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Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer
Junky191 writes: "Just came across an informational page for the Earth Simulator computer, which provides nice graphics of the layout of the machine and its support structure, as well as details about exactly what types of problems it solves. Fascinating for the engineering problems tackled- how would you organize a 5,120 processor system capable of 40Tflops, and of course don't forget about the 10TB of shared memory." Take note -- donour writes: "well, the new list of supercomputer rankings is up today. I have to say that the Earth Simulator is quite impressive, from both a performance and architectural standpoint."
Biotches! I'll 0wn the CLIT soon
Isn't it fairly difficult these days in terms of the specilisation that occurs at this end of the market to really compare between different machines?
Surely purpose is the best way to organise the rankings?
Didn't the mice in H2G2 already build such a computer? I think it was called... the Earth.
:)
Will the Earth Simulator have the nice fjords by Slartibartfast?
Imagine a beo*SLAP*
"Earth Simulator" is a rather bold name for a supercomputer, especially when you consider it probably can't even simulate the global weather fast enough to predict it (or even tell you what the weather is in real time). The computer looks impressive, but I think they should have stuck to a more abstract name rather than what I see as false advertisement.
So that in 15 years I'll already know how to code for the PlayStation 6.
if you could install the clients on this thing, you could find the cure to cancer, crack RC5-64 and OGR-25, decipher all of the SETI@Home work units (but you still wouldn't find any aliens :)...hell, you could solve ALL of the distributed computing applications on this machine.
:)
Stating the obvious, that's a shitload of CPU power.
I guess this is a *little* off-topic, but this really bugs me. They're building this really cool supercomputer, and they list the memory with base-10 prefixes instead of the standard base-2. I mean I can almost understand when dell does that with hard drives (it pumps up the number for advertising purposes), but it's just silly in a scientific arena.
Could you imagine a beouwolf..... Ahh fuck it..
I am not going to ask "Does this run Linux ?" because it obviously does not, but can anyone point to some good resources on what kind of Operating Systems do these monster machines run ? Are they some kind of a UNIX ? Or are they some elite breed of OS that mortal humans have no chance of understanding ? Linkage appreciated.
I thought the Earth was a supercomputer?
Btw, the the meaning of life is 42.
You don't say.
What does: "It is now under development aiming to start from FY2001." mean? am i missing something here...
..my friend called Richard will actually take his cock out of his own ass one day! Hi Nanna!
If we counted the average speed of all the SETI volunteers over time, does anyone have an idea where it would rank?
What is really amazing is that in 50-60 years, this amount of computing power will easily fit within the confines of the standard PC case (assuming such a thing even exists 50-60 years from now). Remember ENIAC...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
how many FPS does this bitch get in Quake III?
But, can it figure out why Cowboy Neal always wins the polls? Hmm... Ya know... Some things are probably best left unsolved.
This is a question, and not a statement
While this does a nice job of crunching numbers, how do they know that their algorithms are any good at doing what they do? Or are they trying to simulate things that aren't continuously kicked around by chaos theory?
I ask because I've been looking at dynamics in my spare time, and simulating something as small as cigarette smoke accurately seems impossible (although I must say Jos Stam and Co did a nice job of making it look real). So it seems a bit bewildering to see something trying to simulate the earth, even if only at a macro level.
``The Earth Simulator Project will create a "virtual earth" on a supercomputer to show what the world will look like in the future by means of advanced numerical simulation technology.''
We already have that: http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these !
Hate me!
They don't want to admit it, but the real reason for building this thing is so that they can predict appearances of Godzilla....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Hahahahahaha
Seems to me that though ES takes the overall performance crown, that the IBM and HP (man that sounds strange) units have some definite advantages over it. Primary of which is the fact that they DO use "off the shelf" parts. ASCI White uses 375Mhz Power3 chips which are comparitively low performance compared to what IBM is shipping now (1.3 Ghz Power4). I don't know what the technical details are behind ASCI White, but it seems that IBM could instantly get a doubling of performance by using new CPU modules. With the "specialized processor" approach that NEC uses, this would seem to be prohibitively expensive. IBM has already amortized most of the cost of the development of new processors through their normal business units.
Another advantage would be that since ASCI White is a hyper RS6K, you could use a lower end model (and IBM could rather inexpensively offer a lower end model) to develop your models on before using the relatively expensive big boy to do the actual simulations. I have to admit that this point is moot if they don't keep the utilization of the thing up pretty high most of the time.
Though they mention that ES "only needs 5104" processors vs 8192 for AW, it looks like ES still takes up massive amounts of space. Now ES' storage is significantly larger that AW, so maybe that's where all the space is being eaten, but it would be interesting to see what the actual cabinet space/power requirements for the two machines sans storage are (assuming they are both using standard stuff for storage).
Others things include since AW is based on OTS parts, is it easier to get parts for when processing units konk out. Is it simpler for a tech to work on the unit. Since Linux is already running on RS6K, theoretically with a few device drivers, you could run Linux on that bad boy
Of course all this is moot in the non-real-world of supercomputers. With seemingly infinite budgets, the only _real_ measure is absolute performance, and ES obviously has the edge here. But if I were the IBM sales rep for supercomputing, I'd sure be hyping the fact that when it's not simulating nuclear explosions, you can run Gimp and Mozilla.
I know the cheat codes!
Hmmm blonde or redhead first?
Mmmmmmm
That "shitload of CPU power" comes with an expensive highspeed network which you don't need for distributed computing applications.
Seems kinda silly if we already know what the answer is. Hmm... double checking, perhaps?
..a single-cpu one of these!!!
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
...but will it run pong? :)
.. the CrystalSpace 3D engine?
I thought not, it isn't powerful enough.
I personally agree with you one hundred percent in regard to your thoughts. All of these supercomputers dedicated to abstract tasks like climate forecasting, protein folding, and things of that nature are all and good, but they do very little to help the human race as it is, right now. I propose that you take Blue Gene, and the Earth Simulator, and ASCI White (which is used for war of all things), and port clients for distributed computing applications to them. My proposal is based primarily on the United Devices Cure for Cancer project. Take this computer, let it run for a few days, and you have yourself a perfect list. The same procedure could be applied to AIDS, anything, as long as someone could write a similar program for it. It's great that Blue Gene is helping scientists learn against their will about protein folding, and that information could very well help us in the future. The problem however lies in the fact that this is a truly massive amount of processing power that could be put towards better use. You could research anything, just get three teams: -Team One: researches applications for the processing power of a computer that scale, that pertain to the immediate survival and improvement of the human race -Team Two: builds a distributed computing application to solve the problem that Team One comes up with -Team Three: applies the regular x86 compilation of the Team Two distributed computing applications to supercomputers For instance, you could use Blue Gene to solve work units, and something like ASCI White to feed them to it. But seriously people, we need to rig something that helps us, not just wastes taxpayer or private sector money on another extraneous project.
ES has 700TB storage, ASCI W 160TB;
a small difference... heh
My life in the land of the rising sun.
but I couldn't find anything about the PowerMac G4?
:)
-- james
ps humour, not troll/flamebait
Back in the BBS days you could enter [Control-H]'s into a message and they would become part of the actual text. That way the reader could actually see the words appear and be back-spaced over and re-written. It was a cool effect. Of course it worked better at 300-2400 baud, where you could actually see the characters being drawn.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
42
that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them." - Prof. Frink
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Where have I seen this before?
http://www.geocities.com/s178.rm/index2.html
The Earth simulator will be destroyed to make way for a hyperspacial bypass...
Get yer tits out and I'll think about it.
Come on give it try and install windows on it. Ooops it went just down from 40 teraflops to effectively 1 (the other 39 is probably used for IE).
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
Overclock! Why not? It's probably got an excellent cooling system. Someone needs to write up a guide on [H]ardOCP or something...
i'll freely admit that i'm a little freaked out by this. (so much so that i'm delurking.) directed at the discussion about whether it can be a practical machine, does it really matter? it seems as if it was built for one sole purpose, and it appears that it will do it well. can we just give them that?
Are there any estimates of the processing power of all the worldwide computers participating in the SETI project?
Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer
How did they get inside my brain???
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The Earth Simulator is running Super UX. The same operating system as the rest of the NEC supercomputers
The German Language TV channel 3sat will broadcast a 30 min film on Earth Simulator on Monday and 24th of June at 21:30 hours and on Tuesday, 25th of June at 14:30 hours.
Dammit. I thought one day my little university would also be able to get into the top500 list since it is bulding an Sun Fire Ultra Sparc Cluster (http://www.rz.rwth-aachen.de/hpc/sun/index_e.html ). The setup will consist of 16 Well know the world knows :)
It's funny because windows is slow!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
ES seems all very interesting and all, but I would like to see how it compares to what the NSA has parked under Washington for Echelon and its successors.
You can get your butt that if information about the "Worlds Fastest Supercomputer" is available to the general public, the NSA has got something bigger and better.
Although they are setting up a quite cool Sun Fire Ultra Sparc Cluster running Solaris.
The setup will consist of 16 Sun Fire 6800 SMP nodes (1500 MHz, each node is a 24 processor SMP system with 24 GB shared main memory) and 4 Sun Fire 15K SMP nodes (1500 MHz, each having 72 processors and 144 GB of memain memory) giving an max. arithmetic performance of 4 TFlop/s.
Check the link to see for yourself (like you dont have anything better to do, right?).
Sad/funny part of the story: the cluster is going to be finished in 2003 ...
I should check Moores law on top 500 super computers...
Alt least know the world knows we do cool stuff too ...
Sorry had to ask..
Seriously though, the 40 TFLOPS is a peak value. On well-written-code, I wonder how fast it's capable of versus the number 2 in a similar comparison.
Saying 40 TFLOPS peak is still too much like 'Hey my 2.2 GHz Intel beats your 1.2 GHz AMD'. While it is fast, is it really that accurate?
Almost 'nuff said. But I guess for the number crunching work that it's designed to do, FORTRAN must be the way to go. Not to mention that it was probably build by engineers. Nya! ^_^
The cuntface reply wasn't exactly a surprise either.
A possibility, yes, but in reality there's only me. And I don't really read ... I sort of skim and then reply regardless.
That's probably true, since the sum of all processing power in silicon valley of about 25 years ago is now wrapped up in a single personal computer.
weird huh?!
boo hoo the americans got smashed at their own game. stupid clown. obviously you're much too smart to be able to build one of these. yep, anything about 10TFlops is just stupid because you can just dig a hole.
And they say /. is boring.
Wonder if EarthSimulator could run a version of SimEarth, down to every country,state,city,person,etc. Doesn't the Sim series also throw in weather events? Tornados, etc.? EarthSimulator should be able to crank out a few of those...
www.Beyond7.com Insane modern art water sculpture.
the new list of supercomputer rankings is up today.
I guess top500.org isn't running on one of them.
-cibrPLUR
I spilled a cup of coffee into it.
:P)
It didn't fry.
Beat that, Earth Simulator! Beat that!
(I still use the now-slightly sticky soundcard from it
Can they play Quake III on it at lunchtime?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
I wonder just how well it can simulate Acts of God(tm). Or maybe they can tap into the Global Consciousness Project?
The Earth Simulator Project will create a "virtual earth" on a supercomputer...
Hmmm, now where have I heard of an idea like that?
There are some nice pictures on the ES site as well. I wonder if the colouration of the cabinets is there to prevent the engineers from getting lost..? :o)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
I was looking at the list of supercomputer rankings, and I couldn't help thinking - yeah, but what about all the CLASSIFIED computers? I bet the US gov has secret computers that would blow that list away.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
So they are running SUX - has it occured to them that it sounds like SUCKS? Maybe they should take a lead from the former the canadian "Conservative-Reform Alliance Party" ... yes C.R.A.P. and
change their name
What I read is, its based on Nec SX arch, now imagine if it was a DX...
;)
Some nostalgia
Boy would I like to buy some render time on THAT O_O
/those/.
(The article has some nice graphics too!)
And because I KNOW there's probably 2000 "A beowulf cluster of those..." posts that are below my threshold: I would fear for the safety of mankind if someone made a cluster of
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The diagram that the post links to looks oddly like a big PC case. Even the way the internal components are layed out is oddly reminiscent of a standard PC.
from the preview-of-2026-ipaq dept.
How can that be possible? You mean PocketPC OS will actually become powerful enough for that? You wouldn't be able to boot it up until AFTER you hacked it to run *nix.
On the other hand, that would make a nifty graphing calculator. Wish i has a cluster of... ok i'll shut up.
Just because it's been through a fancy (or expensive) machine it doesn't make the outcome any more valid.
Modelling real processes is a science which has been around for as long as computation. Simulations I used to run with Dynamo (discrete simulation of general PDE's) on a minicomputer was in some ways the coolest. It was also the slowest, a 10-state thermal transfer model could take an hour on a $200k processor.
It is quite possible to look at fine-grained results using finite element or finite-difference methods in mechanical and fluid dynamics problems. For instance looking at vortex-shedding is within the realm of possible for a current model PC or workstation.
verification is done against known data-sets and most simulation work involves checks on accuracy.
Yes, problems which are really in the 'butterfly effect' region are very difficult, interesting (useful) work has been done taking such phenomena to the molecular level. For something like crack-propagation finite element methods have to be very detailed indeed to be predictive and while you can use these for useful results, the 'interesting' part needs to be calculated at the atomic level. That, however I have only seen done in simulation of highly regular materials.
Many of the chaotic results happen where there is a delicate ballance in total energy, e.g. the dynamics of cigarette smoke. 'Useful' problems however usually involve substantial energy transfers and at some computational scale these are not chaotic.
Solar and geo-thermal energy input into global weather patterns involves a LOT of energy and modelling is generally easier where you are looking at such problems.
Computational weather prediction has made impressive strides. 10 years ago the ability to predict weather in New England was dismal, today between better sensors and better models the 5-day forcast is now more often correct than not.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Altough the setup is quite cool I guess you've never heard of it before.
It is a Sun Fire Ultra Spac Cluster.
Consisting of 16 Sun Fire 6800 SMP nodes (1500 MHz, each containing 24 processors, with 24 GB shared main memory per node) and 4 Sun Fire 15K SMP nodes (1500 MHz, 72 processors and 144 GB of memain memory each) it's arithmetic performace is to be about 4GFlop/s. Total memory 960GByte
Too bad the whole thing only going to be assembled completly in spring of 2003.
I must check wether Moore had a law on the entry level of GFlop/s for that darn list or not.
Maybe we still get a chance.
At least now the world knows that we do cool things too ;-o
" Before this the aggregate performance of all 500 system was smaller THEN 30TF/s." I find it difficult to give the author any credibility when he cannot tell the difference between then and than.
Now there are 23 installations at least this large, that should be the new threshhold: the largest machines that can be bought at any given time.
the big red eyeballs on the cabinets.
As long as we can keep making such strides in Red Eyeball technology, HAL can't be very far off.
No, really...there is a new lead dog...
The amazing "Q" (built by CompaQ, go figure)
ASCI Q, named to follow LANL's tradition of alphabeticalnames for computers, will have 11,968 processors, 12terabytes of memory and 600 terabytes of disk storage. It willbe about two and one-half times as powerful as today's mostpowerful supercomputer, ASCI White at Lawrence LivermoreNational Laboratory in Livermore, California. It wouldrequire approximately 20,000 of today's state-of-the-art PCs,which are capable of about 1.5 gigaOPS, working veryclosely together to match the peak performance of ASCI Q.
or read more here/a?
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Zaphod's briefcase had an entire simulated galaxy in it.
Yeah it looks nice, and probably plays a mean game of Quake (pun intended!), but what is its Bogomips number? Riddle me that, batman!
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Hans Moravec estimates it would take about 100 Trillion instructions per second to emulate the human brain. At 38 Tflops, Earth Simulator is in the ballpark. Maybe they should have called it human simulator, or just "Sim".
4TB for pr0n, 3TB for mp3s, and 3TB for warez.
they should use it to run their webserver. It sucks like a banshee. Wonder what its uptime is?
haven't we been over this ad nauseum? yes, the total power of all the SETI computers is much much greater than ES, but that's all individual machines grinding away on their little chunks of data that they periodically download. for massive data-intensive numbercrunching like ES was designed for, the interconnects become as important as the processing speed. try running a whole-earth climate sim over the SETI network, where you have to constantly feed each processor a stream of data, and watch your performance drop by a few orders of magnitude. (disclaimer: IANA supercomputer architect, so everything i've said could be wrong, but i think i get the meat of the matter.)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
yeah, so what?
it's circuts are permanently laid out, burned into silicon. that's what IMHO makes us intelligent...not the raw processing power, but the abitily to dynamically reconfigure our networks on-the-fly. now, if somebody were able to build a few 100Tflop systems with neural networks and the ability to fuse the networks, decide what features to keep and lose, and repeat, THEN we're in trouble (sort of like the way the escaping robot 'learns', only with >100,000x the processing power.)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
...is build a computer capable of withstanding a full slashdotting.
can you imagine a beowolf clust...umm...nevermind
a beowolf cluster of Earth Simulators.
mmmmmmmmm...... beowolf
640 processor nodes, each consisting of eight vector processors are connected as a high speed interconnection network.
640 processor nodes.... Ought to be enough for anyone!
Badoum boum! Thank you, thank you, I got a million of em!
SHHHHHH!
You don't want grammar nazi to hear, do you?
However the SETI network could never do what the ES does because although it is compute-distributed, the data is centralized, so the actual compute rate is limited by communication speed. And over the Internet that's really slow compared to real interconnect architectures for these sorts of applications. At least, until the Internet can compete with a multi-gigabyte-per-second local interconnect. Of course by then, the processors will still be outstripping the network, so you probably still wouldn't be able to do it.
We'll be wearing that as our watch in 10 years. PLUS!! I just bought a geforce4 ti4200...I think I can hang with the Earth Simulator.
It's interesting to note that SETI@Home maintained a >39 TeraFLOP rate over the last 24 hours according to their web page. The earth simulator is aiming for 40.
I know this isn't strictly an apples-to-apples comparison by a long shot but it's kind of fun to compare the two numbers.
-- Ken
Japan already dominates the electronic and automobile industries, and all of a sudden it has the most powerful computer on the planet! The United States (or American companies) lead the world in the production and sales of computers: IBM, HP, Compaq, Apple - these are the brands that are on desks across the world. When people in other countries think "computers", they think America.
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/images/g7_7_4. gif
Take a look at the above graph - Japan is finally ahead in a race that's been going on for decades.
Come on, isn't anyone else a *little* disturbed?? We're no longer the best in an industry that frankly we've bet our future on, and by such a wide margin!
This is NOT A TROLL, and I have nothing against the Japanese - they make great stuff, but the computer industry belongs to AMERICA, and all of a sudden it looks like we've got a SERIOUS competitor.
SimEarth XP
System Requirements:
40Tflop 5120 Processor Cluster
10TB of System Memory
256 Color Display
4X Cdrom Drive
Arctic Rated Parka
"Sales thus far have been slow..." confessed Wright, "...however we're expecting at least one large customer in the coming months."
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
42!!!!
Tibbon
tibbon.com
an here are the timesets for this two
.. call me ;-)
events of the show
1:15:24:2130:2200:30:5:Super UX - THE EARHT:
1:15:25:1430:1500:55:5:Super UX - THE EARHT:
if it does not appear on kazaa
btw: http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/
rulez *sfg*
... is that this beastie will produce 100 petabytes of data a day. When announced at a meeting of supercomputer people in London last year, this produced a very, very nervous laugh. Shipping output to people who can make use of it is a problem. Then, archiving...
i wonder if the DOD will want to use their nuke simulators on the earth simulator to simulate a nuclear holocaust... my guess is they probably don't want to know.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
that is stuff that matters
I wonder what the total Mean Time Between Failures is on all that equipment. It must be approaching zero.
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
You mean the model H3760?
--pi
... Erm, sorry. That's 3760000000. They release too many of these things. And, it only costs 1/8 of it's model number, like the rest do!
For cracking codes, the NSA has computers that are far faster than this.
I submitted this two months ago on the 26th of April and it got rejected. I sometimes would like to know if it's only alcohol they use to select their stories or if other drugs are involved as well?