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IBM's Blue Gene powered by Linux
bigjnsa500 writes "Linux will be the main operating system for IBM's upcoming family of 'Blue Gene' supercomputers--a major endorsement for the operating system and the open-source computing model it represents. Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. Due in 2004 or 2005, the system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations." Blue Gene has been announced for some time, but it's cool to see how it's shaping up.
Why are computers still being used for simulating nuclear weapons tests?
Are they trying to pack more megatons of destructive force into each warhead? Don't the major world governments have enough quantity to preclude the need for more powerful units?
Or are the tests run to design "safer" and/or more localized implementations? (Awww, looks like Big Brother has a soft spot after all...)
Heh, while I realize that innovation has always been important for IBM and making money, it seems like they're trying too much to innovate and not enough to capture market share. It's like they're coming out with all these great inventions but they're pursuing pure science and not having a profit-making strategy.
Of course I realize that I'm probably wrong in some way but this is just how it seems to me.
And Nobel discovered that dynamite could be used to kill people as easily as it could be used in mining or construction. What's new?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
As opposed to if he charged for it, in which he would have just made blood money, and implicitly accepted the use of the technology. In this case, he/she can't say that s/he endorses the use, because they released the technology from their hands. To be sure, it is still disturbing, but not in the same way...
#define DRM chmod 000
When did Blue Gene change to a nuclear simulation computer? Last I heard it was for protien folding and DNA research, which is why it's called Blue GENE. This way it's like the Utah Jazz.
-B
*bzzt*, sorry, wrong answer
0/CPU * 65000 = $0
(Remember, SCO is, well, not going to win)
Uh, IBM makes the G5, or rather, the PPC970. I think they of all people would know whether or not the processor is suitable for the task at hand. Don't you agree?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
When we get a supercomputer like this and the end of the article isn't "Some company will use this to find newer more efficient ways of killing people" but instead "Some university will use this to find ways of improving society at large."
I'm dreaming. I know.
fifth sigma, inc.
You say:
What was the claim? The only bogus claims I heard regarding the Terascale (G5 cluster) were:
Then a New York Times report using old data reported 7.1 teraflops Rmax--enough to put it at #3 on the old list and #4 on the new--NYT forgot to mention that there have since been three new clusters that made the top 10, one of which slightly edged out the Terascale.
Of course, by the time that was reported, the figure was revised to 8.3 Tflops and now, officially reported (both on the current Top500 and by the head of Terascale) as 9.555 Tflops (60% efficiency) with the stipulation they could probably get 10% more. A pretty umapproachable #3 spot in the Fall500 and the first sub-$100 million dollar system to break the 10 teraflop mark.
Go look at the current benchmarks, where are the Pentium clusters that are above it? Where are the Itanium clusters above it? Where are the Athlon clusters above it? Oh, I'm sure there will be some (probably in the Spring2004 500), but where are they all right now? How much do the current ones on the list cost (answer: no less than $30 million). Sounds to me the wishful-thinking, poor-reporting Wired and the Mac zealots were closer to the truth than FUD-meisters and the anti-Mac zealots.
The most efficient top 10 supercomputer right now is also the most powerful: The NEC EarthSimulator at about 80%. I'd imagine we should expect a 60-80% efficiency from the big budget Blue Gene/L. And in my book there is nothing wrong with the current 60% efficency of Terascale--anyway it probably says a lot more about how good Infiniband is than it does about how good the Mac is.
But the writing is on the wall. There is nothing special about the the 970 (G5), Virginia Tech could have done the same thing with an Opteron or Itanium2--it would have taken more processors and cost twice as much: ~$10 million best offer for the systems as opposed to $5.7 million list price paid for the Macs (subtracting $1.5 million for the Infiniband cards, routers, and cabling).
The take home point is not that they did it with Macs or Mac OS X instead of (your favorite CPU) and Linux. The take home point is: these guys built a top 10 supercomputer in a fraction of the time (months as opposed to years) at a fraction of the cost (<$10 million as opposed to >$100 million).
Yes, like the Crays of the old days (and today) there will always be those who need something like Blue Gene/L and IBM is happy to supply them. But a whole new generation of supercomputers will be built on-demand and out of commodity PC hardware and a good set of software running on an OS that doesn't charge for all the CALs. Right now the 970 is easily the best performer for LinPak. So much so, they can pay educational list price which included such worthless features as an Apple-tooled case, overpriced RAM, gigabit cards, and Radeon graphics cards, firewire, usb2.0, digital audio, iTunes and other iApps, and a OpenGL based desktop. Since the 970 is made by IBM, I'd hazard a guess that IBM would be happy to supply these people too. Whether they choose to run Linux, MacOS X, or something else.
Wrong.
:P
My Aunt and Uncle have been working for IBM since the "glory days" of computing, and through that I realized that IBM has a solid foot in the door. They provide servers/computers for hundreds of companies around the world, with the biggest being probably half or more of the current blue-chip corporations.
We're not in the dot-com era anymore, bud.
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
Somewhere, there's an open source developer who's just realized that his work is being used to the development of nuclear weapons. All jokes about derivative works aside, I think it's a good time to consider the implications of this.
Somewhere else, there's an open source developer who's just realized that his work is being used to power machines for Doctors without Borders, the Red Cross, a number of innercity churches and rec centers, and hospitals.
Yet somewhere else, there are soldiers testing out new battlefield computers that run open source, and those machines are more stable, which means more safe, which means one more son doesn't come home in a body bag.
Honestly, does that sand around your head taste good?
davejenkins.com |
It's a waste/misuse of computing power to simulate nuclear weapon experiment.
The atomic bomb was developed by the United States in the Manhattan Project in the forties. At first it was thought that Nazi Germany possessed the atomic bomb but it became clear that this was not so and when Nazi Germany was clearly on the point of defeat Japan became the only target under consideration.
The reason given by the US for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was that this was necessary in order to defeat Japan without a seaborne invasion of the Japanese main islands. This, the Americans said, would have met fierce resistance and would have cost many American as well as Japanese lives. The justification was that by dropping the atomic bomb on a Japanese city many more lives were saved than would have been lost in an invasion. This seems to me to be the ultimate in utilitarian arguments. Was it justified? Neo dies after Smith takes him over, and his clones explode. Trinity is impaled in a crash-landing on the way to the Machine City. The Matrix continues to exist. Were there alternatives? The obvious ones of either dropping the bomb on a uninhabited place and/or giving prior warning were rejected on the grounds that only by dropping the bomb on a city would the Japanese government be convinced of its power.
In so far as the saving of American lives is concerned to the best of my knowledge the rules of war do not allow the taking of civilian lives in order to save casualties amongst one's own military forces. I would therefore say that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was not justified by the saving of American and Japanese lives argument even if that argument were an honest one. There is now a lot of evidence that it was not. The American government knew of the desperate plight of the Japanese. Confined to their home islands by the overwhelming sea and air power of the American and Allied forces, starving and without their own supplies of fuel the collapse of Japan was in any case imminent.
There is much evidence that the real reason for the dropping of the atomic bombs was the desire to ensure the defeat of Japan before the Russians could enter the war in the Far East in strength and thus have a say in the post-war settlement. From this point of view the atomic bombings could be said to be the first act of the Cold War.
I have not seen any moral justification for the dropping of a second bomb on Nagasaki even after the effects of the first bomb had been amply demonstrated at Hiroshima. The desire to test a plutonium bomb (the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium device) may have been the motivation.
Well, there are 65536 digits spanned in 16 bits. Monitor 0 would be the first physical monitor, 65535 would be the 65536th monitor.
Who taught you to program?
So, where's the 0th monitor fit in here? Or, did you start at 1?
It's a blithe assumption by people that we start counting at 1. Ever wonder why it takes two digits to render just the first 10 counting in base 10, but only one digit to max out when counting in base binary?
If you count in base 2, you start at 0, as in
0, 1
not
1, 10.
It should then follow that
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
really should be
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
10 should start the next sequence since now we're an order of 10 higher than where we started, and we're using the extra place (the "1") to demonstrate this.
This is all standard number theory. The question is, where should we truly begin? For historical reasons, we start at 1, but for mathematical reasons, we really should start at 0.
Starting at 0, we'd have 65,535 monitors, which is the maximum value rendered by 16 places in base 2.
Who taught you to count?
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Ok, assume I have a 128 bit key. How long to crack with a supercomputer this size? Anybody have a reference to mips->cracking time for something like this?
Just a thought...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Here's a nice calculation for you.
What is 2 to the power of 16? 2^16. Try all kinds of calculators.
How many times would you multiply 2 with itself to end up with an odd number (which 65,535 is)? It is fairly difficult to end up with an odd number when doing 2^y where y is an integer > 0.
Now, 2^15 + 2^14 + 2^13
I'm guessing the guy who taught the parent poster to count actually knew what he was doing
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
True, free knowledge can be used for evil or for good. For instance, a developer could place his open source work under a licence that specifically forbids specific uses (and this is something I did when I was younger, more idealistic, and less realistic). My early OSS works were not GPLd, but used a BSD-style license with certain conditions.
The problem with this is that you cannot simultaneously restrict and promote knowledge. As another poster has commented, everything we do as a society is interlinked: your taxes pay for guns and bullets as much as they do for medicine and books.
If a technology is truly free, it has no prejudices about who uses it. The GPL adds a second layer of freedom: it protects technology from being stolen and locked up again.
The OS developer who contributes to software used in the development of nuclear weapons will find one day that the nuclear weapons establishment has also contributed to the same software.
What I'm trying to say (and I worked all night on a stupid report, so my IQ is around 36 now), is that OSS is about the freedom of knowledge, and this flows in all directions: as much from the developer to the user as vice versa.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If they're going to put so much money and so much effort into this, why do they have to research nuclear weapons? Surely we have enough weapons for everyone now. For fuck's sake. There's enough to wipe out all life on the planet hundreds of thousands of times over.
Why not research into harnessing different kinds of energy. Or search for a cure for cancer. Or look for fucking aliens.
But please. Not more fucking weapons. There are enough.
IBM expects the Unix offshoot to be more popular than its own version of Unix, called AIX
The truth is that AIX isn't entirely IBM's property, and Linux is not Unix. I guess SCO has an operative inside of zdnet.
Funny how Apple makes supercomputers with IBM's chips while IBM makes supercomputers with AMD's chips. Sun is starting to us x86 and Sparc64 chips despite its own UltraSparc line. HP dropped the Saturn chip for ARM. Can anyone afford their own chips these days?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.