Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
So that in 15 years I'll already know how to code for the PlayStation 6.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
..a single-cpu one of these!!!
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
"How does the computing power of Seti@home compare with existing supercomputers?"
"The most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS and costs $110 million. SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500K so far"
Earth Simulator Project Total peak performance: 40 Tera FLOPS.
Of course the systems' architecture is different so using the speed to evaluate processing power is difficult.
There's a TFlop chart on the earth development button.
Simulating the Earth down to square kilometers will be impressive.
Yes, I mentioned the difference in my post:
...
Now ES' storage is significantly larger that AW
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
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.
The Earth simulator will be destroyed to make way for a hyperspacial bypass...
What about: Super ASCI White Turbo Champions Special Edition
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.
Specialization? What specialization? The Top500 rankings are based on LinPack-- a software package for solving dense systems of linear equations-- which seems applicable to a fairly general set of scientific problems.
Do supercomputing manufacturers cheat on benchmarks? I don't know. Presumably it would be a rather expensive proposition-- and since supercomputing sites will benchmark with a variety of specialized and general purpose libraries, it seems unlikely to work.
There, are, of course, differences between weather simulations and galactic evolution simulations. But field specific benchmarks are inappropriate for a site like Top500--the whole point of the site is to allow someone to analyse gross trends. "This memory architecture once dominated the rankings--now its used by only a few entries. Perhaps our next computer platform shouldn't be based on that architecture." (and possibly writing journal articles about it.)
In addition, general purpose supercomputing sites are relatively common.
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 ...
the new list of supercomputer rankings is up today.
I guess top500.org isn't running on one of them.
-cibrPLUR
The Top500 rankings are based on LinPack-- a software package for solving dense systems of linear equations
Almost, but not quite. The Top500 rankings are based on solving the dense system of linear equations generated by the LinPack benchmark driver. Using LinPack is optional. For that matter, using Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting is optional, as long as you meet the error bound of O(n \epsilon).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Ahh, but you're forgetting that the Earth wasn't designed to calculate the answer, (Deep Thought had, as you rightly note already told us what that is) it was designed to calculate the question.
Would've worked, too if the pesky Golgafrinchans hadn't turned up and perturbed the calculations. By the time the Vogons demolished it, the algorithms were way out of whack anyway.
(Yeah, I know: -1, Offtopic)
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.
What I read is, its based on Nec SX arch, now imagine if it was a DX...
;)
Some nostalgia
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
I don't mean to nitpick, but the general public doens't get access to this. Researchers will, but you can't just walk up and start playing Doom on this thing.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
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.
Better rethink that theory:
Earth Simulator: 35.86TFlops.sec (according to Top100 list)
Seti@Home network: 37.07TFlops/sec (over last 24hr., according to the site).
Just because it is an incredibly powerful machine doesn't mean it has the distributed computing projects beat.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
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".
...is build a computer capable of withstanding a full slashdotting.
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.
Naming their OS S-UX would be pretty much par for the course for a Japanese company. A few years ago, Sony took some of their videotape library technology and applied to to data storage. The video version was called "TeleFile," I believe. They decided, since the library could hold as much as a petabyte, to call the data version "PetaFile."
Shortly thereafter, Sony started referring to the libraries as "PetaSite" systems instead. Say "PetaFile" out loud, and you'll understand why.
I'd provide a link, but Sony's web site works properly in, like, no known browsers. Pfeh.
Flops aren't everything. Until the SETI@home network has the bandwith that the Earth Sim has between processors (someone said 1Tb/sec?) until then one supercomputer will have it beat for anything that requires data to be compared (has this chunk of data been processed by one of the other 4999 processors yet?)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
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--
So if they were to install Seti@Home on the earth simulator, when it was not busy simulating Earth, Seti@home's speed would double...
-Leperflesh
I am allowed to criticize you: you are not allowed to criticize me. Sorry, that's just how things are.
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!