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The Amazing Shrinking Supercomputer
mE123 writes "It would seem that IBM is trying to change what we all think of as super computers. Their new Blue Gene family of super computers is meant to be 6 times faster, consume 1/15 of the power and be 1/10 the size of current models. The prototype is already number 73 (with 2 teraflops) on the list of the most powerful super computers and it's only "roughly the size of a 30-inch television". They are hoping to be able to make it up to 360 Teraflops using only 64 racks." We covered this a bit earlier, but without the level of details.
Why do we need to have small, power-efficient supercomputers? Isn't the main goal of the supercomputer to be fast as hell? Granted, if this can be achieved while simultaneously minimizing power and size then by all means go for it. However, as stated by my parent, what sacrafices are being made?
That aside, I would happily take a computer the size of a 30" TV if it was SUPER!
If you could make something top 100 for 30-60k, it wouldnt be top 100 for long. Because then other people would pay 200k for something twice as fast.
:) Then maybe you wouldnt be so small anymore. Maybe you are choosing the price AND quantity you are selling...
You can either choose price, or speed, but not both. So do you want something for 30-60k? Or do you want something top 100?
Your small business should take some economics
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Very few businesses/institutions can afford, nor need an Earth Simulator. Big power hungry supercomputers need specialised buildings with sufficient power supply and heat dissipation capabilities. By creating a small, power efficient supercomputer which can simply be plugged in in the server room, they open up an entirely new market.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Their new Blue Gene family of super computers is meant to be 6 times faster, consume 1/15 of the power and be 1/10 the size of current models
If it's 1/10 the size and 1/15 the power and it's still faster, then we can stick 15 of them in a room, get the same power consumption, and have a larger "much faster" computer that you're looking for. This seems like a win-win direction to go in, for IBM.
~Berj
You need small power-efficient supercomputers so that you don't need a dedicated 100MW coal-fired power plant next door for each 10 teraflop building.
Imagine the cooling system necessary for a building which dissipates the energy normally used by a small city!
This is why bluegene is cool; they realize that at the high end, power is going to become the limiting factor, and they designed their architecture accordingly.
Bobby
Plus, once you have a powerful, (relatively) energy efficient computer in a smaller package, you can use them as building blocks to scale a larger installation.
Modular installation = better able to match requirements without having to build entire system from scratch = more cost effective solution for some (most?) customers.
I think the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" joke may actually pretty close to the point!
=Smidge=
Cause then it won't need such a sophisticated cooling system. Cooling systems are expensive, you know. There's no reason to waste power if you can help it
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
At the speeds these things operate, the time it takes for any signal to propagate is important - hence smaller is faster.
I'm not a big fan of super computers. I mean, it's kind of cool, but to me, it's just throwing a whole bunch of computers at the problem, more or less.
That being the case, why aren't distributed apps considered as part of the Super Computer list? I mean, SETI@Home has got to be far and away, #1 in terms of computing power. Granted, it's not in 1 integrated piece of hardware, and Berkeley doesn't own all the hardware, but I still think these things ought to be considered, at least to make it more realistic about who actually has the most computing power.
Just my little rant.
was already having to figure the propagation delay of signals (traveling at near the speed of light) into their large multirack systems. I can only imagine one of things driving the desire for smaller supercomputers is to speed up the clock by reducing the delay across the physical size of the box.
--Rob
It seems that making computers small and efficient makes them fast as hell. Small = less distance for signals to travel = shorter times to wait for the signals to travel, and efficient = less heat given off = higher possile clock speeds.
Eat at Joe's.
True; another poster has noted that power is relative. I love the setup I have now, and I'm amazed that I got anything done in 1983.
C|N>K
If supercomputers were ubiquitous, more uses would be found. So I don't see how "need" comes into the picture. Now who can afford one? That is a good question. If they were affordable you'd see needs popping up all over.
Lasers Controlled Games!
> The Big Mac G5 cluster in VA, for example, required custom cooling systems because conventional aircon units simply couldn't handle the load.
Have you never been in a server room. Almost every server room in existence has "custom cooling" no matter if it's Intel, SUN, SGI or IBM. This is NOT new.
I think it's hilarious that we still talk in terms of computers taking up a mere half a tennis court. Once upon a time, computers took up an entire room - and they still do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"I think we should be developing and improving this kind of solution FOR EVERYONE, and not spending millions to develope something that just a few ones will have."
What's this "we", white man? Are you a supercomputer developer? Because, I mean, if Seymour Cray rose from the grave, got a slashdot account, and wrote your post, I would believe that you have a point. But he didn't, so you don't.
"Supercomputers", a set which today includes the supercluster computers along with traditional supers (like Cray's stuff), generally stay in service for a hell of a lot longer than your average desktop PC. There's iron in military labs and DOD facilities left over from spending bills that Reagan signed, still doing useful computing work today. The fact that it's not the FASTEST and BESTEST machine in existence doesn't mean that it's not still useful.
You forget that a computer becoming obsolete doesn't mean that the computer gets any slower. A super is at least as fast on the day it's decommissioned as the day it was first booted.
The fact that the price has dropped somewhat is irrelevant. Today, I can buy a desktop PC for $2500 with the computing power of a DEC mini that cost $10 million in 1982 (~). But in 1982, that amount of computing power was WORTH $10 million (again, ~), because computing power was so scarce. Or are you saying that they should've waited until the price came down before buying? Because if they did, they would never be able to buy, because prices are always coming down.
If I have a computing need that can only be addressed by a super, and I have the money (or I can get the money) and believe that the computer is worth it, who are you to say shit? You don't have supercomputer-level needs--you have DESKTOP level needs. So go buy a desktop, overclock it, and live with the fact that you can't afford the fastest computers known to man.
Get real. The reason for only having 64MB is that's the size of memory that fits on a single chip. It only has to do with the space requirement. There are supercomputing apps that would make use of larger parcels of memory if they were available. Secondly, this machine only got two teraflops on the Linpack benchmark, which doesn't test memory performance much at all. Who knows how this performs on real memory hog industry apps? This supercomputer, like most, has a limited market and purpose that it's appropriate for.
Ask yourself: why do you need a supercomputer?
Answer: To do a very sophisticated simulation that would be too difficult or costly to conduct in real life.
But if the supercomputer is so expensive to purchase and maintain, it might be easier and cheaper to use CAD and rapid prototyping to make a few doo-dads and knock them into each other for real, as an example.
So if the supercomputers can't scale with the rest of computing or manufacturing, then no one will buy them (no one who doesn't want to get fired for being thickheaded, at least)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
While progress in making supercomputers more efficient in terms of power usage and space, the widespread adoption of supercomputers is still really hampered by functionality. The majority of supercomputers are used for modeling, simulations, or code breaking. This limits their usage to academic and government institutions. These break through only help those kinds of institutions afford a super computer. I would think that most businesses have little use for that kind of raw computing power. Their computing bottlenecks are more related to transactions per time as opposed to calculations per time.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Probably lots of people submitted that article. Slashdot editors, not being complete idiots, had the same reaction as a lot of the posters here, to paraphrase: "Shock! IBM makes smaller, faster, clusterable computer!" So they featured this in a group article on the 14th about a bunch of similar articles.
Later on after about 20 more people submitted it, they gave in and posted it directly. They generally attribute the person who causes them to post it, rather than a group.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Why do we need to have small, power-efficient supercomputers?
It brings them into reach of small engineering firms and university engineering, science, and math departments.
Imagine if supercomputing goes the way of the PC: affordable and ubiquitous to those who want them. It is arguable that today's gigaflops CPUs are already supercomputers, but I guess people are always striving for more.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin