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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..."
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
"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 ?
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!
Or better, give a userid and passwd for a NYTimes account.
I'm sure it's legal. It's like sharing/swapping discount passes at the supermarket.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
(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."
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.
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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?
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.
Heh. You forget that none of the causes you mention involve playing with huge computers. A lot of these machines are, however, being used to do protein-folding simulations- Blue Gene, or the PNNL's new machine (I think). I'm fine with simulating nukes, because it means fewer Pacific islands get slagged. Protein folding, on the other hand, is often something of a joke- some people get very interesting results that tell us a lot about biophysics, but absolutely nothing whatsoever indicates that we'll be able to do accurate structure prediction anytime soon. It's amazing how many people think completely computerized drug design is right around the corner.
From what I've read, a real useful advance in computational biology would be to automate building and refining of protein structures from crystallography. It's just not as sexy, though.
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...
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.
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
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.
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