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Sandia, Compaq, and Celera To Build Petaflop Machine
Fact-o-matic writes: " Compaq, government weapons facility Sandia National Laboratories and genetics researcher Celera Genomics are teaming up to build a petaflop computer -- one that will process 1,000 trillion operations per second.
To listen to an audio playback of today's press conference announcing the project, Celera has set up a phone-in recording: call (800) 642-1687, and enter the conference ID: 818790
You can read the joint press release or the
Compaq press release"
It's obvious people didn't read the press release before hitting their reply buttons. 1st: Compaq provides the hardware. Sandia and Celera cooperate on getting biotech applications to utilize the beast. Each company is throwing 4 million/year at the project for a few years. 2nd: A distributed, loose, confederation of machines, like SETI@home, can't solve the problems such a machine is designed for. There is way too much intercommunication required. 3rd: The press release indicates a 1000T machine, potentially. It doesn't give that as a goal. I believe the top of the indicated range is actually 100T. 3rd: Not in the press release, but allegedly reported in an industry rag (Computer World did someone say?) is that it's Linux. That's not what is planned. Someone's thinking Cplant. Cplant is reaching for a "top 10" spot on the top 500 list, one of the releases reports. Cplant doesn't even need to deliver 1T to accomplish that right now. 4th: Blue Gene is a special purpose machine. It's designed to solve one problem -- Protein folding. It is about as useful for Celera's problems as the IBM chess machines would be. Finally, as to the gov't controlling biotech for some implied dastardly deeds: Bunk! Can't you imagine folks at the national labs wanting to make positive contributions to humanity? If not, read their web pages: www.sandia.gov, www.lanl.gov, www.llnl.gov
"The Sandia labs and Celera Genomics Group in Rockville, Md., plan to work together on the project under a joint research and development agreement, with Houston-based Compaq as their technology provider. The planned system will be built around future versions of Compaq's AlphaServer SC supercomputer line and is being designed for use in complex applications in the fields of computational biology and life sciences...."
"The prototype supercomputer will likely use 10,000 to 20,000 of Compaq's Alpha processors and is being budgeted at $150 million in current costs, according to Blake. He added that the first system could eventually lead to the development of a so-called "petacruncher" -- a machine capable of 1,000 teraflops -- by the end of the decade."
you do realize, don't you, that distributed systems aren't the answer for everything, right?
projects like distributed.net and seti@home are perfect for distributed systems b/c the data analysis can be easily split into manageable sets which can be passed off to willing participants.
If you are referring to something more along the lines of a beowulf cluster, then you should take a look at 3. of the beowulf faq.
In order for a cluster of machines to make a difference, that application has to be built for such a thing.
hmm...wait a second, did I just respond to a troll?
-Peter
How long 'till the 800 number says that all lines are full?
Moore's law is a flippant statement that happens to hold true. It is no more "law" than the Monroe Doctrine was, it just happened to work.
We can double the transistor density whenever we want. Economic factors will effect it as will government research policies.
There is no need to exceed Moore's law, you could just increase the number of processors. However, if we need to increase faster, we can, we just pump money into engineering research.
There are laws of physics - these can't be broken (although the law could be changed if we had a problem)
There are laws of society/traffic - these can be broken but you can get in trouble
There are historical trends with cool names that include law... these can be broken whenever someone is in the mood too...
> do that can't be done by a distributed system?
Not every possible computation can be made distributed without major performance loss. Remember, this baby IS vastly parallel (10K-20K processors), but the inter-processor communications are way faster than any network, and some problems that can be parallelized aren't easily distributed.
Also, i doubt you want nuke research done on the same set of systems running SETI@Home :-)
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
It's more that both of them need serious computing power than that they're thinking about biowarfare. Bioinformatics has the potential to use truly monstrous amounts of processing power. Assembling a genome that's been shotgun sequenced is going to require serious computational horsepower, and Celera wants to start pumping out genomes left and right. Annotating the things is also going to be pretty brutal, although with a few genomes as roadmaps this may be a bit less trouble. Any way you slice it, though, you're talking about needing massive number crunching power, and nobody knows more about that kind of things right now than the nuke simulation boys at Sandia, who are currently being encouraged to branch out and do more than weapons development. It's a reasonable match.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I do a lot of research into Biological Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Protein-Substrate interactions. When you consider that there are often several thousand amino acids in a protein, each amino-acid has a goodly number of atoms. Each of those atoms occupy multiple dimensions of space and at least one of time. Each of those atoms also have other properties such as velocity, electrostatic properties, physical size, covalent bonds to other atoms etc, and each of those atoms have to interact with an large number of other atoms.... (And I'm not even taking into account Quantum Mechanics). Forget galaxy collisions, Biomolecular Dynamics is a tough cookie. Believe me one of these babies would be really quite useful.
Problem is, the doin't know what the genes actually do, for most of them.
So the extra computing power has to go into sorting this out, and figuring what they mean, the grammar of the genes.
The only thing I can think of, that would be like that, would be the old translating of the rosetta stone.
Now that was a political text. Now what if the text had actually be a discussion of the subatomic particle reactions that take place in a matter/antimatter reactor? The task of translating for Napoleons archeologists would have been much harder, even *if* the ancient greek had been in "clear text", because archeologists did not know higher mathematics, etc. Probably, it would have been seen as a *really* obscure alchemy or religious text.
So now we have a similar task. Knowing the letters and a few "words" of the genome does not mean anything like knowing the design principles that are incorporated into a strand of DNA. DNA is all compiled coded, and we are trying to manually de-compile it. Then reconstruct the source.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
PETA won't stand for this. I can already see the lawsuit's coming, along with the spraypainted keyboard's and silicon is murder signs. *sigh*
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An ethernet driver
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A simple networking layer
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Standardized disk drivers for virtual memory and input/output set storage
These things are glorified calculators -- you don't need a 'real' OS -- just build on top of a simple embedded/RT systems OS! This would likely yield small performance gains and save on maintenance, setup and support costs. Of course, you would have to standardize on hardware, but if you're building the thing from scratch (as opposed to just clustering a bunch of PCs around the office/lab), then you probably would anyways.Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
And that would be one quadrillion. Come on, don't be so afraid to say quadrillion. I know you can.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Yay!
I'm glad all that crazy animal rights group flopped!