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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.
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 ?
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
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."
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.
I think if you add up all the Watts sucked up by the myriads of smaller PC's in those projects, you'd get a respectable amount of electricity too... Imagine just the inefficiency of having monitor screens on all these machines sucking up power alone.
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
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
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.
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?
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.
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..
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...
sigh....it has to suck in that power in the first place. If it's dissipating a 1000 watts, it has to suck in 1000 watts (atleast) of electric energy. You can't get 1000 watts of heat from nowhere.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I guess it's some braindead idea NY Times has got. For benchmarking supercomputers (which of course necessarily doesn't say much about the performance of any particular application), flops is still the way to go. To be more exact in the form of the linpack benchmark, of which results are published at the top500 site. Incidentally, the site has recently been updated (usually 2 times per year).
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
That's a very good reason, but that's not the way the simulations have been used in the past, or at least not the way that justified the funding. I don't see any reason to expect the future to differ from the past along this axis.
The current interest in simulating nuclear explosions occurs simultaneously with Bush declaring that tactical nukes might be a good idea, and exploring techniques for using them to destroy hardened underground bunkers (see this month's Scientific American). So I think that's the most likely justifier of the current interest.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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."
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 money isn't coming from the commercial power production interests in the government - they don't do explosions (except in countries like Iraq where it helps oil prices, or occasionally dynamite explosions for echolocation to find underground oil.) It's coming from the people who *do* like explosions. Always has. Some of it's tactical nukes, some of it's strategic nukes, some of it's "when do we have to replace our current warheads?", some of it's "how small/large/well-aimed a bomb can we make?". Bush is heavily involved with the military-industrial complex, but the Labs have been working on this kind of thing for several years, expanding their groups of people who simulate blowing stuff up since they can't do much actual testing. Some of them like explosions because they like blowing stuff up, while others of them like explosions because what else does a nuclear-weapons physicist do in today's market?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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