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NEC Strikes Back With SX-8 Supercomputer
News for nerds writes "It was just 3 weeks ago that we learned IBM's BlueGene/L with 36.01 TFlops edged out NEC's Earth Simulator, but today NEC announces a new SX-8 supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65 TFlops (press release). It may be available in the U.S. as Cray's OEM like SX-6."
65 trillion calculations per second and all I ponder is if NEC would mind using my user id while running seti@home.
Tom's Hardware stated the the guts are Packard Bell, and it comes with a WinModem. That sucks.
If you think
...can it figure out the question to the answer 42?
This is like an arms race of yesteryear. The Germans and the Brits with their battleships, the Americans and Soviets with there nukes, the Yankees and Red Sox with payroll. Except this race is way cooler and will likely pay off in a much more productive way.
In Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster of SX-8 supercomputer overlords welcome me!
Note that 'SX-8' pronounced 'Sex-ay' :-)
It's very impressive and all, but how is this going to benefit me down the line? It's not like they're affordable to small/medium businesses like the Cray or HP's highly valued Alpha DEC workstations.
We are stiffling progress at the lower level by pricing these systems well beyond the reach of the average researcher or multi-national oil conglomerate.
Why is this?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I was about to say "With a computer this powerful, the world probably only needs 4 of these", but history tells me otherwise :)
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
It seems like it runs Linux as they are claiming that it will use the Global File System for clustered FS operations.. unless their Global File System is different.
Banu
The 65 TFlop for the SX-8 is only an estimate while the 36 TFlop for BlueGene/L was real performance. So it is not certain that SX-8 will be faster than Blue Gene/L
I like how this speed race keeps flip-"flopping"
I didn't know John Kerry liked to race
Next up: NEC announces a name change to "Empire"
Please revise headlines to read "Empire Strikes Back With SX-8 Supercomputer"
Alternate headline: "Outsourcing to Japan Raises unemployment concerns for C3PO & R2D2"
what kind of framerates will it make doom 3 hit
@ Virginia Tech it is rumored the US Gov't is gobbling(harhar) up Apple XServers in hopes to build the "Ultimate" Super computer...
But then again these are just rumors as Srinidhi Varadarajan is being *highly* recruited
/me makes some random obligatory comment about a beowulf cluster...
Anyone know what the price tag is on a computer like this?
Not that I'm in the market, but I'm just curious if this has any significant benefits over simply buying two supercomputers at half the speed...
Right now, this SX-8 announcement is just a publicity stunt to generate some "shock and awe" in the small supercomputing community of national and commercial research labs.
Perhaps, the management of NEC should consider generating some "shock and awe" among the greater engineering community. I suggest that NEC donate computing time on an SX-8 to all the startups designing spaceships (e.g. SpaceShipOne). These startups are short on cash and cannot afford the kind of supercomputer that is needed for modeling the spaceships. Free time on a supercomputer would greatly assist these startups and would generate considerable shock and awe among engineers who daydream about what the predecessor of the M-5 computer could have been.
Apparently, we are gradually building all the technologies needed to accomplish intergalactic space travel. The short list is matter-antimatter energy (which is undergoing top secret research in the American government) and high-performance computers (like the SX-8, which will model the spacecraft and possibly serve as the on-board computer).
"Space...the final frontier. These are the voyages of the startship ..."
In other news, scientists create a robot that could replace half of my friends.
No Grendel! Stop attacking my village! I think you forgot "cluster."
How's my typing? Call 1-800-eta-shut
The have SX-56 which is probably 7 times more powerful but unfortunatelly runs Windows CE... ;-(
1) I won't go out on a limb but I'll stick my NEC out for this supercomputer.
2) SX-8? Is that the next in line to SSX Tricky?
3) As you can see, I am resolute on this war on Tera...and my opponent is clearly a Tera-flopping machine.
4) Please don't write articles with "$COMPANY Strikes Back" as its title. It begs "Return of the $RIVAL_COMPANY" as a follow-up.
And why is this good news exactly?
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
Remember that the 36.01 TF figure for BlueGene/L was only using 8 racks.
The final BG/L will use 64 Racks.
Also, the SX-8 figure is only an estimation.
Why?
Because IBM's Blue Gene/L was/is made with off the shelf parts based on the POWER arch. Meaning it becomes much more efficient dollar wise than the custom made stuff NEC keeps pumping out.
(on a side note: Where does Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory get all that money to keep buying the latest and greatest super computer ?!)
Sunny Dubey
PS: Two of the Blue Gene/L folks will be presenting at my LUG tonite. I wonder if they will have any responces to this.
BlueGene/L is only at 36TFLOPS today, but by next year the full-size version is supposed to clock in at 180TFLOPS. The SX-8 has no chance to survive.
which is based on that well proven design of ropes and pulleys in Apraphulia (see Sci Am a long time back), I wonder if they will have heat dissipation problems from the friction...
This is good news to all those who aspire to emigrate to the "West" from the third world via university admissions (you know, the F1, H1, GC route).
BTW, happy "Apping".
"we are gradually building all the technologies needed to accomplish intergalactic space travel"
Maybe in the same sense that cavemen were gradually building Internet2 every time they found a crystal of SiO2 in their navels.
They should add another moderation option: "-1, Not funny any more" for posts like this.
Even with 65Tflops it still takes 3 min to apply my desktop settings.
John Anthony Hartman
In a few years, when someone gets get cancer, the medicine that cures him/her might just have been developed on this very machine.
Protein folding research is vital in cancer research, and highly computationally intensive too.
NEC say in the press release that these super computers start at ~$10,000 a month rental. Maybe that's the base line model but isn't $10,000 a month peanuts for a serious spaceship business?
yeah but can it run longhorn ?
Do you really wish to move Doom from a game to Reality?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Epson PX-8.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Oh, I wish they were, but sadly HP seems to have axed anything with Alpha. I wish Intel would
take a good look in the mirror and buy the Alpha
outright (FUD alert: if AMD does it first you are
history guys...).
Given the beautiful clean design I wonder if a really die-shrinked version of Alpha would make a nice PDA processor...
Anyone out there have any clues?
(sorry, but I just watched Bob Colwell's (ex intel chief architect) lecture to Stanford, so I'm in processor architecture mode right now...
The answer "Lieutenant" is that this stuff benefits you because the problems it tackles are
not addressable by distributed computing apps like seti@home. This sort of iron deals with problems where each point you are fiddling with (on a lattice) affects everything adjacent, so communications with other processors has to happen
a lot. Scratch the idea of doing that over the
snoozi-net...
But even for Beowolf, you have to consider the running cost (which when you compute it isn't small beer - $20-$30/month per node given the power use. Multiply that by 256 and you could end
up being the first individual to file for Chapter
{whatever it is in the states}).
***** QUICK NOTE TO THE SLASHCODE AUTHOR ****
In text mode, < and > should not get dumped
in text mode. Yours, Angry Meta programmer
****** END RANT *****
These days Cray isn't the Cray of old, and you could perhaps roll your own Cray Clone. It isn't like you get to have the cachet of ECL logic processors with *seats* around them, but what the heck..
Beowolf class machines fill in some of the need for true crunch mode machines, but you can never have enough power, so watch Internet 2, and grid computing issues.
Someone will *still* complain even if you turned the whole goddammn universe into their personal computer. It's that difficult. Some problems are just too horrid, and some Professors just too impatient.
I don't expect Quantum computing devices to bail me out in a big hurry, but then again I might be
wrong. (Real uncertain about this...).
Perhaps, the management of NEC should consider generating some "shock and awe" by having Oprah give away free SX-8.
WHAT?
How is Japan part of "the West"?
If you have everything prepared, then you get the supercomputer at the end to do your rendering, and in that way, it is cheap.
Its just idle time.
Do you have your software written to actually run on it correctly?
Do the people who analyse the results work for peanuts?
Have you tested it?
"Just one more revision" is another 10k.
Imagine, you get some time on a supercomputer donated to you.
You sit yourself down at the console, what do you do?
Well, after writing the obvious pi to 1e999 dp, or for a=0 to 1000000000000000000000 do print "whoa!"
How would you use your time?
do they run a terminal environment - the worlds fastest computer interactively scrolling messages to 100s of users, and only throttling up when someone stops playing and gets on with some serious work?
I also wonder, do SuperComputers run screensavers?
liqbase
oh lord, its worse than the email storage wars!!!
Here's your M5 for you, right here.
Entertainment science at it's finest.
Japan is a modern democracy with civil rights. Citizenship in Japan is not based on race or blood. Ditto for the USA. Oriental Japanese who emigrate to the USA are viewed, by Japanese citizens, as foreigners. Oriental Chinese who emigrate to the USA are viewed, by Chinese citizens, as part of the extended Chinese motherland.
The Japanese have a normal ratio of male babies to female babies. That ratio is 1.05. Ditto for the USA. The Chinese, the Koreans, and the Indians (the 3 barbaric bigots of Asia) have a ratio of 1.20.
Chinese are barbaric animals and think like them, aborting female fetuses like there is no tomorrow.
So, yes, Japan is a Western nation.
And why is this good news exactly?
Obviously you never played through the expansion pack for Battlezone. Let the Chinese get into space and the next thing you know they'll be building cloaked, super-fast hover tanks that kick the crap out of the American units you thought were so powerful in the original game.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Has it come down to this? A TFlops-size contest?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
*ouch* didn't realize this was such a no-no
Karma: Good, or bust!
How well does it handle XP SP2?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
G5's are fine, they're like Intel's chips from 2 years ago.
When I use Macs, the power is lacking compared to the high powered Intel and AMD machines.
I'll shoot:
I for one welcome our new super computer overlords.
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
WooHoo! Just in time for Halo2/Half Life 2!!!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
the West (which includes the USA and Japan)
Traditionally, Japan has been considered part of the orient, while the USA has been lumped in the occident.
I agree that dedicating supercomputer time to investigating new technologies is good.
Low impact alternative energy sources to supplant existing technologies would be a good start.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
So chinese and korean bigots consider themselves equal to americans, whose bigots, on the other hand, consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity.
Bush could use one of these to write his speeches.
65 TFlops of err, ummm, urrrr, mmmm, ahhhhs processed per second!
At least FAH DC has more power than these "little" boxes:o sstats
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=
(At the moment 196 TFLOPS sustained!)
Isn't a prevailing AI theory that given enough raw power some sort of emergent complexity will emerge?
Does it run on Turbografx-16 style HuCards?
And then comes Google with its massively distributed Array of Inexpensive Reduntant Computers (AIRC) and uses all those giga flops to fetch p0rn links and pictures. I'm coming!
How many flops is 100000 low cost PC:s?
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Are you sure that's not a game console? Just look at that name!
Two IBM's BlueGene/L.
The SX8 uses a 90nm CPU clocked two times as high as the one used in the SX6 respective the erarth simulator. Taking into account all the additional improvements it's save to say the SX-8 will be twice as fast as the old one - so 65 TFlops seem reachable.
/ pap247.pdf
For those interested in how vector processing compares with scalar processing in terms of absolute performance and computational efficience, this paper of Leonid Oliker et.al. is definetely worth reading:
http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/schedule/pdfs
I was picturing a massively parallel array of little PDIP Ubicom SX microcontrollers, all running at 50 MIPS. http://www.ubicom.com/processors/sx-family.htm
[begin silly] I don't know exactly what it'd take, but I'd think 50 8-bit operations might be able to handle most floating point operations.
That'd mean each SX could handle 1 MFLOP... so we only need a million of them. At 3$ each... with radio-shack proto-boards... it would only cost around $10 million including assembly. [end silly]
Note that they don't specify the bus width of the SX-8 system. Is it 32 or 64 bit? More?
Cool,
Now ID soft can release Doom3 written in VB! I bet this thing willl get close to 30 fps!
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
... until they come out with something better than the SX-64.
We have more than sufficient computer power on our desktops to do the maths needed for a designing something like SpaceShip One. What's killing the startups isn't lack of cash, but lack of experience (both individually and across the industry) needed to make valid and rational engineering tradeoffs. (Not to mention that they aren't building for a market, but in hope of a market, thus making the design/tradeoff process even harder. Nobody knows what to design *to*.)
also, each cpu has 7 times higher io bandwith...
The 65Tflops estimate is for 512 8 cpu nodes, which less then earth simulators.
Plus each of the cpus now has 16GFlops (and can archive it with that much memory bandwith it has), but uses less than half of the power of the old sx6.
So a "earth simulator 2" with 65TFlops would have 20% less cpus and 60% less power consumption then the first.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
...I'll wait for the DX version to come out, those SXs have the math coprocessor disabled.
All it contains is 65 PS3s. %$#@!!! game consoles.
The short list is matter-antimatter energy (which is undergoing top secret research in the American government)
It's not top-secret if a computer geek knows about it.
Now I know why IBM vastly under-reported the Blue Gene numbers. I'm betting IBM formally reports the real ones that seriously trounce NEC at Supercomputing 2004.
...you'd really want more than four if you were going to make a half-decent beowulf cluster of these things.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
This is good news to all those who aspire to emigrate to the "West" from the third world via university admissions (you know, the F1, H1, GC route). Ah of course, because us third worlder's would rather travel half way across the world, forsaking family and friends, to obtain the education and professionaly opportunities from the west we would never have otherwise; rather than staying around to get it on our our own countries if that were possible. BTW, happy "Apping". Thanks but I've already got into one your "prestigous" universities, and with my other third world cohorts, we're eating away at it from the inside.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
65 TFlops - compares with Data from Trek:TNG:t abase/Query -ST.php?EpName=The%20Measure%20of%20a%20Man, let's hope it doesn't also have an evil twin...)
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Da
(Now
SX is better than C, but 64 is better than 8.
Really, what's wrong with giving the damn thing a name?
when comparing 2 totally different architectures:
Blue Gene/L ( power pc-440 cpu vs Earth Simulator ( sx6 ) cpu.
Memory Latency: 7 microsec vs 2 microsec.
Memory Bandwidth: 1.4 GByte/sec vs 5 GByte/sec per node
Register size: 64Bit? vs 16Kbit ( 16 Thousand Bit! ).
-> There's certainly cases where one 1 BlueGene/L TFlop ~ 1 B Earth Simulator TFlop, but for plenty stuff Earth Simulator will always outperform BlueGene/L, even if it gets cranked up to 360 TFlop.
( Data taken from the latest CT journal from www.heise.de )
You can't compare those figures. The 65 Tflops is estimated peak speed, the 36 Tflops is measured sustained speed on LINPACK.
Hmm, that stung didn't it ? You still haven't answered the basic question - why do most of you hang around here after your grad studies are over ? I also know about the tall tales you guys normally come up with to "prove" to the immigration officials that you's actually go back home ?
What's the deal with "Eating away" anyway ? If this is your attitude toward education, then it's a lost cause anyway.
Why are you trying to come to the US again ? ofh yeah, lack of "opportunities" back home - right. So you still are a potential economic immigrant who are selling out your homeland for a few bucks.
And you ask "why should the west not have the best of technologies ?"
That's because we still get most of the third world grad students who would sell their own mothers for a buck, thats's why. Deal with it.