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Two Directions for the Future of Supercomputing

Posted by timothy on from the thattaway dept.

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..."

8 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. all i see by martissimo · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 ;)

  2. Re:Google set reply - OT by flonker · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 Items
    Porn
    Warez Sites
    pirated software
    Irc Bots
    Mp3
    Spamming Software
  3. Moores Law by wiZd0m · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Gridcomputing sites by grid+geek · · Score: 4, Informative
    Rubbish. Talking as someone doing a PhD in the subject, Grid computing is *not* the answer to every high performance computing problem.

    Latency issues are still going to be there and which would make Grid environments unsuitable for the majority of simulations. You can't do nuclear event simulations effectively if you have a multiple second delay in communicating between processors which you get in Grids.


    On the other hand Grids do have several advantages in terms of providing similar TFLOPS for a much lower price, by using several geographically seperated systems you give access to more researchers and research in this area has a lot of practical spin offs in the future.

  5. Q machine interconnect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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..

  6. Re:Teraops? by pclminion · · Score: 3, Informative
    Since when did Flops turn into ops? It's importatnt to make a distinction between floating point operations and integer operations, right?

    Not really, for two reasons: first, supercomputer CPUs are rigged for floating point, and they do it really fast anyway. Second, a super CPU is so fast compared to RAM that the time difference between an integer op and a floating point op is almost totally amortized into the RAM access time anyway. In other words, computing a float multiplication might be 1.5 times slower than an integer multiplication, but it's still 200 times faster than a RAM access.

    Then you have to work out what exactly you mean by "operation" -- a single multiplication, or a single vector instruction (which might multiply 64 numbers in one shot). It quickly becomes difficult to judge performance based on some "flops" or "ops" number. To figure out performance it's better to just run the real application and see how fast it goes...

  7. Re:Efficiency of Programming? by joib · · Score: 3, Informative

    No. They use standard compilers and tools for their respective architectures (that is Tru64 for Q and I guess Linux for Green Destiny). The applications are programmed using MPI, a FORTRAN/C/C++ message passing API which is an absolute bitch to program.

  8. Re:Green Destiny looks like an RLX cluster by hippster · · Score: 3, Informative

    It IS a cluster of RLX Transmeta blades, each containing a 667MHz processor and 640MB memory connected by 100Mbit Ethernet. It's not meant to compete with "Q". It's simply a great departmental or workgroup cluster. However, its' efficiency suggests it might be a concept worth exploring for future cluster supercomputing architectures. Hippster