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Two Directions for the Future of Supercomputing
aarondsouza writes: "The NY Times (registration required, mumble... mutter...) has this story on two different directions being taken in the supercomputing community. The Los Alamos labs have a couple of new toys. One built for raw numbercrunching speed, and the other for efficiency. The article has interesting numbers on the performance/price (price in the power consumption and maintenance sense) ratios for the two machines. As an aside... 'Deep Blue', 'Green Blade' ... wonder what Google Sets would think of that..."
What could be a better chance to market my grid computing sites list. That's how truly massive computational tasks are to be done more and more in the coming years.
I'd be VER interested to see comparison numbers between the two machines.... Which one actually delivers more bang for the buck? because, I think, that efficient would imply getting more power out of less resources, right???
On a work per dollar bassis, which one actually delivers more??
(screw the NY times, I'll glean the data from re-posts) (and screw all of you first-post weenies.... nothing but garbage 'tween your ears)
#1 Does it run Linux?
#2 May we imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Moore's Law holds that the number of transistors on a microprocessor -- the brain of a modern computer -- doubles about every 18 months, causing the speed of its calculations to soar. But there is a downside to this oft-repeated tale of technological progress: the heat produced by the chip also increases exponentially, threatening a self-inflicted meltdown.
A computer owner in Britain recently dramatized the effect by propping a makeshift dish of aluminum foil above the chip inside his PC and frying an egg for breakfast. (The feat -- cooking time 11 minutes -- was reported in The Register, a British computer industry publication.) By 2010, scientists predict, a single chip may hold more than a billion transistors, shedding 1,000 watts of thermal energy -- far more heat per square inch than a nuclear reactor.
The comparison seems particularly apt at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, which has two powerful new computers, Q and Green Destiny. Both achieve high calculating speeds by yoking together webs of commercially available processors. But while the energy-voracious Q was designed to be as fast as possible, Green Destiny was built for efficiency. Side by side, they exemplify two very different visions of the future of supercomputing.
Los Alamos showed off the machines last month at a ceremony introducing the laboratory's Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation. Named for a pioneering mathematician in the Manhattan Project, the three-story, 303,000-square-foot structure was built to house Q, which will be one of the world's two largest computers (the other is in Japan). Visitors approaching the imposing structure might mistake it for a power generating plant, its row of cooling towers spewing the heat of computation into the sky.
Supercomputing is an energy-intensive process, and Q (the name is meant to evoke both the dimension-hopping Star Trek alien and the gadget-making wizard in the James Bond thrillers) is rated at 30 teraops, meaning that it can perform as many as 30 trillion calculations a second. (The measure of choice used to be the teraflop, for "trillion floating-point operations," but no one wants to think of a supercomputer as flopping trillions of times a second.)
Armed with all this computing power, Q's keepers plan to take on what for the Energy Department, anyway, is the Holy Grail of supercomputing: a full-scale, three-dimensional simulation of the physics involved in a nuclear explosion.
"Obviously with the various treaties and rules and regulations, we can't set one of these off anymore," said Chris Kemper, deputy leader of the laboratory's computing, communications and networking division. "In the past we could test in Nevada and see if theory matched reality. Now we have do to it with simulations."
While decidedly more benign than a real explosion, Q's artificial blasts -- described as testing "in silico" -- have their own environmental impact. When fully up and running later this year, the computer, which will occupy half an acre of floor space, will draw three megawatts of electricity. Two more megawatts will be consumed by its cooling system. Together, that is enough to provide energy for 5,000 homes.
And that is just the beginning. Next in line for Los Alamos is a 100-teraops machine. To satisfy its needs, the Metropolis center can be upgraded to provide as much as 30 megawatts -- enough to power a small city.
That is where Green Destiny comes in. While Q was attracting most of the attention, researchers from a project called Supercomputing in Small Spaces gathered nearby in a cramped, stuffy warehouse to show off their own machine -- a compact, energy-efficient computer whose processors do not even require a cooling fan.
With a name that sounds like an air freshener or an environmental group (actually it's taken from the mighty sword in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), Green Destiny measures about two by three feet and stands six and a half feet high, the size of a refrigerator.
Capable of a mere 160 gigaops (billions of operations a second), the machine is no match for Q. But in computational bang for the buck, Green Destiny wins hands down. Though Q will be almost 200 times as fast, it will cost 640 times as much -- $215 million, compared with $335,000 for Green Destiny. And that does not count housing expenses -- the $93 million Metropolis center that provides the temperature-controlled, dust-free environment Q demands.
Green Destiny is not so picky. It hums away contentedly next to piles of cardboard boxes and computer parts. More important, while Q and its cooling system will consume five megawatts of electrical power, Green Destiny draws just a thousandth of that -- five kilowatts. Even if it were expanded, as it theoretically could be, to make a 30-teraops machine (picture a hotel meeting room crammed full of refrigerators), it would still draw only about a megawatt.
"Bigger and faster machines simply aren't good enough anymore," said Dr. Wu-Chung Feng, the leader of the project. The time has come, he said, to question the doctrine of "performance at any cost."
The issue is not just ecological. The more power a computer consumes, the hotter it gets. Raise the operating temperature 18 degrees Fahrenheit, Dr. Feng said, and the reliability is cut in half. Pushing the extremes of calculational speed, Q is expected to run in sprints for just a few hours before it requires rebooting. A smaller version of Green Destiny, called Metablade, has been operating in the warehouse since last fall, requiring no special attention.
"There are two paths now for supercomputing," Dr. Feng said. "While technically feasible, following Moore's Law may be the wrong way to go with respect to reliability, efficiency of power use and efficiency of space. We're not saying this is a replacement for a machine like Q but that we need to look in this direction."
The heat problem is nothing new. In taking computation to the limit, scientists constantly consider the trade-off between speed and efficiency. I.B.M.'s Blue Gene project, for example, is working on energy-efficient supercomputers to run simulations in molecular biology and other sciences.
"All of us who are in this game are busy learning how to run these big machines," said Dr. Mike Levine, a scientific director at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and a physics professor at Carnegie Mellon University. A project like Green Destiny is "a good way to get people's attention," he said, "but it is only the first step in solving the problem."
Green Destiny belongs to a class of makeshift supercomputers called Beowulf clusters. Named for the monster-slaying hero in the eighth-century Old English epic, the machines are made by stringing together off-the-shelf PC's into networks, generally communicating via Ethernet -- the same technology used in home and office networking. What results is supercomputing for the masses -- or, in any case, for those whose operating budgets are in the range of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than the hundreds of millions required for Q.
Dr. Feng's team, which also includes Dr. Michael S. Warren and Eric H. Weigle, began with a similar approach. But while traditional Beowulfs are built from Pentium chips and other ordinary processors, Green Destiny uses a special low-power variety intended for laptop computers.
A chip's computing power is ordinarily derived from complex circuits packed with millions of invisibly tiny transistors. The simpler Transmeta chips eliminate much of this energy-demanding hardware by performing important functions using software instead -- instructions coded in the chip's memory. Each chip is mounted along with other components on a small chassis, called a blade. Stack the blades into a tower and you have a Bladed Beowulf, in which the focus is on efficiency rather than raw unadulterated power.
The method has its limitations. A computer's power depends not just on the speed of its processors but on how fast they can cooperate with one another. Linked by high-speed fiber-optical cable, Q's many subsections, or nodes, exchange data at a rate as high as 6.3 gigabits a second. Green Destiny's nodes are limited to 100-megabit Ethernet.
The tightly knit communication used by Q is crucial for the intense computations involved in modeling nuclear tests. A weapons simulation recently run on the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative's ASCI White supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California took four months of continuous calculating time -- the equivalent of operating a high-end personal computer 24 hours a day for more than 750 years.
Dr. Feng has looked into upgrading Green Destiny to gigabit Ethernet, which seems destined to become the marketplace standard. But with current technology that would require more energy consumption, erasing the machine's primary advantage.
For now, a more direct competitor may be the traditional Beowulfs with their clusters of higher-powered chips. Though they are cheaper and faster, they consume more energy, take up more space, and are more prone to failure. In the long run, Dr. Feng suggests, an efficient machine like Green Destiny might actually perform longer chains of sustained calculations.
At some point, in any case, the current style of supercomputing is bound to falter, succumbing to its own heat. Then, Dr. Feng hopes, something like the Bladed Beowulfs may serve as "the foundation for the supercomputer of 2010."
Meanwhile, the computational arms race shows no signs of slowing down. Half of the computing floor at the Metropolis Center has been left empty for expansion. And ground was broken this spring at Lawrence Livermore for a new Terascale Simulation Facility. It is designed to hold two 100-teraops machines.
I agree with you, you stupid coward
The photo in the article talking about Green Destiny shows RLX shelves in the background.
-ez
is that the writer has noticed that is cheaper to run a beowulf than to run a true supercomputer, but in return for the price you sacrifice performance...
;)
though i did find the line about Q needing rebooted every few hours kinda funny, i mean when are they gonna learn to stop installing Windows on a 100 million dollar supercomouter
We all know that NYtimes requires registration by now. Can we skip the damn warning every time there's a story there?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
(my emphasis)
#include "coucou.h"
"The NY Times (registration required, mumble... mutter..."
next time you put "registration" between brackets, followed by two words, you better make sure that those two words are userID and paswd !
I really wonder what the NYT logfile-monkeys think when they see a zillion 'mumble/mutter' login attempts...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The article said something to the effect that in 10 years or so a chip will come with a billion transistor and suck up a full 1000 watts. Ok how long until I can say my desktop uses 1.21Gwatts?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Google Sets:
Predicted Items
Deep Blue
Stand Away
Solitaer
Floor planing
Master Mind
Reaching Horizons
Freedom Call
DEEP RED
etc
Queen Of The Night
Painkiller
Today's Technology
Recent developments in AI
His literary influences
Angels Cry
Never Understand
Red
After rain
The Renju International Federation
Game of Go Ring
Gateway Inc
Dell Computer Corp
IBM
Carry On
The future of AI
Food Chain Fish
Deep Yellow
Violet
ZITO
Forest Green
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
... The Future of AI ;)
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
How many people can hold the handle that turns the crank? Or in modern terms, how much juice can you reasonably throw at these beautiful monsters!?
So with this in mind, I don't think it's too off-topic to mention this article which talks about the gutting of funding for fuel cells. Or this student research paper site which talks about the inherent economy of different sources of energy in various terms. (Warning! They are pro-nuclear, so YMMV!) Also, if you are interested in where this topic takes you you should stop off here to follow up on whatever takes your fancy as far as energy production goes. They've got a veritable mountain of info. Check out their hydrogen economy stuff.
Whoever thought up the names of the two machines needs to get a grant or something! Green Destiny, mmmmmmm! Q, grooowwwl!
(Time to burn a point or 10...)
Never having seen Google Sets before, I typed in:
Cmdr Taco
Hemos
It expanded it to:
Predicted Items
Hemos
Cmdr Taco
The Andover brunette
The blonde masseuse
CmdrTaco
Mel Gibson
Martha Stewart
The me redhead
Purple Bikini Girl
I'd love to know how it came up with those results...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Maybe we could dispense with this sort of nonsense everytime the NY Times is referred to. If people know what the "mumble...mutter" refers to, they don't need the note. If they don't, then the note doesn't help.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Well, there has always been need for differnt
supercomputers. There is numbercrunchers,
vector machines etc. You have to get the
machine that suites your needs. Thats all.
Like som machines need HUGE datasets to work
on but its not a complex calucation eatch
cycle. But some other are very complex
calucations on small datasets (where a beowulf
works wonders). But you cant use a
linuxkluster THAT efficent if you have to move
around several hundred gigabyte of data around
the nodes.
On a sidenote. Why is "blah blah ny times had
registration we know it" informative? I say
offtopic!
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
Please let the "2 new directions" be my home and my office. This crappy laptop of mine can barely log into Slashdot.
The race between the Italian monster tank, and the English light and aerodynamic car in The Difference Engine. Remember ?
The Q machine is a big cluster of Alpha servers with some kind of fast interconnect. The Green Destiny cluster seems to be a Transmeta blade cluster with some kind of commodity interconnect. Both are basically big collections of independent CPU's talking over some kind of fast network connection.
They are distributed memory clusters, each machine has it's own memory and they interact through a fast network.
There are other architectures where you have all the processors sharing the same memory, and they communicate over the memory bus. Kind of like the difference between 16 PC's talking over gigabit ethernet, and a 16 processor Sun box.
At another level there is the whole vector vs. scalar architecture. The japanese have a 36 teraflop vector supercomputer that leaves our machines in the dust.
The article is misleading because the machines described are at different ends of a price spectrum, not at differents ends of an architectural spectrum. You aren't looking at different approaches, you're just looking at different price points.
Actually, they don't allow the login name cypherpunks anymore. Nor do they allow cypherpunks1, cypherpunks2, cypherpunks99, cypherpunks742, cypherpunks999, ... They do allow cypherpunks followed by four digits, but some of those may be taken.
oh man, imagine two beowulf clusters of these babies!
This sig was cut off by the sla
A beowulf cluster of... of... *collapses from sudden heart attack*
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
A little bit of research shows up this on how google sets works. There's a link on the bottom of that message for an introduction to faceted sets.
And now for the fun bit. Looking for set with just the keyword Porn, I got some very interesting results:
Predicted ItemsPorn
Warez Sites
pirated software
Irc Bots
Mp3
Spamming Software
how Earth collapses into black hole after turning on beowulf cluster of such computers.
Green Destiny belongs to a class of makeshift supercomputers called Beowulf clusters.
Uh-oh...
Moore's Law holds that the number of transistors on a microprocessor -- the brain of a modern computer -- doubles about every 18 months, causing the speed of its calculations to soar.
This is a myth for the non techie, it's transistor density that doubles every 18 months, not the number of transistors.
From the article:
"Armed with all this computing power, Q's keepers plan to take on what for the Energy Department, anyway, is the Holy Grail of supercomputing: a full-scale, three-dimensional simulation of the physics involved in a nuclear explosion."
Come on, for pete's sake, can't we do better stuff with this than simulate the physics in a nuclear explosion? Honestly, who cares about that. We all know it's bad, real bad. Move on to something near and dear to a lot of us out there...cancer, AIDS, Heart Disease,etc.
This is probably an unpopular view, but damn, enough destruction already.
Sent from your iPad.
tried mumble,mutter doesn't work, so i registered mutter,mumble
Tis done
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Ok, Q is rated at 30 teraops at 5 MW. Green Destiny is capable of 160 gigaflops at 5 kW.
This means that the power efficiency difference is just a mere factor of 5. The problem with supercomputing is of course scaling and interconnecting the cpu... The author argues that the Green Destiny is "not so picky", and "hums away contentedly next to piles of cardboard boxes and computer parts" while Q requires special buildings and monstrous cooling installations. Yeah, so what, it is a much smaller machine.
Of course it is easier to build a smaller machine than a large machine. I would say that despite the fact that Green Destiny is 0.5% as fast as Q and is designed with power consumption in mind it is just 5 times as efficient.
Can anyone tell me (or point to a resource) how CPU power consumption depends on transistor size and clock frequency. Will a chip with a given size operating at a given clock frequency require the same amount of power, regardless of the number of transistors in it?
The future of supercomputing lies in grid technology and creations such as the globus toolkit.
A really good computer.
(or if it was on wheels)
a WHEELY good computer.
NYT:
Moore's Law holds that the number of transistors on a microprocessor -- the brain of a modern computer -- doubles about every 18 months,
Well, Gordon observed the exponential increase of transistors on ICs in Electronics, Voume 38 Number 8, April 19, 1965. There were no microprocessors until about 1970! Also, he never mentioned 18 months, thought it can be inferred.
-Kevin
PPC chips are generally more efficient than their x86 counterparts, which makes tham a low tco option for universitys. i wonder what benefit they would have had if they used Motorolas newer mobile G3 processors. and already efficient chip designed for an ultra efficient environment.
I want 2D games back.
Supercomputing is an energy-intensive process, and Q (the name is meant to evoke both the dimension-hopping Star Trek alien and the gadget-making wizard in the James Bond thrillers) is rated at 30 teraops, meaning that it can perform as many as 30 trillion calculations a second. (The measure of choice used to be the teraflop, for "trillion floating-point operations," but no one wants to think of a supercomputer as flopping trillions of times a second.)
Since when did Flops turn into ops? It's importatnt to make a distinction between floating point operations and integer operations, right? Seems pretty dumb to me. Or is it a cracker/hacker kind of thing...
Orp
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
In other words, the stuff we all love. ;-)
Except for that last one... >:-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
From an economical point of view, maybe the more interesting question to ask is which of these machines is more easily programmable -- especially when the manhours involved in developping software of this complexity typically ends up being a significant fraction of the cost of the entire project. In particular, time spent testing and debugging has got to be especially expensive given the enormous complexity of the problems being solved, which makes me wonder -- do we perhaps need less super and more smart in our big iron? This is pure speculation -- I don't know the specifics of Q or the Green Destiny -- but I'd imagine that a custom machine requires the development of a custom compiler that knows how to take full advantage of the hardware (not to mention building and optimizing the numerical libraries,etc. that the system's users will need). As anyone who's built a compiler can tell you, this is not a trivial task!
For those of you who are wondering what they mean by high performance networks inside the Q machine..
The Q machine utilizes dual-rail Quadrics card according to this. Dual rail refers to using two NI cards (each one on a separate 64b/66MHz PCI bus so they can get the most out of the I/O system of the host).
I hadn't heard of Quadrics so I looked them up. At the web site you find out that they're a switched network that gets 340 MBytes per second between applications and with latencies around 3-5 microseconds. Compare this to 100Mbps ethernet, which gets 10MBytes/s and latencies of 70+ microseconds and you'll understand why the Q machine will run fine grained parallel apps that the green machine won't be able to touch.
Looking a bit through the literature, I noticed that Quadrics uses IEEE 1596.3 for its link signaling (400 MBaud, 10 bit). While they don't say it anywhere, this IEEE standard is the well-known SCI standard (scalable coherent interconnect.. pretty popular in Europe, but the US has been dominated by Myrinet..which I conicidentally use at school)..
Hope this gives some more detail about the arch..
The reason there are no fusion power plants is because we don't know how to handle the vast amounts of energy released in a fusion reaction. If it can be modeled and studied, maybe that energy source can become practical.
This may help explain things.
I never would have thought that all those things could be so easily related... but there you have it!
This article succeeds in pointing out the fact that we are reaching the peak computing speeds. As is common konwledge, exponential growth does not continue forever: it reaches a peak. Adelman figured this out when studying encryption algorithms, and his solution was DNA computing. Since then, researchers have been working on such systems. Just this week I saw a lecture at the field museum of natural hisory in Chicago about biocomputing. Chemical reactions will power the future computers, apparently around the year 2010 when the expoential growth curve levels off once and for all. It seems that the future of supercomputing goes much further than supercomputers as we know them. Instead, computers will not resemble current computers at all. They have already built such systems, and a robot that runs off of chemical reactions. This applies to artificial intelligence, also, as these reactions make it easy for systems to learn, as was demonstrated by the robot.
I wish I had more details to give you. I'll add the lecturer's name when I get home from work. But yeah, this article definitely missed this aspect of research in information technology.
Lower power usage is a good direction for regular computing, too.
Many have noticed the increasing trend towards laptop computers as a primary computer for people concerned not just about portability, but also about space, electric power and noise issues in their abodes. A noisy tower and 60 lb space-hogging CRT is too uncool. Sleek LCD monitors, minimalist keyboards and no noisy cooling fans is where it's at.
And, many have noted too, that most CPU power is going to waste these days. Except for a few games and for the server environment, most CPUs spend their time waiting for someone to type in a character into MS Word or click the next link for a browser.
I think you'll see a shift to more energy efficient CPUs in a big way in a much broader market sector than supercomputing. Namely, desktop client access devices will go this route, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I submitted a Green Destiny article on June 10, when some guys named Linus Torvalds and Gordon Bell helped officially open it. (I think they are like dot.com millionaires or something, right?)
/. is to find stories that will get overlooked on the big sites.
But since it didn't have an article from the Gray Lady associated with it, the editors passed.
I read the Times on the train, I don't have to read it again. The WWW is a big place, and the whole point of
2002-06-10 16:52:06 Green Destiny: Los Alamos Beowulf Cluster, Low Upk (articles,news) (rejected)
http://sss.lanl.gov/vance.shtml
No, the reason there are no practical fusion power plants is that creating fusion conditions in a plasma using current technology uses more power than can be extracted.
Research fusion reactors exist, but they don't produce net power, rather they consume it. That is why they are still research.
This is pretty much unrelated to the problem of simulating fusion bombs, which uses a different fuel (for the final fusion stage, typically lithium-6 deuteride), the ignition of which involves a whole series of reactions between a large number of different materials, initiated by the detonation of a fission bomb boosted with deuterium or tritium.
Fusion power plants typically use plasmas, not solids, for their fuel, and are ignited by confinement and heating. The amount of energy released is pretty much self-regulating, since the plasma will tend to lose confinement and burn less if it gets too hot.
Power generation and weapons have very different design goals: power plants tend to be big, stay still, and produce large amounts of power for a long time, connected to a power transmission system, with human operators nearby. Weapons need to be moved quickly to a target (i.e. be light, compact, and robust), and generate a huge amount of power in a very brief time, with care taken to preserve the safety of the weapon's handlers, and not much done to preserve the safety of any people at the target.
(Of course, the two fields are not totally separate; however, my main point is that they typically involve very different computer simulations).
The single reason that Green Destiny is more
efficient than Q is that it uses a very slow
interconnect. 100 Mb Ethernet consumes considerably less power than a high speed
interconnect like that of Q. While GD is 3X to
5X cheaper per FLOP, its interconnect is at least
10X slower than Q's, and that more than
compensates for the price difference. In all,
GD's strengths are more political than technical.
Apparently it came from a geekculture comic.
If you're trying to get maximum bang for the chip buck, and willing to custom-build boards (which people often are for multi-million-dollar highly-custom machines), digital signal processor chips often have rocking performance for dumb fast applications. For instance, the TI TMS320C6713 can do up to 1800 MFLOPS at 225MHz (probably only 1350 double-precision), while most general-purpose CPUs do less than one MFLOPS per megahertz, and have a reasonable amount of memory and I/O bandwidth. You won't be running off-the-shelf Beowulf on them, but it's not hard to build them into PCI boards or multi-processor PCI boards that you can feed data from a conventional CPU, and they come with compilers and usually other programming environments.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Register has a reply of sorts, including a link to its pioneering article on computer assisted cooking technologies
Sounds like Q's going to need it's own nuclear reactor for a battery....
I'm all for showing the worthless pricks that we don't need their online journalism. Chances are that there are 20 other sites with a very similar article.
Fuck 'em man.