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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."
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.