Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
A quick Google search has netted the following: OS - Linux, HPK (High Performance Kernel) Complilers - Fortran95, C99, C++ Math Library - a subset of ESSL If you would like to read the article, it can be found at http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegene/talks/ gupta.pdf
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.
Here's a bit more: each node has 2 cpus and 4 fpus, custom non-preemptive kernel
application program has full control of all timing issues kernel and application share same address space
kernel is memory protected
kernel provides: program load / start / debug / termination file access all via message passing to IO nodes
I could go on and on but it's all on Blue Gene's site http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/index.html
I can't resist adding that GCC won't use the second FPU on each die...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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...
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.