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."

Comments

Re:algorithm development

[hype7]

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?

This is an extremely insightful comment.

What's being suggested here is akin to this - sure, they've got the most powerful car in the world, but to get from LA to New York, you've got to head east. Heading North won't help much, no matter how powerful your car is.

This is what gets me about all these global warming "earth is going to heat up and cool down and rain and drought and..." predictions. How can they be sure they're even in the ballpark?

One variable out, they could throw their predictions out by a massive amount. Their simplifications to allow for the computer to do predictions may not take into account the nuances and subtleties of the real world.

That's why, in many instances, I look at these computers with perhaps more cynicism than most other people. They're great for testing theories, and for allowing scientists to compute algorithms that they possibly otherwise wouldn't be able to do. But just because it's come out of a billion $$$ computer, doesn't mean it's a golden egg.

It's like that old saying that came out when word processors were first invented - shit in, shit out. Just because it's been through a fancy (or expensive) machine it doesn't make the outcome any more valid.

-- james