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.
Re:The mighty have fallen
by
anzha
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes...and no. What we have been upset by is that people have been trying to shoehorn in all problem sets to MPPs and clusters. There are problems which do so, and do so well.
HOWEVER! Not all do by any stretch. Certain problems map well onto certain architectures.
The second reason is that quite frankly, clusters are boring. Rack, after rack of parts I can buy at Fry's or as a workstation just doesn't have much interest for us. I mean, where's the excitement in thousands of PCs...It's kewl for about 30 seconds and then you have to deal with teh headaches of keeping it up and running...
I'd love to have dozens of interesting architectures running around, not just vector, cluster, and MPP. If five of them could be spun out of slashdot - yeah, right - or anywhere, then we'd be very happy campers.
-- Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Cool.. but
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I wonder if it will be as fast as the computer William Shatner and Priceline.com use?
Just imagine...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...building a supercomputer as a cluster of commodity off-the-shelf personal computers, interconnected with a local area network technology like Ethernet, and running programs written for parallel processing out of those!
Seymour Cray said it best: "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
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?
Return of Vector Processing
by
drhairston
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk said Red Storm reflects Cray's strategy to deliver high-efficiency, high bandwidth supercomputer systems. "Red Storm embodies the same design philosophy as our new Cray X1(TM) vector-based product in a highly cost-effective superscalar architecture and will be a key initiative for Cray."
Ah, I remember my days on the venerable Cray Y-MP, optimizing my programs for vector processing. I am unsure how Cray has managed to make a combined parallel-vector machine like the Y-MP out of PC chips provided by AMD, but I do not envy the programmers who must now begin the task of vector-optimizing their code to take advantage of this beast.
I had hoped that this idea died with Cray. Apparently not.
Re:Return of Vector Processing
by
anzha
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Better reparse what he said. it uses the same design philosophy, not the same architecture. The X1 and Red Storm are distinctly different machines.
More of what you are worried about is this. That might be both scary and fun to code for.
However, it looks like vector processing is on the upswing, not down. It hit rock bottom during the 90s...
-- Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Re:Return of Vector Processing
by
Boone^
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Japan's Earth Simulator is created from NEC SX-6 Vector processors, proving that not only hasn't the "idea" died, but it's doing very well thank you very much. Besides, who said that a machine made with AMD Opteron processors has anything to do with vectors?
Heating issues?
by
Spazholio
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Now, I know that my little ol' Athlon runs hot as a mother, so I can't imagine the cooling necessary to keep this baby running at an optimal temperature. Last I heard (and I could be mistaken), Crays were cooled by bring submerged in liquid nitrogen, and more recently with some sort of liquid plasma cooling (don't ask me, I have NO idea how something like that would work). Does anyone have any information on how they're going to keep this thing from incinerating itself the moment it's turned on?
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.)
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.
Re:Heating issues?
by
subgeek
·
· Score: 4, Informative
one thing the opteron will have going for it is a heat spreader. intel uses this technique on the p4. it allows better heat transference and a larger surface area so the temperature is more spread out. one of the reasons athlons are hot is because a lot of work is done in a small area.
another is silicon-on-insulator (soi) where a layer of glass insulates each layer of silicon from the next. this allows lower voltages to be used because there is less interferance.
but even after all of that the opteron might run cooler than your athlon, but probably still run hotter than an intel chip at the same clock speed. check out the article on www.tomshardware.com (to lazy to look up the link) and take a look at the basic opteron heat sink requirements. must have copper contact area. bolts to mobo, not to socket (probably to cover for the added weight of the copper).
but that's just the regular opteron set-up.
wait, i forgot, amd fire comments are funny, right? maybe you didn't want discussion. too late now.
Re:Heating issues?
by
yknott
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Flourinert is a whole bunch of fun. You can actually buy it for about 200 bucks a gallon. A few people have tried overclocking their computers by immersing their computers in the stuff. Check it out here and here
UT (and every other game out there right now) assigns itself (its processer affinity) to the first CPU available. It makes absolutely no use of SMP or parallel execution whatsoever.
So it'll run on CPU 0, and the other 90 bazillion will sit idle.
Interestingly enough, all the gamer kiddies saving up for a shiney new Prescott based P4 with hyper-threading will see no advantage either, for the same reason.
AFAIK, Doom III will actually make use of concurrently executing threads, and there's rumor of a new UT2k3 exe that will, as well.
Programming for parallel CPU's is a whole new ballgame, and the rules are still being written.
--
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
temporary setback
by
GunFodder
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
AMD has been suffering recently because they are focusing their efforts on Opteron, and meanwhile Athlon isn't getting any younger. This is a temporary setback; if Opteron is any good then AMD will be performance competitive again, allowing them to sell at higher price points and get a better margin.
AMD was in the same funk back when Intel released the Pentium II and AMD was still working on Athlon. Once AMD got Athlon out the door they started doing a lot better.
and come over to my house, and I will demonstrate.
-- LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
WSJ story here
by
CathedralRulz
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· 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.
I hope they are not putting that supercomputer anywhere near Antarctica.. 16,000 Athlons can get pretty hot resulting in some serious polar melting forcing me to evacuate from New Orleans (we are already underwater).
-- Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Local Politics Needs Heat Spreader
by
4of12
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It will be real interesting to be at local chamber of commerce meeting where Sandia Labs management gets to meet with managment from another big employer in Albuquerque.
That's right boys and girls.
On the west side of the Rio Grande is Rio Rancho, home of Intel Fab 9. (the same one that got struck by lightning a while back).
-- "Provided by the management for your protection."
glad cray ditched the itanium
by
Billly+Gates
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Itanium is a dog. They are a bitch to program in and optimize. THis means the compilers for it suck and will take years before optimized code will begin to take hold. I still prefer risc like the alpha chips because they are easy to program and optimize with. Not to mention very fast. But I understand why cray switched due to the death of the processor. Samsung still sells supercomputers with alpha's even though it will be dead shortly.
Remember that the customers who purchase these bad boys hire their own software engineers and purchase specialized compilers for maximum optimization. All the compilers will be available for Amd hammer chips because they run on so many systems. Also more engineers know it inside and out and can write great optimized programs for it.
Re:next generation == last generation
by
Brian+Stretch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Simple. AMD crammed as much bad news as possible into Q3 and held up shipping their shiny new Athlon XP 2400+ and higher chips to distributors until the first day of Q4. Accordingly, Q4 revenues are going to be much higher than Q3, AMD's net loss will be considerably lower, and they'll hang in there just fine until the Opteron ships in early Q2 (late Q1?) next year.
AMD also took the unusual step of accelerating their changeover to 130nm and the new Thoroughbred Revision B core that those neato new 2400+ and higher chips use and letting old inventory burn off during the resulting downtime during the last two quarters.
I say "unusual" because Intel did just the opposite. They dumped lots of crippled 2GHz Celeron processors onto the market rather than shut down their old 180nm fabs and they brought lots of new 130nm capacity online. They have no prayer of finding buyers for all the chips they now have the capacity to build and the sales channels are choked with rapidly aging Intel inventory. Their ASPs are eroding and the Xeon line that sustains their profitability is going to get Hammered in about 6 months, assuming no Tier 1 OEMs grow a pair and start offering AMD Athlon MP servers and workstations before then.
Soooooo, AMD's future looks pretty good, depending on how badly Intel panics at the mess they've gotten themselves into.
Slashdot Mirror
There's something comic-bookish about that name... maybe it's just cos it sounds like a Transformer.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
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.
I wonder if it will be as fast as the computer William Shatner and Priceline.com use?
...building a supercomputer as a cluster of commodity off-the-shelf personal computers, interconnected with a local area network technology like Ethernet, and running programs written for parallel processing out of those!
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?
"Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk said Red Storm reflects Cray's strategy to deliver high-efficiency, high bandwidth supercomputer systems. "Red Storm embodies the same design philosophy as our new Cray X1(TM) vector-based product in a highly cost-effective superscalar architecture and will be a key initiative for Cray."
Quoted from the Cray Press Release.
Ah, I remember my days on the venerable Cray Y-MP, optimizing my programs for vector processing. I am unsure how Cray has managed to make a combined parallel-vector machine like the Y-MP out of PC chips provided by AMD, but I do not envy the programmers who must now begin the task of vector-optimizing their code to take advantage of this beast.
I had hoped that this idea died with Cray. Apparently not.
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
Now, I know that my little ol' Athlon runs hot as a mother, so I can't imagine the cooling necessary to keep this baby running at an optimal temperature. Last I heard (and I could be mistaken), Crays were cooled by bring submerged in liquid nitrogen, and more recently with some sort of liquid plasma cooling (don't ask me, I have NO idea how something like that would work). Does anyone have any information on how they're going to keep this thing from incinerating itself the moment it's turned on?
On the 1.8 clawhammer with software rendering?
About 10.
UT (and every other game out there right now) assigns itself (its processer affinity) to the first CPU available. It makes absolutely no use of SMP or parallel execution whatsoever.
So it'll run on CPU 0, and the other 90 bazillion will sit idle.
Interestingly enough, all the gamer kiddies saving up for a shiney new Prescott based P4 with hyper-threading will see no advantage either, for the same reason.
AFAIK, Doom III will actually make use of concurrently executing threads, and there's rumor of a new UT2k3 exe that will, as well.
Programming for parallel CPU's is a whole new ballgame, and the rules are still being written.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
AMD has been suffering recently because they are focusing their efforts on Opteron, and meanwhile Athlon isn't getting any younger. This is a temporary setback; if Opteron is any good then AMD will be performance competitive again, allowing them to sell at higher price points and get a better margin.
AMD was in the same funk back when Intel released the Pentium II and AMD was still working on Athlon. Once AMD got Athlon out the door they started doing a lot better.
and come over to my house, and I will demonstrate.
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
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
I hope they are not putting that supercomputer anywhere near Antarctica.. 16,000 Athlons can get pretty hot resulting in some serious polar melting forcing me to evacuate from New Orleans (we are already underwater).
here on Cray's website.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It will be real interesting to be at local chamber of commerce meeting where Sandia Labs management gets to meet with managment from another big employer in Albuquerque.
That's right boys and girls.
On the west side of the Rio Grande is Rio Rancho, home of Intel Fab 9. (the same one that got struck by lightning a while back).
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Remember that the customers who purchase these bad boys hire their own software engineers and purchase specialized compilers for maximum optimization. All the compilers will be available for Amd hammer chips because they run on so many systems. Also more engineers know it inside and out and can write great optimized programs for it.
http://saveie6.com/
Simple. AMD crammed as much bad news as possible into Q3 and held up shipping their shiny new Athlon XP 2400+ and higher chips to distributors until the first day of Q4. Accordingly, Q4 revenues are going to be much higher than Q3, AMD's net loss will be considerably lower, and they'll hang in there just fine until the Opteron ships in early Q2 (late Q1?) next year.
AMD also took the unusual step of accelerating their changeover to 130nm and the new Thoroughbred Revision B core that those neato new 2400+ and higher chips use and letting old inventory burn off during the resulting downtime during the last two quarters.
I say "unusual" because Intel did just the opposite. They dumped lots of crippled 2GHz Celeron processors onto the market rather than shut down their old 180nm fabs and they brought lots of new 130nm capacity online. They have no prayer of finding buyers for all the chips they now have the capacity to build and the sales channels are choked with rapidly aging Intel inventory. Their ASPs are eroding and the Xeon line that sustains their profitability is going to get Hammered in about 6 months, assuming no Tier 1 OEMs grow a pair and start offering AMD Athlon MP servers and workstations before then.
Soooooo, AMD's future looks pretty good, depending on how badly Intel panics at the mess they've gotten themselves into.