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Japan Builds World's Fastest Computer
claylikethemud writes "The New York Times reports that Japan has built the world's most powerful supercomputer from "640 specialized nodes that are in turn composed of 5,104" NEC processors. The machine boasts the computing power equivalent to the 20 fastest American supercomputers combined, and with a top speed of 35.6 teraflops, outpaces the next fastest machine, the ASCI White Pacific, by more than factor of five. Applications include climate modeling, global warming prediction, and other non-weapons research."
With all of the supercomputer posts on /. recently, I've seen a lot of talk about the various ASCI projects in the works by IBM and others. No one even mentioned this before. I'm glad to see that someone is building supercomputers for reasons other than nuclear weapons research though.
Interesting comment from the SJ Mercury
The accomplishment is also a dramatic statement of contrasting scientific and technology priorities in the United States and Japan. The Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. The United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons.
Also worth noting is that the article mentions that the US gov't has blocked sales of these machines because they believe that NEC is "dumping" them on the US market - eg selling them below cost. Has there been any WTO action on these restrictions? Wouldn't this be a perfect test case for getting US trade restrictions struck down?
Don't you wonder why they bother? They're only going to have to destroy the thing when it sprouts purple tentacles and destroys Tokyo.
generates a login:
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
Non Weapon research??
Yeah right !
Uh.. from Chapter II, Section 9 of the Japanese constitution:
"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. 2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
The Japanese are only able to maintain a defensive force, not an army, so even if it was weapons research, it would only be for use in self defense.
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...become a huge goddamned distributed-network-in-a-room?
I'm not a real expert but I have recently taken a high performance computing course from somebody who is an expert for my comp sci masters.
The basic problem of adding more and more processors is keeping all the memory in sync. If you have a process that is running across 50 cpus the machine needs to ensure that if one of them updates a variable that all the others work with the current value. (Ok, it's more complicated than that but I'm not writing a book here)
The solution is to write your system so that the calculations can run as independently as possible. However, at 100 million processors it probably just doesn't fit the problem space.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
This is, of course, one reason why the post-war Japanese economy was so successful for most of the second half of the 20th century. whilst we were pouring all available resources into 'defence' research, they were getting on with something a litle more useful and productive.
It seems a largely successful strategy and it might be better if more countries were to consider it.
Japanese people are very anti-nuclear-wepons - which is not really a surprise due to the fact that they had two dropped on them. In fact they have sent letters of protest to the heads of every country that tests nuclear wepons since 1965 - hundreds of letters.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The basic problem of adding more and more processors is keeping all the memory in sync.
That's why message passing is typically used instead of some sort of shared memory approach. You eliminate the synchronization problems as well as memory contention. After that, it's just a matter of keeping all the processors busy.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Applications include climate modeling [...] But virtually anything, and any knowledge, can be used to "weapons"
You know you're right!
- scientist: our climate modeling indicates that if we start our weekly barbeque at exactly 6:17pm, a US weapons lab will be destroyed by a powerful tornado in 41 days.
- director: well let's start our barbeque at 6:17pm to see if you're right. Welcome to the 21st century, America! (insert maniacal laughter).
Pictures here. so cool!
Jeez, could you imagine a single one of those...
...we still operate under this 640 node barrier.
Wrong. Just plain wrong. Explicit message passing can often reduce communication overhead compared to coherent shared memory, but the synchronization problems are still very much present. You still can't operate on data before it becomes available, regardless of the programming model. Explicit message-passing systems handle synchronization very differently than shared-memory systems, but those problems don't just go away.
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It takes about a few weeks on Sun ultra sparcs to simulate a week long air pollution scenario over the north eastern united states. This is assuming a 8x8 km grid (where the 8x8 sqkm area is one "point"). The wind modeling is extremely simplified, and the focus is on a select set of contaminants.
To do a detailed wind modeling, and have a finer resolution, and to do some statistical analysis of different input conditions... suddenly we end up with requirements far more than the current computing power.
We can always come up with a problem that is more complex than we can solve using current computing power. That is a good pursuit.
S
Eliza did that several years ago.
I'm just waiting for Tom's Hardware to write up an article on how to overclock this to get an additional 1,000,000 fps in Quake III.
Okay, so then the Japanese complain about us dumping. Then what? Let's say they win in WTO hearings. How nice for them. Then the US just ignores it. Why? Because we can. What real punishment can the WTO provide?
The WTO is totally powerless, especially against the US. The only thing it provides is a common forum for working these issues out and for establishing a sort of trade best practices. But when you get right down to it, trade disputes are settled as they always have been, either through discussion, or through various embargoes, tariffs, etc. The WTO may add some legitimacy to a particular countries use of some tariffs, etc, but overall it doesn't provide any significant sanctioning ability.
That's the funny thing with all of the world governmental bodies. They have no real power, they mostly just serve as negotiating platforms. The real power continues to be held by individual nations and there's no evidence that they'll be giving up that power anytime soon.
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Contrary to rumor,
n e02.html
the machine is constructed from 640 nodes, with 8 vector processors per node, and 16GB RAM per node. That totals 5120 processors and 10TB memory.
See http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/outline/outli
Also of note:
peak performance per processor: 8 GFLOPS
total peak performance: 40 TFLOPS
Remember, when they give you TFLOPS or TOPS values, they're giving you PEAK values.
In reality, most of the time, performance is way below peak values, even for the algorithms for which the computer was designed to handle. IBM's pacific blue has a peak TFLOPS value around 3.6TFLOPS...but in reality, its usually around 1.2TFLOPS.
There's no reason to believe this machine will be any different.
Furthermore, the performance of this machine is likely to sink like a rock when its used outside the area it was specially designed for.
In other words, the best supercomputers in the world are still the ones made by starbridge systems, which were bought by NASA (I believe the one NASA bought was called HAL 15, or something like that).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This is faster than the SETI network.
SETI operates at 17 teraflops, but at a cost of only $500000.
Nuclear weapons are the most sensitive issue in Japan, Japanese people are strongly against it. Since the nuclear accident in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1999, the most serious nuclear leakage accident, Japanese citizens have lost confidence about nuclear industry, they asked governments to reduce or stop nuclear power plant construction.
So how, exactly, do I "not know what I'm talking about"? --
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien