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Fastest US Supercomputer Runs Linux
jgercken writes "The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has brought online a 11.8 teraflops supercomputer based on the Linux operating system, comprised of ~2,000 Itanium processors, and assembled by HP. Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science."
But does it run Linux?
::ducks::
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Whoa, that's gonna cost them in SCO licenses.
But seriously, I wonder what kind of stand governmental implementations of Linux are taking on the fiaSCO.
If you notice this is based on PEAK Performance, aka Theoretical Max, not the best they've gotten out of it . . .
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
They clearly aren't considering the Powerstack 5000
tcd004
Also after reading the whole press release I'm stuck with a few measly pictures of a bunch of HP rack servers running a processor that I won't be able to buy (let alone afford) for awhile longer. There is no mention about how much heat the thing produces, or how much energy it takes to run it. I hope the Ph.D.s running the whole thing realize that while they are trying to do stuff for the "Department of Energy" they are releasing so many thousands of pounds of junk in the land/air/water to run this giant supercomputer.
Can it run Quake II properly with 200 bots set to godlike abilities? ;)
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Makes you wonder for a second what they're doing with the [SECRET - EYES ONLY] hardware.
My guess is that they're working on NP-hard, but useful problems, like finding ways to crack hard encryption via shortcuts that work half the time.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science.
And the occasional game of Doom III... at a frame rate of 24 fps (if you're lucky).Being the Department of Energy I though they would have used AMD chips so they could use the excess heat to drive a power plant.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The headline for the Slashdot article is a bit misleading. It's the fastest non-military supercomputer in the US; it's the fastest Linux-based supercomputer in the world (at least, it's supposed to be). It's not the fastest supercomputer in the US, though.
Did HP buy licenses for this setup? Could this be why SCO says HP is in the 'clear'?
wbs.
Huh?
Imagine the royalties SCO will be demanding here . . .
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Now, let's see if we can /. the world's fastest linux powered unclassified computer.
Got URL?
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
RC5-1024 here we come!
Call me back in about 200 years.
Most likely the #1 Unfunny Meta/Moderator on
... is to run Linux on it.
"It's solving complex problems and moving 11.8 terraflops, but the real interesting bit is that it's running Linux!"
http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/mscf
:)
a more direct link to info about the facility. EMSL is a scientific user facility, designed to be a collaboration point and resource for environmental and molecular sciences (Environmental and Molecular Sciences Laboratory).
You can read about what the computer will be used for, what stuff is inside it, even see the job status. It's pretty neat stuff. The folks over there should be quite proud of what they've done. Yes, I work at PNNL
It is a demon of a machine. It's huge. It's very fast. I hope some good life/world saving chemistry comes out of it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I will personally bludgeon to death anyone who posts a "Beuwulf cluster" joke to this story. Let's just get that out of the way...
But according to Apple the G5 is 10% quicker under their latest benchmark tests.
I wonder what kind of FPS they get in TuxRacer...
Well first, your site has that spark of a "I'm a Tesla Alien Abduction Genius Who Will Solve Everythin gWith Cold-Fusion" genius. That frankly make me seriously consider whether I should even click on the next link.
Then you have (DONATE HERE) banners that (NO HERE) make your site really (GIMMEE) hard to read. The more massive projects dont beg like that. If you cant/wont support it, that's what the GPL was for.
And lastly, the style presented reminds me of the magazine, OMNI. There's that feel of spoofery/hokey kind of "I'm code-God" that just makes me want to click that nice xkill on that window.
It may be a good project, but the presentation really sucks. Even the basic Black text on white with simple images looks cleaner/better than that.
machines paid for with public funds do not count as anything of note... ever.
too much politics and not enough "bottom line"
instead i prefer to study all the machines listed in www.top500.org
and then i discount all the sites running clusters paid for using taxpayer dollars
www.top500.org is a fascinating list.
Hehe, I guess that's what seti@home's *really* doing.
I'm joking, I think.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
... welcome our new 11.8 TFLOP overlord.
Hello, HAL.
Error 666 - Satanic SCO code found in your Linux kernel.
We all know it is a superior system. And with $1.5M in licensing fees they will collect for this particular installation, they will develop it even further.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
that 10,000 Opteron Cray supercomputer comes online...although I guess that system may not be unclassified.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I'm not EVEN going to look at it until YOU put in more exclamation points!!!!!!!!! and BOLD TEXT!!!!!!!!
The RADICAL NAVIGATION BAR is absolutely AMAZING!!!!!!!!! That kind of NATURAL CAMOUFLAGE of VITAL NAVIGATION ELEMENTS is a SUPER-COOL way to design GROOVY WEB SITES!!!!!!!!!
First, how many reboots would it take to install any MS OS?
Second, does MS even RUN on something like that (i.e., is it even POSSIBLE to utilize the processors)?
And, finally, how long would it take for it to be infested with SoBig?
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
About a project whose webpage is nearly free of content aside from a plea for donations, whose most significant announcement is "02/17/2003: GridShell website created!!!", and whose demo seems to be hung? Beats me, that sounds like the crap they usually post
You should go easy on the bold, capitals and exclamation marks. They make you sound amusing like a viagra spammer. (Or was that your intention?)
But aside from that, what's "True Artificial Intelligence"? Something that can pass a strong Turing test? Now that would be news.
Here's a clue for free: why not put on your home page a description of the project that is not just a string of buzzwords?
In the dim times there was one company called Cray that built big, expensive custom designed vector supercomputers. It took forever to build one so Cray could always insure they were profitable because they always new how many orders they had well in advance and could staff and spend appropriately and they were pretty much the only game in town.
One day SGI got tired of doing just fluffy graphics and built the MIPS R8000 which was probably the first really successful CMOS supercomputer on a chip. They completely carved up Cray from the low end up and eventually pushed them into a merger from hell that nearly destroyed both companies.
Around this time the Department of Energy had to give up setting off nuclear bombs to see if they actually worked and got in the business of funding these massive supercomputers mostly to simulate bombs and then some other stuff too. Unfortunately the DOE changed companies and architecture with each new contract. They managed to suck SGI, Intel, IBM, Cray, HP and countless others in to this prestige contest and I doubt its been particularly good for any of them. You see these are one off systems, that require a massive very custom engineering effort and the R&D effort seldom pays off. Its just not a good way to do business spending massive engineering effort when your usually lucky to sell one system. If you get a second one you usually have to start from scratch and do it all over again.
They are great for prestige and maybe some of the R&D effort does translate into the companies product line but, IMHO, I think a smart, well managed computing company wouldn't touch these with a ten foot pole. Microsoft sure doesn't seem interested in pouring any effort in to trying to land one of these contracts.
If the U.S. government had a clue they would find a way back to pouring all their money in to Cray to develop the specialized vector processors and find a new little Cray Jr. company to specialize in building the giant Linux clusters and encourage companies like IBM and HP to get out of this massive distraction from their core business.
Shouldn't that be "Earth emulator", since as we all know, the Earth is itself a very powerful supercomputer built to find the Question that fits the Answer to the meaning of Life the Universe and Everything (42)...?
This seems to be something you run via a CGI server, so multiple copies of itself interact via that route. I think.
Check out EULA.txt in the sources:
SCO (software licensing company)
AOL/Time Warner (media conglomerate)
Disney (media conglomerate)
McDonalds (fast food chain)
Taco Bell (fast food chain)
Bayer (pharmaceutical production company)
DuPont (plastics production company)
Anheuser/Busch (alcohol production company)
De Beers (diamond trading company)
Dell (computer production company)
Intel (microprocessor production company)
Exxon/Mobil (petroleum trading company)
Texaco/Chevron (petroleum trading company)
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
ABSOLUTELY ANY Local, State, Federal, or International LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY
ABSOLUTELY ANY Local, State, Federal, or International INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
ABSOLUTELY ANY Local, State, Federal, or International MILITARY FORCE
ABSOLUTELY ANY Bank, Credit Union, Insurance Agency, or other primarily finance-related institution
ABSOLUTELY ANY Illuminist, Non-Human, Facist, or Evil organized institution
GridShell v0.97, feauturing MORE INTELLIGENCE
McBride: We have learned that your government secret agency is using Linux IP in violation of our intellectual property rights.
Secret Government Agency: We have learned that SCO owes billions of dollars in back taxes, and that you have an affinity for barnyard animals.
McBride: But I havn't been on a farm in 40 years!
Secret Government Agency: That's not what these pictures generated by our new Linux supercompter say.
paintball
Everyone is picking up on the fact that this supercomputer runs Linux, but no one seems to have commented on the fact that it uses Itanium2 processors.
Now I wouldn't consider that point newsworthy, were it not for the constant FUD levelled against the Itanium.
The reason for the FUD is obvious -- it's because the Itanium-ready version of Windows is still mostly 32-bit code, which means that Windows' performance sucks on an Itanium CPU. Linux, on the other hand, gets the full 64-bit boost, with more to follow as the compilers are improved. Thus, Microsoft is afraid that, if the Itanium becomes popular, lots of people will see Linux performing much better than Windows.
That's also why Microsoft-friendly journalists and posters have been working so hard to promote AMD's Opteron. It's nothing against AMD, of course, but AMD compromised, and catered to Microsoft's failings, by dedicating part of the Opteron's real estate to native 32-bit support. As a result, Windows performance doesn't suck quite as much on AMD's 32/64-bit Opteron, as it does on Intel's fully-64-bit Itanium.
This supercomputer should put an end to the "Itanium is slow" and "Itanium is going nowhere" FUD. But I emphasized "should" because it probably won't -- FUD writers have never cared about facts.
and Linux is also running on the slowest computer in the US: my old 486 with 4 megs of RAM.
ha ha
http://cassettefetish.com
Its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science.
IOW, studies in dealing with the power consumption of 2000 Itanium processors.
it says here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/32523.htm l - couldn't see anything in the posted article on this) that they achieved this speed by upgrading from 1ghz to 1.5ghz itanium's. What did they do with all those old CPUs? and who paid for the upgrade PNNL or HP? Those things aren't cheap, they cost $800+ each.
I wonder how much more powerful it could of been if they designed it with Opteron processors or had waited until next summer when the release of XDDR Ram that runs in the 3ghz range would of been out.
Keep in mind as main memory speeds catch up with processor speeds and can easily run in 128 & 256 bit configurations that the signifigance of chip cache will become less and less. If the memory standards commttee's can keep memory speeds in line wiht processors then we can see some great advances in supercomputing. Along with cheaper processors due to the lack of onboard cache's since the processors would be able to use the main memory for such purposes.
Only stopgap into truely fast computing is the hard drive and that is quickly coming into it's solid state future as well.
I would guess at 2006 for 10ghz PC's with the only moving parts left being the dvd player and cooling systems which at that time will probably have to be more advanced than even liquid unless we make thsoe processors run at that speed with todays power outputs.
As these things get faster, we'll need a better benchmark. A TERAFLOP??? Come on - can anyone really put into words what this can actually do?
:)
How about running SETI on it for a day (or an hour) and seeing how many units it can crank out? Then we would finally have something comparable to our own lives that we can comprehend.
I doubt that many people know how many M/G/Tflops their own computer is, but many more probably know how long it takes to run a SETI unit.
As a side note, I'm working on a project for my employer to put in a PETAbyte size storage solution. Now I know a petabyte is a million gigabytes, but it's much easier to think of it as seven years of medical images for each of the 30 hospitals we have.
-Mark