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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.
Should the priority be making faster supercomputers (but large) or smaller supercomputers (but the same speed)? This one seems to be a step in both directions, but I wonder if they're sacrificing speed for size (or vice-versa).
My mom wouldn't let me have one because they take up so much space!
Clif
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So, how long will it be before these become commoditised for sme's ?
...
:-)
Something that fits into the space of a 30" TV set (how about dimensions, guys ?) is presumably about half to 1/3 a standard rack in a co-lo. 2 Teraflops of processing power ought to be able to comfortably shift the bottleneck to the bandwidth, even for database-orientated sites
I think people's cost expectations are going to be significantly impacted by the size of this - if it's small, it must be cheap, right ? (wrong, but try telling them...)
Fantastic acheivement, btw, kudos to the man in blue
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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]
Take your standard technology curve (aka Moore's Law), take any specification/cost point, then move ahead an arbitrary point in time and wonders of wonders, it costs less and is smaller and does more.
Yes, one day supercomputers will fit into your wristwatch! What's more, they already do! If you use an ancient measure from, say, 50 years ago.
It's very disappointing to see technology always reduced to whizz-bang figures that are in fact meaningless. What about the impact on our society? What about the capability for good and for bad? What do "good" and "bad" mean, anyhow? How do I know I even exist? What does "I" even mean?
Now, that kind of stuff is worth discussing.
OK, go ahead and mod me as a troll now, if you can't think of an intelligent answer.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
In other news, the price of petrol increases.
I work on the project.
We're packing 1024 compute nodes (each node having two CPU cores) into a rack. The nodes are small and based on the PowerPC 440, with beefed up floating point. It has to be air cooled - water is a PITA.
The finished machine will still be quite large - 64 racks with miles of cables. And that doesn't count disk drives. There isn't a single disk drive on the thing - the customer provides the filesystem, which will also be another beefy set of machines. It requires a new building.
The machine featured in the article is just half a rack. It is still respectable, coming in at #73 on top500.org. Might be quite useful for business and small scale scientific in it's current form. (This is far more than my alma matter had access too.)
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?
The increase in speed is related to the reduction in size.
For a moment, let's pretend that electricity within a wire travels at the speed of light.
Now, let's pretend that we wish to carry pulses of electricity from one end of the computer to the other at a very high speed.
At some point, the distance the signal has to travel will become significant to the speed of the computer.
This is already happening in PCs. If you take a close look at the motherboard in your computer, chances are you'll see weird places where the traces just zig-zag back and forth (notice the angles on them, that's not by accident either, but I'm not going to try to explain a fourth-year university course in microwave and RF design here). These zig-zags add length to the traces so that they have the same length as other traces within the same bus, and all the signals on that bus arrive at the same time. Think of them as being "equal length headers", if you're into the throb of a big-block V8.
Length of interconnecting wires is non-trivial at this point. Stray capacitance and inductance caused by any conductor are non-trivial at this point. As a result, a terrific limiting factor to the speed of a computer is now its size.
Power consumption is also related. Modern ICs are made of millions of MOSFET transistors which behave as switches. These switches are not perfect: during the transition between a logic high and a logic low, the transistors spend time in the linear state where they are resistive. As a result, they waste energy as heat.
Stray capacitance and inductance - even within the junctions of the transistors themselves - slow their ability to switch instantaneously. As a result, they must be made as small as possible to reduce capacitance (C) and inductance (L).
This also explains why newer generations of a processor can run faster than their predecessors: smaller and smaller features on the IC mean less stray C and L, which means that the transistors can switch states faster, which means that they spend less time in the linear state and therefore heat up less. This means less energy wasted as heat.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.