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

I'm in luck.

[Oily Tuna]

I know the cheat codes!

Hmmm blonde or redhead first?

Re:What about the REAL fastest computers?

[caveat]

They are there as well. The classified computer project of the US government is named ASCI..

well...ASCI is publicly acknowledged computers running classified apps/data. i wouldn't say it's totally unreasonable to say that the NSA/CIA/MI6/etc likely have some non-publicly-acknowledged system(s) hidden away somewhere that make ES look like a 8088. i don't have that much faith in my government to expect them to tell me everything they spend my tax dollars on.

Re:"Inside" the Earth Simulator

[caveat]

i really like the design aesthetic of the cabinets, with the big red circles at the ends...remind anybody else of HAL, or pretty much every menacing intelligent supercomputer ever conceived? makes the ASCI systems look so boring, with plain metal cabinets...gotta love the japanese Way, everything has to look good on top of working good.
now if they'd just backlight the circles deep red, and pulse the light along with the level of system activity...mmmm

Re:SETI? nah, no way.

[caveat]

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.)