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World's Fastest Supercomputer To Be Built At ORNL
Homey R writes "As I'll be joining the staff there in a few months, I'm very excited to see that Oak Ridge National Lab has won a competition within the DOE's Office of Science to build the world's fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It will be based on the promising Cray X1 vector architecture. Unlike many of the other DOE machines that have at some point occupied #1 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, this machine will be dedicated exclusively to non-classified scientific research (i.e., not bombs)."
Cowards Anonymous adds that the system "will be funded over two years by federal grants totaling $50 million. The project involves private companies like Cray, IBM, and SGI, and when complete it will be capable of sustaining 50 trillion calculations per second."
As usual, there should be a qualifier as to what is meant by fastest. According to their definition they are, but not according to NEC's, for example.
The article mentions that the new supercomputer will be used for non-classified projects. Does anyone have more exact details of what these projects may involve? Will it be a specific application, or more of a 'gun for hire' computing facility, with CPU cycles open to all comers for their own projects? It would be interesting to know what types of applications are planned for the supercomputer, as it may be possible to translate a raw measure of speed like the quoted '50 trillion calculations per second' into something more meaningful, like 'DNA base pairs compared per second', or 'weather cells simulated per hour'. Are there any specialists in these kinds of HPC applications who would like to comment? How fast do people think this supercomputer would run apt-get for instance? Would 50 trillion calculations per second equate to 50 trillion package installs per second? How long would it take to install all of Debian on this thing? Could the performance of the system actually be measured in Debian installs per second? I look forward to the community's response!
I disagree. There is a huge difference. Bolting a load of boxes together with ethernet and all the associated overheads can never be as efficient as dedicated hardware for connecting, and sharing the processing load.
Obviously there is a lot more that could affect the performance, such as how memory is implemented. In general though, the system will perform best when each processor is performing calculations, rather than looking after ehernet connections.
There are still a few computing problems that can't be efficiently split into a large number of subproblems that can be executed in parallel. For those cases, a cluster of small machines won't help.
I think ORNL and PSC know a lot more about supercomputing than you (or Internet rag pundits) do. As others have noted, there are real reasons for Big Iron.
Clusters are great for certain problems but for heavy computation -- think simulating two galaxies colliding or earthquake modeling -- off the shelf clusters don't cut it.
They're not wasting tax-payer money unless you consider basic researcher a waste.