ackthpt writes "Code named Red Storm, Cray and Sandia National Laboratories (US Dept. of Energy) to build a 100 Teraflop super computer employing AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors. Alluded to in the WSJ (non-free-as-in-beer subscription required), also in Infoworld, and Reuters."
The mighty have fallen
by
zmalone
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This sort of thing must just be braking all the classic Crayons hearts. I mean, people were getting upset when Cray started building the T3 series Alpha based stuff, nowadays they are cooperating with Dell and making AMD based clusters. At least they have a new vector machine coming out soon.
Might want to check out what Cray and Sandia
by
anzha
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Cray and Sandia say it is a 40 tera*OP* system, not a 100 teraflop one. See what Cray says here and what Sandia says here
The really interesting thing is not the processor, but rather the interconnect which seems to be very similar to the torus used in the T3E.
-- Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Re:Heating issues?
by
ketamine-bp
·
· Score: 5, Informative
for the AMD CPU's, they use Liquid N2 with phase-change system (as described in prev. posts).
for the part of 'plasma cooling', it's similar (in non-scientific term) to laser cooling, which relates to absorbing momentum. (you may want to find some information on the plasma section of http://www.arxiv.org/ if you want to know 'bout that.)
WSJ story here
by
CathedralRulz
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm a subscriber. Here's the article. I hope it convinces you,too, to subscribe.
AMD's New Opteron Chips
Are Tapped for Red Storm
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Endorsing the technology of one of Intel Corp.'s key rivals, Sandia National Laboratories and Cray Inc. plan to build a massive supercomputer using a soon-to-be-introduced line of microprocessor chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The development project, estimated in June to cost $90 million, is a high-profile vote of confidence for AMD's new Opteron chip, in a small but prestigious market long dominated by other chip suppliers. It represents a missed opportunity for Intel, which has been targeting its new Itanium line at high-performance computing applications.
Red Storm, Sandia's name for the new supercomputer, also marks a step forward for the U.S. effort at leadership in supercomputers, which suffered a blow this year with the completion of a huge machine called the Earth Simulator by Japanese government agencies and NEC Corp. Where recent U.S. machines have largely been constructed out of components used in commercial computers, Cray is expected to develop special technology for connecting the AMD chips that should make Red Storm suited for more-complex scientific problems.
"This is a move away from commodity components," said Horst Simon, division director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a supercomputer facility affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's very exciting."
Sandia, which does research for the U.S. Department of Energy in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., has a performance goal of 100 trillion operations per second for Red Storm. It hasn't disclosed most technical details, including the chip selection. But Mr. Simon estimated that the machine will require 16,000 or more microprocessors to hit its speed target, which would appear to surpass the Earth Simulator's current performance.
Sandia said in June that it had selected Cray, a longtime supercomputer maker based in Seattle, to negotiate a development contract. Cray and Sandia officials didn't return calls seeking comment Friday. AMD and Intel officials declined to comment.
AMD could use some good news. The company's Athlon chip line, mainly used in personal computers, has been falling behind the performance of comparable Intel chips. The company reported last week a third-quarter loss of $254 million on sales of $508.2 million, off 34% from the year-earlier period.
Opteron is a high-end member of the new line, code-named Hammer, that is due out next year and viewed by analysts as AMD's best hope for recovery. Like the Itanium, Hammer chips are designed to process 64 bits of information at a time, instead of 32 bits, a capability that helps run huge databases and solve scientific problems.
Intel's Itanium line, developed over eight years with help from Hewlett-Packard Co., is based on an entirely new architecture and achieves its best performance on new 64-bit programs. AMD, by contrast, made 64-bit additions to the original Intel technology used in the past by both companies.
The difference, AMD says, allows Hammer-based computers to run both 32-bit and 64-bit software at high speed. AMD released preliminary test results last week for Opteron -- so far not validated by outside researchers -- that show the chip exceeding Intel's latest Itanium 2 model on one of two widely-used speed measures, AMD said.
Itanium 2, introduced last summer, has already been selected for at least a half-dozen high-performance installations. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, another Department of Energy facility, is building a $24.5 million system based on 1,400 Itanium 2 chips. Based on past Sandia announcements, the Red Storm project's stated performance goal is more than 10 times that of the Pacific Northwest project.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
Re:Free-as-in-Beer
by
Overt+Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"Free" is an overloaded term. In the typical context it can either refer to cost ("free" = "no cost") or to rights ("free" = "no legal restrictions").
To differentiate, many postings here at./ and elsewhere use "free speech" vs. "free beer" as examples of whether something is free from restriction or doesn't cost anything, respectively. So "free-as-in-beer" refers specifically to cost.
Re:Heating issues?
by
fgodfrey
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Crays have never been cooled by liquid nitrogen or any other super-cold liquid. The explanation for this that was given to me is that the super-cooling causes too great a temperature change to keep the parts reliable as they have to be warmed up every time they are turned on.
The Cray 1 and Cray X-MP were cooled by a freon-cooled cold plate. The Y-MP, C90, T3D, and T3E have a chilled liquid called Flourinert (some derivative of an artificial blood plasma, I believe, which is made by 3M) cirulating through a cold plate between boards. The Cray 2 and Cray T90 were cooled by being immersed in a vat of Flourinert. The Y-MP/EL, J90, and SV1 are all air cooled. The X1 (aka SV2) is cooled by spraying Flourinert onto the chips.
I believe, though I'm not 100% certain, that this system will be air cooled, presumably by lots of big fans:)
-- Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Re:Heating issues?
by
Dukebytes
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Good question - can't imagine the heat that it would generate.
Found this on the web -
"Keeping it cool - The development of Cray cooling technology allowed each technology
generation to increase the circuit board density.
"Someone (perhaps Gary
Smaby? I truly don't remember) once said that Cray Research was primarily a refrigerator company."
Cray-1: Single sided boards clamped to copper plates placed in aluminium
racks that had cooling fluid in tubes.
XMP: Double side sandwich boards clamped to twin copper plates placed in
aluminium racks which had cooling fluid in tubes.
Cray-2,3,4: Immersion cooling. The CPU and memory boards sat in a bath of
electrically inert cooling fluid.
YMP, C90, T3d LC, T3e MC: Double-sided circuit boards clamped to hollow
aluminium boards in which the cooling fluid circulated.
El,J90,T3eAC,SV-1: Blown air cooling.
T90: Immersion cooling. The CPU and memory boards sat in a bath of
electrically inert cooling fluid."
I was up close and personal with an older Cray once - it was basically a tower of CPUs and very very short cables - and a whole bunch of cooling "units" srounding it. They were built into something like bench seats - the tech that was showing us around said they put those in so the guys could sit down and rest once in a while in peace:).
Duke
--
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of thing must just be braking all the classic Crayons hearts. I mean, people were getting upset when Cray started building the T3 series Alpha based stuff, nowadays they are cooperating with Dell and making AMD based clusters. At least they have a new vector machine coming out soon.
Cray and Sandia say it is a 40 tera*OP* system, not a 100 teraflop one. See what Cray says here and what Sandia says here The really interesting thing is not the processor, but rather the interconnect which seems to be very similar to the torus used in the T3E.
In other supercomputing news, check out what NERSC is proposing for their Earth Simulator Response Proposal. It's a 160 teraflop machine...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
for the AMD CPU's, they use Liquid N2 with phase-change system (as described in prev. posts).
for the part of 'plasma cooling', it's similar (in non-scientific term) to laser cooling, which relates to absorbing momentum. (you may want to find some information on the plasma section of http://www.arxiv.org/ if you want to know 'bout that.)
AMD's New Opteron Chips
Are Tapped for Red Storm
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Endorsing the technology of one of Intel Corp.'s key rivals, Sandia National Laboratories and Cray Inc. plan to build a massive supercomputer using a soon-to-be-introduced line of microprocessor chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The development project, estimated in June to cost $90 million, is a high-profile vote of confidence for AMD's new Opteron chip, in a small but prestigious market long dominated by other chip suppliers. It represents a missed opportunity for Intel, which has been targeting its new Itanium line at high-performance computing applications.
Red Storm, Sandia's name for the new supercomputer, also marks a step forward for the U.S. effort at leadership in supercomputers, which suffered a blow this year with the completion of a huge machine called the Earth Simulator by Japanese government agencies and NEC Corp. Where recent U.S. machines have largely been constructed out of components used in commercial computers, Cray is expected to develop special technology for connecting the AMD chips that should make Red Storm suited for more-complex scientific problems.
"This is a move away from commodity components," said Horst Simon, division director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a supercomputer facility affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's very exciting."
Sandia, which does research for the U.S. Department of Energy in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., has a performance goal of 100 trillion operations per second for Red Storm. It hasn't disclosed most technical details, including the chip selection. But Mr. Simon estimated that the machine will require 16,000 or more microprocessors to hit its speed target, which would appear to surpass the Earth Simulator's current performance.
Sandia said in June that it had selected Cray, a longtime supercomputer maker based in Seattle, to negotiate a development contract. Cray and Sandia officials didn't return calls seeking comment Friday. AMD and Intel officials declined to comment.
AMD could use some good news. The company's Athlon chip line, mainly used in personal computers, has been falling behind the performance of comparable Intel chips. The company reported last week a third-quarter loss of $254 million on sales of $508.2 million, off 34% from the year-earlier period.
Opteron is a high-end member of the new line, code-named Hammer, that is due out next year and viewed by analysts as AMD's best hope for recovery. Like the Itanium, Hammer chips are designed to process 64 bits of information at a time, instead of 32 bits, a capability that helps run huge databases and solve scientific problems.
Intel's Itanium line, developed over eight years with help from Hewlett-Packard Co., is based on an entirely new architecture and achieves its best performance on new 64-bit programs. AMD, by contrast, made 64-bit additions to the original Intel technology used in the past by both companies.
The difference, AMD says, allows Hammer-based computers to run both 32-bit and 64-bit software at high speed. AMD released preliminary test results last week for Opteron -- so far not validated by outside researchers -- that show the chip exceeding Intel's latest Itanium 2 model on one of two widely-used speed measures, AMD said.
Itanium 2, introduced last summer, has already been selected for at least a half-dozen high-performance installations. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, another Department of Energy facility, is building a $24.5 million system based on 1,400 Itanium 2 chips. Based on past Sandia announcements, the Red Storm project's stated performance goal is more than 10 times that of the Pacific Northwest project.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
"Free" is an overloaded term. In the typical context it can either refer to cost ("free" = "no cost") or to rights ("free" = "no legal restrictions").
./ and elsewhere use "free speech" vs. "free beer" as examples of whether something is free from restriction or doesn't cost anything, respectively. So "free-as-in-beer" refers specifically to cost.
To differentiate, many postings here at
The Cray 1 and Cray X-MP were cooled by a freon-cooled cold plate. The Y-MP, C90, T3D, and T3E have a chilled liquid called Flourinert (some derivative of an artificial blood plasma, I believe, which is made by 3M) cirulating through a cold plate between boards. The Cray 2 and Cray T90 were cooled by being immersed in a vat of Flourinert. The Y-MP/EL, J90, and SV1 are all air cooled. The X1 (aka SV2) is cooled by spraying Flourinert onto the chips.
I believe, though I'm not 100% certain, that this system will be air cooled, presumably by lots of big fans
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Found this on the web -
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/computer/syst em/cray/faq.html
"Keeping it cool - The development of Cray cooling technology allowed each technology generation to increase the circuit board density.
"Someone (perhaps Gary Smaby? I truly don't remember) once said that Cray Research was primarily a refrigerator company."
Cray-1: Single sided boards clamped to copper plates placed in aluminium racks that had cooling fluid in tubes.
XMP: Double side sandwich boards clamped to twin copper plates placed in aluminium racks which had cooling fluid in tubes.
Cray-2,3,4: Immersion cooling. The CPU and memory boards sat in a bath of electrically inert cooling fluid.
YMP, C90, T3d LC, T3e MC: Double-sided circuit boards clamped to hollow aluminium boards in which the cooling fluid circulated.
El,J90,T3eAC,SV-1: Blown air cooling.
T90: Immersion cooling. The CPU and memory boards sat in a bath of electrically inert cooling fluid."
I was up close and personal with an older Cray once - it was basically a tower of CPUs and very very short cables - and a whole bunch of cooling "units" srounding it. They were built into something like bench seats - the tech that was showing us around said they put those in so the guys could sit down and rest once in a while in peace :).
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.