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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.
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.
slashdot!=valid HTML
...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
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.
What surprises me is that this is the first we (Slashdot readers) have heard about it. There have been several headlines saying 'new supercomputer planned' with a story 'it will be quite fast, and finished in 2004'... but this new world's-fastest-computer just suddenly appeared without being preannounced.
Are any of the supercomputer projects in the pipeline expected to be faster than this?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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!
Actually, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. They call their military the `Self Defense Forces', but it's the real thing, with big ships, tanks, fighter jets, and all that good stuff. No nukes though.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Jeez, could you imagine a single one of those...
Hell, with a budget of 265 Billion, who are WE defending ourselves from? Everyone else.....at once?
The US military budget is SO high, because when we go to war, we want to destroy weapons and remove evil doers with surgical precision. All the while making the locals love the US.
The US ideally would go to war where only weapons ould be destroyed and noone would get killed.
To acieve this goal our weapons have to be extremely high tech.
Oddly enough it's value of all human life, both ours and the people in the region we're fighting that makes our budget so huge.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Eliza did that several years ago.
Canadians of course!
You never know when some pesky Canadians on a training exercise in Afganistan will suddenly turn their weapons on an American F16.
Reality has a liberal bias
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.
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
640 nodes should be enough for anybody.