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IBM Sets Supercomputer Speed Record
T.Hobbes writes "IBM's BlueGene/L has set a new speed record at 36.01 TFlops, beating the Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFlops, according to internal IBM testing. 'This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator,' said Dave Turek, I.B.M.'s vice president for the high-performance computing division. The AP story is here; the NY Times' story is here."
I wish I knew what a Tecord was...
/. shoud be using automatic text-box spell checking found in KDE...
Maybe
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Is that how they measure Records in Teraflops?
Someone call Huinness' Nook pf Eorld Tecords!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
I'm sorry, but those Supercomputers have nothing on my machine running Windows. It has a record of AlwaysFlops.
I'd say rypo.
It might be fast, but could it keep up with monitoring all the errors and dupes on /.? ;P
A new tecord?!? That's timpossible! But more seriously, does anyone know if there's an impartial 3rd party that ever confirms these measurements? I'm all for improving technology, but how do they verify their "tecords"?
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
Hete's the full text in case of a massive slashdotting of theit setvets:
IBM says Blue Gene bteaks speed tecotd
9/29/2004, 7:27 a.m. ET
By ELLEN SIMON
The Associated Ptess
NEW YOtK (AP) - IBM Cotp. claimed unofficial btagging tights Tuesday as ownet of the wotld's fastest supetcomputet.
Fot thtee yeats tunning, the fastest supetcomputet has been NEC's Eatth Simulatot in Japan.
"The fact that non-U.S. vendot like NEC had the fastest computet was seen as a big challenge fot U.S. computet industty," said Hotst Simon, ditectot of the supetcomputing centet at Lawtence Betkeley National Lab in Califotnia.
"That an Ametican vendot and an Ametican application has won back the No. 1 spot -- that's the main significance of this."
Eatth Simulatot can sustain speeds of 35.86 tetaflops.
IBM said its still-unfinished BlueGene/L System, named fot its ability to model the folding of human ptoteins, can sustain speeds of 36 tetaflops. A tetaflop is 1 ttillion calculations pet second.
Lawtence Livetmote National Labotatoty plans to install the Blue Gene/L system next yeat with 130,000 ptocessots and 64 tacks, half a tennis coutt in size. The labs will use it fot modeling the behaviot and aging of high explosives, asttophysics, cosmology and basic science, lab spokesman Bob Hitschfeld said.
The ptototype fot which IBM claimed the speed tecotd is located in tochestet, Minn., has 16,250 ptocessots and takes up eight tacks of space.
While IBM's speed sets a new benchmatk, the official list of the wotld's fastest supetcomputets will not be teleased until Novembet. A handful of scientists who audit the computets' tepotted speeds publish them on Top500.otg.
Supetcomputing is significant because of its implications fot national secutity as well as such fields as global climate modeling, asttophysics and genetic teseatch.
Supetcomputing technology IBM inttoduced a decade ago has evolved into a $3 billion to $4 billion business fot the company, said Simon.
Unlike the mote specialized atchitectute of the Japanese supetcomputet, IBM's BlueGene/L uses a detivative of commetcially available off-the-shelf ptocessots. It also uses an unusually latge numbet of them.
The tesulting computet is smallet and coolet than othet supetcomputets, teducing its tunning costs, said Hitschfeld. He did not have a dollat figute fot how much lowet Blue Gene's costs will be than othet supetcomputets.
Howevet, othet supetcomputets can do things Blue Gene cannot, such as ptoduce 3-D simulations of nucleat explosions, Hitschfeld said.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Place your bets, people!
What percentage of posts in the first 15 minutes will be about the spelling of the last word in the title, and what percentage about the content?
G
"I want to play chess against that one" - Kasparov
Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another? - Bertold Brecht
...what operating system it uses. Anybody know?
I wonder if that is sustained ?? ...
I know that when the Mac G5 Cluster was developed they claimed tremendous speed, but when the sustained rate was calculated, it turned out to be much lower
98% of posts will be 0.4 standard deviations away from one of the following:
... 4. PROFIT!!!
0. "fist pr0st!!!!!111~"
1. "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"
2. "But does it run Linux?"
3. "In Soviet Russia, SPEED RECORD SETS YUO!"
4. "1. Earth Simulator: 38.56 TFlops. 2. BlueGene/L36.01 TFlops. 3.
5. "I for one, welcome our supercomputer overlords."
6. "Do either of the supercomputers run BSD? BSD is dying."
7. "I didn't have enough time to read the article, but..."
From TFA:
the Blue Gene/L system next year with 130,000 processors and 64 racks, half a tennis court in size.
The prototype for which IBM claimed the speed record is located in Rochester, Minn., has 16,250 processors and takes up eight racks of space.
So does this mean the finished product, with almost 10x as many procs will be much faster still? Or am I reading this wrong?
Unlike the more specialized architecture of the Japanese supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L uses a derivative of commercially available off-the-shelf processors. It also uses an unusually large number of them. The resulting computer is smaller and cooler than other supercomputers, reducing its running costs, said Hirschfeld. He did not have a dollar figure for how much lower Blue Gene's costs will be than other supercomputers.
This is the most interesting part of the article to me. Makers of supercomputers are going to go back and forth for the speed record. However, holding the speed record with off the shelf components seems like a separate achievement in and of itself. The article did mention, however, that the IBM system is not as capable as other supercomputers.
http://www.busyweather.com/
From the NYTime article:
"The new system is notable because it packs its computing power much more densely than other large-scale computing systems. BlueGene/L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, the company said."
1/100th the size and 1/28th the power. Now if that isn't a beautiful thing, I don't know what is.
For a great deal of detail about this system surf over to this pdf
http://www.busyweather.com/
From the Washington Post article:
"IBM's new system nudges past a nearly three-year-old computer speed record of 35.86 "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second, with a working speed of 36.01 teraflops....The current record-holder, known as the Earth Simulator, is a supercomputer in Yokohama, Japan, designed to simulate earthquakes."
Won't it be great when IBM announces that they built Blue Gene to simulate Japanese earthquakes? Neener neener.
Always a godfather; never a god. -Gore Vidal
I've heard that the neural network of human brain has calculation speed of 4.4 TFLOPS. How soon these machines will start to THINK? Seems like what we need now is just more storage capacity and some well-written "thinking" software...
I'll be very interested in seeing how well this thing performs on benchmarks other than linpack.
Blue Gene is a very interesting design in so much as it uses IBM's 32-bit powerpc cores, normally used for embeded applications. They put 2 cores on a die, and integrated a memory controller, as well as the 4 different interconnect networks. The cores are only clocked at about 800mhz, and are thus pretty wimpy individually. However, that can be good. Since the processor cores are quite modest, the ratio of memory bandwidth to CPU flops is quite high. Similarly the ratio of interconnect bandwidth to CPU flops is also very high. Thus the CPUs should run very efficiently on problems that will parallelize to thousands of cpus. Some problems, on the other hand, will perform terribly. I expect a lot of this system's performance depends on the scalability of the system software, and the compilers / libraries.
That said, the earth simulator is also really good at some applications, and not so good at others. Instead of 16,000 small CPUs, it uses 5000 massive vector CPUs. Each is clocked at only 500mhz, but has 8 parallel execution pipes, and about 50GBytes/sec of memory bandwidth. Problems that don't vectorize run through the very modest 500mhz scalar unit.
Earth simulator has realized a large percent of it's theoretical peak performance on real world simulations (often up to 50%) while most large systems approach (10%). I'm looking forward to see how well utilized Blue Gene is. Earth simulator was a direct descendant from NEC's sx-series supercomputers, which have a 20 year lineage. Blue Gene is a radical departure from IBM's regular HPC product offerings, and uses a new microkernel OS rather than clustered AIX nodes. I imagine there will be some stutter-steps in the early days of this new product, which will undoubtedly work themselves out over time.
Great work IBM.
http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query =teraflop
Cruise TT
No microsoft will install a vanila version of redhat on it and compare it to a pc with windows server then write press articles about cost to run.
The Virginia Tech Supercomputer (take 2) is due to be clocked soon, and its also a huge off-the-shelf system. I'd like to see how they compare.
Also, I'll be big money its already been used for gaming. What college studeny could resist?
"Risc is good..."
Did they use infiniband? Or a proprietary interconnect, perhaps?
Proprietary. Actually, it has 3 networks, one mesh network for point-to-point communication, one tree network for collective communication and a service network for disk i/o, control, health monitoring etc. The service network is ethernet IIRC, the other two are custom.
Wouldn't help. If they had used a KDE spell checker, it would have been changed to 'rekord'.
I've been down in the basement of the building, see a few of the towers 1/2 loaded (at that time), along with the massive cooling system that was added to the building to keep those racks workings. Lift up a raised floor panel and the 95 LBS of me will get lifted off the ground (or so it feels).
Sadly, all 64 racks will never be in Roch, just not enough space.
Actually, StarTribune has one (crappy) pic of some towers.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
How long does it take it to run an infinite loop?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When you have a machine this fast the sampler cannot keep up. As a result what you see is a total distortion of reality. You may have seen this phenomenon with wagon wheel spokes rotating backward when the cart is really rolling. Thus when you read "speed record at 36.01 TFLOPS" your eyes view the letters going backwards and forwards.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Problems run on clusters have to be able to be broken down into small pieces that don't need to interact with the other pieces very much. This is so because of communication latency in such a system. Someone mentioned SETI, which runs great on a cluster, because looking at the signal from one piece of sky requires no information about the surrounding sky. However, something like a nuclear explosion, broken into pieces, requires lots of information about the surrounding environment. What's worse is that as you make the pieces smaller when simulating a nuclear explosion, your need for knowledge about the surrounding increases! Such simulations require a much more tightly coupled system, a 'traditional' super computer.
Except that it's not on the most recent Top 500 list anywhere.
Remember how Va. Tech replaced all 1100 G5 nodes with G5 XServes a few months ago? Well, when you do something like that, you have to rerun and resubmit the benchmark. Va. Tech were not able to get the machine back together soon enough to rerun the benchmark in time to make the last list; there's even a big caveat about it on the Top 500 home page.
(It's also not clear that the original version of the Va. Tech machine ever did anything other than run that benchmark, but that's another matter.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
comes from building hardware for a specific task. Unfortunately most of you can't access this little bit of nerd heaven but some incredibly cool hardware architectures are being described at the High Performance Embedded Computing conference. Sky and Mercury have some of their hottest new designs here. How about a machine that can do a 256 mega-sample FFT in real time?, or a self configuring supercomputer on a chip? Of course most of these tricks will never escape the lab except for the speed-ups for rendering engines...one place where gamers and the DOD are driving technology in a dead heat race with lots of winners. Besides, in a few months, something will come along that will go even faster than blue gene.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
So how long will it take before a Mac rumor site predicts that this CPU will be in the next PowerBook?
-ch
You deserve some credit for using "when", not "if" (IMHO)
The system is designed to work around failure. In the original protein folding simluation, the plan was (among other things) to checkpoint the system every hour in order to be able to restart if a failure occurred. In fact, the original expectation was that a processor would fail every few days (that presentation has since been taken down by IBM... was originally named "BlueGenePublic.pdf" ... I can't find it anywhere on the 'net anymore :( ). Failure detection is through a series of ECC bits attached to most of the data transfers and calculations. The software is also specifically written to check any points where conservation is true (meaning there is redundancy in the application and calculations are checked to ensure no errors). The mesh network that others have referred to also allows nodes which are not functioning to be worked around before they are replaced.
The processors cannot be replaced individually, but the boards (with 2 chips and memory) could be. As far as burning, the processor will often fail in a detectable way (meaning produce incorrect results) long before the device goes (literally) up in smoke. So I would expect the system would be able to disable the failed device long before its a problem. This may be part of what the Linux OS (which oversees 64 of the small processors) is doing. On a wider scale, the designers are smart enough that there are likely temperature sensors in the system that will slow (or shut down) the system if a heat problem is encountered.
I wonder how this compares to the one NASA is building, which is being collaborated with Intel and SGI. Since you can't base performance simply on the number of processors, it should be interesting.