Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator

eecue writes "Earlier this year I went on vacation to japan. At the end of my trip I was lucky enough to receive a tour of the Earth Simulator, which is the world's fastest super computer. I took pictures and wrote about it."

Comments

Hmm

[protest_boy]

I wonder if we can slashdot the worlds fastest supercomputer? ;-)

Re:Hmm

[ender81b]

Well that would, of course, depend on how much bandwith is running to said server now wouldn't it? =)

Found some nice info (good old google) on said Supercomputer though since the sites linked article didn't have much.

A Time Article on The Earth Simulator

Top 500 page on Earth Simulator

NEC page on the Earth Simulator

Google Translated Powerpoint presentation on the Earth Simulator

A snippet(s) of info:
"Based on the NEC SX architecture, 640 nodes, each node with 8 vector processors (8 Gflop/s peak per processor), 2 ns cycle time, 16GB shared memory. Total of 5120 total processors, 40 TFlop/s peak, and 10 TB memory. "

"Earth Simulator's processors are one-chip LSIs fabricated with 0.15 micron CMOS process and copper wiring. Highly optimized software and high-speed networks that pump massive amounts of data through 7.8TB/s bandwidth connecting the 640 processing nodes are key to the amazing efficiency of Earth Simulator."

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

world's fastest supercomputer or world's fastest public supercomputer? heh. better ask the LLNL/NSA boys about that one...

Reliability of its predictions

[hak hak]

I wonder how far in advance things like, say, the climate can be predicted, even by such a powerful computer. It's almost impossible to predict the weather for even a small area (I live in the Netherlands) for more than the coming few days to a week, because it's so sensitive to small errors. (That doesn't mean I'm not impressed by the thing, of course.)

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[Turbyne]

I don't know if climate prediction was its main task, but anyway:

1. Read up on the Lorenz equations.
2. Spend a week or 2 in Boston and see how random weather can really get.

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[protest_boy]

Imagine if the weather was able to be predicted even 10 days in advance with near 100% accuracy. An accurate and reliable forcast would GREATLY effect everything from cargo transport, to disaster preparedness, to "will I have to scrape my windshield in the morning." I can't even begin to fathom how much money would be saved. Too much for my puny brain to comprehend.

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[Anonymous Coward]

When your super-accurate weather prediction system would predict that next week there would be lots of snow and very difficult traffic, then so many people would decide to go to the mountains and spend next week snowboarding and skiing that this sudden and unpredicted traffic would in turn influence the weather and the prediction :-)

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[Buck2]

You Yanks no nothing. ...

We know something about our language. :)

Re:Reliability of its predictions

[mlh1996]

You know, not to knock Michigan weather, 'cause I know those lakes can do some wierd stuff, but I have lived in a lot of places, all over the world, and in every one of them, the locals say, "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes!" like it's original.

All right, every place but San Diego.

How Stupid!!!!

[brett720]

If they are going to simulate the earth...then of course as part of the earth, they will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)...which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1) which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(3) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)..etc.etc.etc...and of course that must go on indefinitely! Dont they have better things to spend millions of dollars of processing power on?

Re:How Stupid!!!!

[Genrou]

Not only that - it is completelly unnecessary. We all know that, at the end of processing, result will be 42.

Sounds like they may be overworked..

[Molt]

The article mentions that "They were afraid to mention on their website that they offered tours as there were only 3 english speaking employees of the lab". Now this hits Slashdot. Guess they may as well mention it on their site now, since it's already now known in the world of the rabid technophile.

I just rooted it.

[Stonent1]

Now I changed the password to the final 84 digits of pi. See ya suckers!

Re:I just rooted it.

[aegilops]

Hmmm. "Final" digits of pi, eh? Hey, the comment was a reasonably funny idea, and the flamebait mod is a bit harsh, but have a think about it for a second.

I read in Q Magazine (music mag from the UK) a column by Blur's bassist in which he wrote that he was doing some thinking about the value of pi, which as we know is an infinite decimal. No, not in the style of "one ninth" which is, also, an infinite decimal (0.1111... recurring), but rather, an infinite, random sequence of digits, that occurs in a precise order.

Now think about that for a second. He pointed out that if you were to take the number 6 and repeat it a million times, and then string together the phone numbers of everyone in your nation's capital city, then that sequence of digits WILL occur somewhere within pi. In fact, it will occur an infinite number of times, but let's not labour the point.

Taking his original concept, it occurred to me that you could use a system whereby a sender and receiver both have a whizz-bang algorithm for calculating pi. Now, no doubt the maths graduates in Slashdot will chime in with how this can be done, but let's imagine that both you and I have some method of reliably generating a sequence from pi (e.g. start at the millionth digit within pi's sequence, and then crank out the next 100,000 values).

So imagine, say, if you were to take some digital media, e.g. the entire source code for Windows, and zip it up into a single archive. The sequence of values that represent the archive would also occur somewhere within the sequence of pi. Now assuming (ah! a big ask) I can FIND that sequence somewhere in there (may take a while...) I can effectively represent ANY binary stream by simply knowing where to start within pi's sequence, and for how many digits (known beforehand by having access to the original file). This way, the binary stream can be "stored" simply by reference to its starting digit, and its length.

This is a pretty mad concept when you think about it. Data transmissions for previously analysed, static data would become immediate (only two numbers to send) although the burden of using this technique naturally falls on the originator host to find the sequence within pi, and for the recipient to have a method of regenerating those digits. Hopefully, it would be easier to regenerate the sequence for the recipient. So a central computer with access to the media and a staggering quantity of poke (hey! The Earth Simulator!) can scan through the sequence of pi to find the starting point, but once that job is done, the recipients may not have to trawl through all of pi in order to regenerate the sequence (assuming you have an algorith that can start at an arbitrary location within the digit sequence ... although this may not turn out to be the case. I don't know what algorithms people use to calculate pi to these levels of accuracy).

All digital media could be stored by those two values, irrespective of size. No DRM concerns for accessing digital media (hey, it's just two parameters to the pi algorithm, and I'd be fairly confident on the 'prior art' argument against patents prohibiting this if they tried to patent any restrictions). No media degredation in storage (e.g. CD-Rs not being readable after a few years). Who would need terabytes of storage, when a terabyte could be represented by two numbers? Unless, of couse, the starting point itself is so far into the sequence of pi that it takes MORE space to store the starting point than the size of the binary stream itself.

Anyway this comment is always going to languish in the -1 off-topic silt at the bottom of the Slashdot pond, but this occurred to me not so long ago and so I fancied sharing.

We apologise for this break in transmission, normal service will now be resumed.

Aegilops

Re:How come we've never heard of this?

[protest_boy]

Looks like it's been #1 since at least June of last year.

http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/

Just think!

[FyRE666]

So if you are in Japan and you are as nerdy as me, email me and I will give you her contact address.

For the majority of people here, this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!

Man is she in for a bad time!

Re:Just think!

[UnknownSoldier]

> ... , this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!

Probably the second -- you forgot Mom's email address ! ;-)

shhhh keep it out of the publ. domain

[JOW]

Pls. Don't tell anybody that we geeks travel around the world to look at computers,
If any none nerds find out ! it just confirms the general believe that we are all a group
Of sad persons with no life

The problem is grid size.

[MyNameIsFred]

I've read in various articles that supercomputer weather prediction systems look at around 200,000 points on the earth surface. With the points being a few km apart. When you think about the size of the earth, this is a very fine grid. However, when you think about a specific person, the spacing is hugh. Hence the problem with weather prediction. A few km can mean the difference between a downpour in a city, or completely missing it.

Earth simulation, supercomputers and chaos theory

[arvindn]

Actually, one of the main motivations for work on building computers in the first half of this century was the promise of weather prediction. Those hopes were shattered by the discovery of chaos theory by Edward Lorenz in 1960. The central point of the theory is that natural systems evolve with time in such a way that even a minute error in measurement at some point in time will make the simulated system diverge rapidly from the real system. You may have heard the catchphrase

A butterfly's wings in Brazil
Can trigger a Texan tornado

This is the fundamental obstacle to simulation of natural phenomena. However, while local parameters remain hard or impossible to predict, global parameters are easier to forecast, and computing power helps. This is where supercomputers come in: for example, they help us study the effect of global warming far out into the future.

Holes in the grid

[hughk]

You are quite right and one of the major issues is the holes in the grid, even at 3Km. Satellite based observation dosn't help much as you only 'see' the tops of any clouds and have no way to measure barometric pressure.

Many ships record information for the meteorlogical services, but the trouble is that only works where there are ships. In some of the meteorologically interesting places such as the poles are often shrouded in clouds and have few weather stations.

The truth is that many points must be interpolated. Points closest to civilisation are quite good because there are enough measuring stations. This means that short-term weather forecasts are quite good (except in the UK, where they may be right but delayed or advanced by up to a day) but deteriorates over about three days and over a week or so is extremely difficult.

Forget the calculations, if you don't have data points, you are just speculating.

Re:so whats the interface ?

[Mister Transistor]

As far as the command set goes it's a vector processor. That means it has an instruction set that is completely unlike any standard scalar (Von Neumann) archictecture processor you may be familiar with. The CRAY series of supercomputers were one of the first vector processors around; do a google search for "CRAY Instruction Set Reference Card" and have a look. That will give you some insight on how a vector processor is programmed. Most instructions support 3 operands - 2 source and a destination argument.

In 30 years...

[medscaper]

...will we look back at this and scoff? Well, not scoff, just admire wistfully what we thought was amazingly fast?

Just curious. It seems that NASA computers that launched Apollo were amazing at the time - the cream of the crop - yet we have far surpassed that computing power, speed, storage in even laptops 30 or 40 years later.

I can't wait to see my grandkids' pc!

Re:In 30 years...

[cowtamer]

Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.

However, due to the processing power required by Windows Authorized Edition (AE), JRE 25.0, and the GPU cycles required to render clippie in holographic hi-res, it will still take about a second between a menu-click and anything useful happening... (RMSLinux, however, will still run on old 486 SX machines...)

Re:In 30 years...

[ShinmaWa]

Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.

Great! Just in time for Duke Nukem Forever!