Virginia Tech Supercomputer Up To 12.25 Teraflops

hrm by gutterandthestars · 2004-10-25 23:04 · Score: 5, Funny

6.40tflops should be enough for anybody

Re:hrm by tmj0001 · 2004-10-25 23:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

Hans Moravec's book "Robot" suggests that 100 teraflops is about the level required for human intelligence. So we are up to 10% of his target. But human intelligence still seems very far away, so either he has badly underestimated, or our collective programming skills need significant improvement.
Re:hrm by TimothyTimothyTimoth · 2004-10-25 23:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think Morevec's method of simulating human intelligence involves modelling a scanned copy of the human brain, in real time at a neuronal level. It would be similar to modelling the global weather system, a software capability we already have. Current neuroscience would expect this model to be functionally equivalent to a human mind in terms of matching inputs and outputs. As an aside, I know that Ray Kurzweil has I much higher required estimated of a 20 petaflop (20,000 teraflop) computer, based on more conservative assumptions. 20 petaflops is due around 2009/10 under Moore's law. (And I for one offer an early welcome to our expected new AI overlords ...)

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Re:hrm by Quobobo · 2004-10-25 23:54 · Score: 3, Insightful

I think the reason lies within the latter.

Think about it; how is throwing more and more hardware at it going to solve the problem? What we're lacking is the software itself needed to do this, and it's obviously not going to be an easy task to write. I see no reason why an AI as intelligent as a human couldn't be implemented on a slower system, unless "thinks as fast as a human" is among the requirements.

(disclaimer, I've never read the book, these are just my opinions)
Re:hrm by SnowZero · 2004-10-25 23:58 · Score: 4, Interesting

I actually asked Hans a similar question at a talk he gave a while back, and he didn't really answer it, to my disappointment. My question was that "In nature the algorithm and computer were evolved together, so we'd expect them to be at a similar level of advancement. So, even if we get a computer as fast as a human, it might it not be nearly as smart since our programs do not use it efficiently enough?" In other words, Moore's law isn't helping us write better software (in some ways quite the contrary).

I'm a robotic software researcher, so this notion really affects me. IMO Software will lag well behind hardware, since it doesn't scale out nearly as well. Representation is of course a huge problem I won't even try to touch... But rest assured lots of people are working on all these things. Btw, It also doesn't help that CPU designs aren't even trying to make AI-style algorithms fast, but we can't blame manufacterers for that util there is demonstrable money to be made.
Re:hrm by TimothyTimothyTimoth · 2004-10-26 00:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

By the way, IBM BlueGene/L is going to produce 360 teraflops by end 2004, so if the report of Moravec's estimate is correct, and he is correct, that AI Overlord welcome could be pretty soon.
(Although I don't believe brain scanning quite hits the resolution mark required yet.)

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Re:hrm by RKBA · 2004-10-26 00:14 · Score: 3, Interesting

His estimate was probably based on the common, and incorrect, belief that neurons are purely digital.

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Re:hrm by dr_d_19 · 2004-10-26 00:17 · Score: 2, Funny

...or perhaps Hans Moravec was just plain wrong :)
Re:hrm by Deorus · 2004-10-26 00:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

I think the difference between human and computer intelligence is that our software (conscious) is able to hard-wire the hardware (unconscious). We may not be able to consciously perform certain tasks such as floating point calculations because our software lacks low level access, but we can hard-wire our hardware for those tasks, this is why our unconscious is so quick and accurate when trained to recognize and respond to specific patterns regardless of their complexity.
Re:hrm by segmond · 2004-10-26 00:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

He is wrong. Intelligence is not about speed. I have met people who are very very smart, but they think very slowly. You ask questions, and the I too knows (ITKs) will blurt out an answer so damn fast, but mr smarty pant will think and think, and you would think they are clueless, but when they final answer, you can't tear apart their answer.

We can build a machine that has human intelligence and run it on a 2ghz process. The only issue is that instead of answering a question in a second. Perhaps it will take 1 or 2 hours to deliver an intelligence reply. But it should be able to pass a turing test with time thrown at the window.

Go read what 3D researchers said about graphics in the 70's. I bet they believed a 10ghz was good enough for real life 3D graphics.

What is hindering us is not speed, but our approach to AI research.

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------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Re:hrm by segmond · 2004-10-26 00:37 · Score: 2, Interesting

I don't think CPU should be designed for AI-style algorithms, when the said algorithms have not been proven. Assume we finally suceed in implementing the Holy Grail of AI right, then we can seek out ways to optimize and make it fast, thus custom CPUs will come in. Right now, most of the algorithms are a joke.

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------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Re:hrm by Chatsubo · 2004-10-26 00:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

What is be really interesting is that when we get these human-brain-equivalent machines, the technology does not stop there.

So the intelligence level of this thing would prob. double in accordance to Moore's law, and in a year outclass it's master two fold. In about another year it will be four times as intelligent as any human being. And, of course, it doesn't stop there....

The implications that this would have on society would be very interesting. Would we believe everything it told us, or claimed that we know better? Would we like all the answers it gave us. Would it start deceiving us for our own good? etc.

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Re:hrm by hackstraw · 2004-10-26 00:44 · Score: 3, Funny

Hans Moravec's book "Robot" suggests that 100 teraflops is about the level required for human intelligence.

Yeah. I've been waiting for years for those dumbasses to make a computer that can outperform my ability to perform 100 trillion double precision floating point operations a second flawlessly.
Re:hrm by Randy+Wang · 2004-10-26 00:49 · Score: 5, Funny

I, for one, welcome our new Beowulf overlord...

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Re:hrm by TimothyTimothyTimoth · 2004-10-26 00:51 · Score: 2, Informative

If you are thinking along these lines you might already be aware of this link, but if not, might I recommend:
http://singinst.org/index.html

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It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
Re:hrm by diersing · 2004-10-26 00:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

I have a question from a casual observer who comes across this Hokie machine and the top 500 list every now and then. What is it these computers do?

Hearing it referenced in terms of AI helps, but is that the only purpose for a research facility to build one of these mammoths? Are there practical applications for the business world (other then the readily available (read commercial) clustered data warehousing)?

I'm not trolling, just curious.
Re:hrm by benhocking · 2004-10-26 01:18 · Score: 4, Interesting

Actually, it's not quite that simple. As someone whose research is in modeling the hippocampal region CA3 (about 2.5 million neurons in humans, 250k neurons in rats), I can tell you that the connectivity of the system is a very important variable. And there is still much we don't know about the connectivity of the human brain. Furthermore, there are hundreds of different types of neurons in the human brain. Why so many different types if only 2 or 3 would do? Seems evolution took an inefficient path - unless, as is probably the case, the differences in the neuron types are crucial for the human computer to work the way it does. Granted, some differences might be due to speed or energy efficiencies which are not absolutely critical for early stages, but I suspect that many differences have to do with the software (or wetware in this case) that makes us intelligent.

After we've solved that minor problem, I think teaching the system will be relatively trivial. I.e., if we understand the wetware enough to reconstruct it, we most likely understand how its inputs relate to our inputs, etc., and we could teach it much the same as we teach a human child. Of course, we might also figure out a better way to teach it, and in so doing we might even find a better way to teach human children. (Some of our research has recreated certain known best learning strategies, it is probably only a matter of time before simulators disover a better one!)

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Re:hrm by Glock27 · 2004-10-26 01:38 · Score: 2, Informative

By the way, IBM BlueGene/L is going to produce 360 teraflops by end 2004, so if the report of Moravec's estimate is correct, and he is correct, that AI Overlord welcome could be pretty soon.
If you read the article (I know, I know) you'll find that the peak performance of this Cray system is 144 teraflops with 30,000 processors.

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Re:hrm by fitten · 2004-10-26 02:10 · Score: 2, Informative

Depends on the site and their main focus. The Earth Simulator in Japan (#1 on the list) for example, is used to simulate and predict weather. Various machines at some of the national labs in the USA are used to simulate nuclear events. Some other machines in the biotech industries are used to do protien folding and things like attempting to simulate a human cell. Financial institutions use them to attempt to predict the economy, the stock market, and the like. Automobile manufacturors use them to simulate crash tests. Aeronautic firms use them to simulate new vehicles.

In the past, there has been talk about companies that exist solely to supply compute power. Such a company would have a warehouse full of computers and control them through schedulers (batch, etc.) and sell time on the machines to anyone who wanted it. So far, I don't think anyone has been successful with the idea yet.
Re:hrm by autophile · 2004-10-26 02:14 · Score: 4, Informative

According to Wired...
Now that the upgrade is complete, System X is being used for scientific research. Varadarajan said Virginia Tech researchers and several outside groups are using it for research into weather and molecular modeling. Typically, System X runs several projects simultaneously, each tying up 400 to 500 processors.
"At the end of the day, the goal is good science," he said. "We're just building the tools. The top 500 is nice, but the goal is science."

--Rob

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Towards the Singularity.
Re:hrm by lawpoop · 2004-10-26 02:55 · Score: 3, Insightful

Of course you can't do it consciously, but that's about what you do when you catch a ball or walk down the sidewalk.

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Re:hrm by ca1v1n · 2004-10-26 03:16 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'm not really sure what you mean that they haven't been proven. In the sense that they don't give the best answer all the time, this much is obvious. That's why we call it artificial intelligence instead of algorithmics. That said, we know quite well that they work. Most adaptive spam filters are based on Bayesian networks. The best of these are better than humans at identifying spam. We don't typically run the best because the computational load is far too high. Bayesian networks have a delightfully simple evaluation procedure that is basically glorified matrix multiplication. Neural networks are a little more complicated, but not by a whole lot. Recall a recent development that used a neural network inside an 802.11 driver to predictively avoid collisions to improve total network throughput in dense environments. It doesn't reduce collisions to 0, as that would require clairvoyance, but it does a good job. You didn't hear about this 5 years ago because putting a neural net inside an 802.11 driver without killing performance to both network and computer is difficult, particularly without processor instructions dedicated to the task.

It's true that designing a CPU to *be* a neural or bayesian network is infeasible, but that doesn't mean we can't add instructions to accelerate their evaluation. The evaluation and update of a neural net, traditional or biologically modeled, is a rather simple algorithmic process, though people who have worked with such simulations (see Ben Hocking's post above, he was my quite capable AI TA) will tell you that they make rather obscene optimizations to make it run reasonably fast. I'm talking about things that might sound familiar to graphics people, like removing all multiplications from a program that's supposed to be doing them more than all other operations combined. It's a particularly good candidate for SIMD instructions. Most large neural nets are sparsely connected, so even if your net is substantially larger than your cache, you can beat that with prefetching. Threshold conditional addition is an example of something that can be done very quickly in hardware, and is much more of a pain to code and optimize in software.

If you prefer RISC to CISC, recall that even the original SPARC had special DSP instructions. Putting the sigmoid function and arctan on silicon is really not all that outrageous.

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Re:hrm by ca1v1n · 2004-10-26 03:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

But their aggregate behavior is quite easily computable. In the human brain, 70% of neuron firings randomly fail to register in their successor. This not only makes our behavior somewhat random, but also implies that there's quite a bit of redundancy and that our brains operate on aggregate behavior of a large neural net, rather than precise behavior of a small one, otherwise we'd be completely unpredictable, rather than just mostly unpredictable. While it's true that you can't model a human brain reliably with a computer, it's also true that you can't even model it reliably with the same human brain. Generally speaking, any simulation that is as good as reality is good enough, even if reality isn't really right.

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WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Re:hrm by hunterx11 · 2004-10-26 06:58 · Score: 2, Funny

Would we like all the answers it gave us[?]
Of course not. How are the philosophers going to get booked on talk shows?

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English is easier said than done.
Re:hrm by BorgCopyeditor · 2004-10-26 07:20 · Score: 2, Funny

How are the philosophers going to get booked on talk shows?
As a professional philosopher, let me ask what talk shows these are that you are watching. Also, what are the phone numbers of their producers?

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Speed at top by luvirini · 2004-10-25 23:08 · Score: 4, Interesting

Reflecting on the comment: "hould still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November." There seems to be a serious push for multiprosessor systems, currently the ranking seem to consist of a couple of stars, few big ones(this computer among them) and a huge group of third category, and then the "used to be great" computers. But from my reading of the trends seems that there will be more and more crowding at near the top, so I expect the second category to be much larger, with much smaller differences.

Re:Speed at top by TAGmclaren · 2004-10-26 00:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

currently the ranking seem to consist of a couple of stars, few big ones(this computer among them) and a huge group of third category, and then the "used to be great" computers

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but I think so far most of the commentators have failed to pick up what makes this system so incredible. Srinidhi Varadarajan, the designer of the system:

Varadarajan said competing systems cost $20 million and up, compared to System X's approximately $5.8 million price tag ($5.2 million for the initial machines, and $600,000 for the Xserve upgrade).

"We will keep the price-performance crown," he said. "We don't know anyone who's within a factor of two even of our system. We'll probably keep the price-performance lead until someone else shows up with another Mac-based system."

Think about that for a second. The system isn't just in the top 5 (or at least top 10), but it's the cheapest by a factor of at least 2. What's even funnier from a tech standpoint is that the creator doesn't expect it to be beaten until another Apple system is built - which puts a very interesting spin on the old "Apple's more expensive".

Anyway as to in/out of the top 5, Varadarajan reckons there's another 10-20% in optimisations left in the tank...

Data taken from the recent Wired Article on the subject.

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Iran has endorsed
Re:Speed at top by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-26 01:05 · Score: 3, Informative

The system isn't just in the top 5 (or at least top 10), but it's the cheapest by a factor of at least 2.

The $5.8M number is how much the computers (and maybe racks) cost, not the whole system. AFAICT, that number appears leaves out US$2-3M worth of InfiniBand hardware that somebody (probably Apple) must've "donated" so it wouldn't show up as part of the purchase price. IB gear costs ~US$2k/node in bulk, on top of the cost of the node itself. It's highly unlikely someone else could build this exact configuration for US$5.8M without serious underwriting or hardware donations. Heck, I can't even get the Apple online store to give me a price on a G5 Xserve that includes an education discount, and I work for a fairly large public university.

Density by GerbilSocks · 2004-10-25 23:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

VT could theoretically pack in 4x the number of nodes in the same space that occupied the original System X. Could we be looking at at least a 50 TFlop (minus 10% overhead) supercomputer with 8,800 cluster nodes?

If that were feasible, you could be looking at toppling Earth Simulator at a fraction of the cost.

Re:Density by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-25 23:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

At linpack. Of course, the Earth Sumulator wasn't built (just) to run linpack.

Also, the Earth Simulator has been around for how many years? 2? 3? Quite frankly, it would be downright embarrassing if it couldn't be toppled at a fraction of its cost by now.
Re:Density by Ingolfke · 2004-10-25 23:17 · Score: 2, Funny

And if we could harness the heat from this machine we could probably power most of the North Eastern United States.
Re:Density by UnknowingFool · 2004-10-25 23:36 · Score: 5, Informative

Not necessarily. Processing power doesn't really scale linearly like that. Add 4 times as many processors doesn't mean the speed will increase 4x.
First, as they try to increase the speed of the system, the bottlenecks start becoming more of a factor. Interconnects is one big obstacle. While the new System X may use the latest and greatest interconnects between the nodes, they still run at a fraction of the speed that the processors can run.
Also the computing problems that they are trying to solve may not scale either with more processors. For example, clusters like this can be used to predict and simulate weather. To do so, the target area (Europe for example) is divided into small parts called cells. Each node takes a cell and handles the computations of that cell.
In this case adding more processors does not necessarily mean that each cell is processed faster. Getting 4 processors to do one task may hurt performance as they may interfere with each other. More likely the cell is further subdivided into 4 smaller cells and the detail of the information is increased not the speed. So add 4x processors only increases data 4x but it doesn't mean that the data is solved any faster.

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Re:Density by koi88 · 2004-10-25 23:53 · Score: 2, Funny

Of course, the Earth Sumulator wasn't built (just) to run linpack.

I think most super computers weren't built just to run benchmark tests.
Well, at least I hope.

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Re:Density by luvirini · 2004-10-25 23:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Indeed, Breaking up computational tasks to smaller pieces that can be processed by these architectures is on of the biggest challenges in the high end computing.
Many processes are indeed easy to divide to parts. Take for example ray-tracing, you can have one processor run each ray if you want, getting huge benefits compared to singleprocessor designs. But many tasks are such that the normal way of calculting them requires you to know the previous result. Trying to break up these tasks is one of the focuses in the reserearch around supercomputing.

"Dick factor" aside by ceeam · 2004-10-25 23:09 · Score: 3, Interesting

Would be interesting to know exactly what stuff do these machines do? Maybe they would even be able to share some code so that people can fiddle around with it optimizing (should be fun).

Re:"Dick factor" aside by millahtime · 2004-10-25 23:14 · Score: 2, Informative

Currently they aren't doing anything with them except getting them up and running. Status is listed at...
Assembly - Completed!
System Stablization - In Progress
Benchmarking - In Progress

When up and going the system will probubly do some high end scientific calculations.

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Evolution or ID?
Re:"Dick factor" aside by joib · 2004-10-25 23:36 · Score: 3, Informative

Would be interesting to know exactly what stuff do these machines do? Maybe they would even be able to share some code so that people can fiddle around with it optimizing

I don't know about the VT cluster specifically, but here's a couple of typical supercomputer applications that happen to be open source:

ABINIT, a DFT code.

CP2K, another DFT code, focused more on Car-Parinello MD.

Gromacs, a molecular dynamics program.

(should be fun)

Well, if optimizing 200 000 line Fortran programs parallelized using MPI sounds like fun to you, jump right in! ;-)

Note: Above applies to abinit and cp2k only, I don't know anything about gromacs except that it's written in C, not Fortran (though inner loops are in Fortran for speed).

Oh, and then there's MM5, a weather prediction code which I think is also open source. I don't know anything about it, though.
Re:"Dick factor" aside by TAGmclaren · 2004-10-26 00:12 · Score: 3, Informative

Currently they aren't doing anything with them except getting them up and running

Their site is out of date then: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,65476,00.html ?tw=newsletter_topstories_html

Now that the upgrade is complete, System X is being used for scientific research. Varadarajan said Virginia Tech researchers and several outside groups are using it for research into weather and molecular modeling. Typically, System X runs several projects simultaneously, each tying up 400 to 500 processors.

If there's a Wired article, and a Cnet article, go with the Wired article every time. It's written by people who love tech.

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So compare it to...... by ericdano · 2004-10-25 23:10 · Score: 3, Interesting

The school said it spent about $600,000 to rebuild the system and add the additional nodes. The original cost of System X was $5.2 million.

Compare it to this new Cray system. Bang for the buck would make the Apple system better.

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Re:So compare it to...... by Coryoth · 2004-10-25 23:39 · Score: 4, Insightful

Compare it to this new Cray system. Bang for the buck would make the Apple system better.

Yup, except the Cray comes with far superior interconnect technology, a better range of hardware and software reliability features built in, software designed (by people who do nothing but supercomputers) specifically for monitoring maintaining and administrating massively parallel systems, and most importantly it all works "out of the box". You buy a cabinet, you plug it in, it goes.

Why do these Apple fans, who justifiably claim that comparing a homebuilt PC to a "take it out of the box and plug it in" Apple system is silly, want to compare a build it yourself supercomputer to one that's just plug and go?

And yes, comparing MacOS X to UNICOS for supercomputers is like comparing Linux to OS X for desktops (in fact that's very flattering to OS X as a cluster OS).

Jedidiah.

--
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Re:So compare it to...... by capmilk · 2004-10-25 23:49 · Score: 2, Funny

Bang for the buck would make the Apple system better.

Sure, but what would you rather say: "I just bought an Apple computer" or "I just bought a Cray computer"?

Re:2.3GHz? by Ford+Prefect · 2004-10-25 23:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

But the XServers come at 2.0GHz, with the desktop powermacs at 2.5GHz. Is this a mistake?

From the article:

Apple said last week that the 2.3GHz machines were a one-off deal for Virginia Tech and not something the company plans to announce for broader consumption anytime soon.

What I really want to know is what they do with the old machines. The articles speaks of the cluster being 'upgraded' - are the older G5s replaced, or do they just become part of the new cluster?

Still, I suppose there's one or two unwanted G5s - anyone want to send me a couple? :-)

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Crays... by CaptainPinko · 2004-10-25 23:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

are not designed for the same type of work as clusters. If a probably is not effeciently parallizable and requires shared memory then a Cray is the only feasible option A Cray is not a cluster. It's like comparing mph for a sports car and truck: the car is faster but they are meant for different types of loads.

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Re:Crays... by Coryoth · 2004-10-25 23:45 · Score: 4, Interesting

are not designed for the same type of work as clusters. If a probably is not effeciently parallizable and requires shared memory then a Cray is the only feasible option A Cray is not a cluster. It's like comparing mph for a sports car and truck: the car is faster but they are meant for different types of loads.

To be fair to the original poster, the Cray system he was referencing is a cluster system. Then again, its a cluster system with very impressive interconnects for which System X just isn't comparable (ie. The Cray system will scale far far better), not to mention the Cray software (UNICOS, CRMS, SFW), and the fact that the Cray system is an "out of the box" solution. So you are right, there is no comparison.

Jedidiah.

--
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts

The list of Supercomputers by ehmdjii · 2004-10-25 23:20 · Score: 5, Informative

this is the official homepage of the listing:

http://www.top500.org/

Re:2.3GHz? by mmkkbb · 2004-10-25 23:21 · Score: 5, Informative

they were sold off by MacMall at a slight discount around 6 months ago, along with a certificate of authenticity and a "property of virginia tech" sticker

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-mkb

Obligatory: by Dorsai65 · 2004-10-25 23:25 · Score: 2, Funny

but will it run Longhorn?

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--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...

Old stuff... by gustgr · 2004-10-25 23:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

Before you guys ask I RTFA. I was wondering what do they do with the old processors?

Re:Old stuff... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-25 23:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

If you're referring to the old G5 Powermacs used in the original System X...they were sold. I bought one!

and yet... by BobWeiner · 2004-10-25 23:35 · Score: 3, Funny

...it still doesn't come with a floppy disk drive.

/sarcasm

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Re:and yet... by Short+Circuit · 2004-10-26 00:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

That's a big RAID Array...

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Thank you VT by Alcimedes · 2004-10-25 23:56 · Score: 4, Funny

I have it on good insider knowledge, that this entire cluster is going to be put to the best possible usage.

Not disease solving, not genetic mapping, not calculating weather patterns.

No, what they're going to do is remaster the Original Star Wars series, right from the laser disc versions!!!!

Imagine, a digitallly remastered bar scene where Han shoots first!!@$!@#!one!@

/kidding

Re:Article Comparison... by erick99 · 2004-10-26 00:00 · Score: 3, Informative

If power was only equated to speed then you would be correct. However, as other posters have pointed out, there are several reasons why a Cray is a more powerful system besides sheer speed.

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much the same as a baby by nounderscores · 2004-10-26 00:25 · Score: 2, Funny

2:14am EDT August 29, 1997...

Researcher: "Go to your machine room! And no Command and Conquer until you do your homework!"

Joshua:"Oh yeah? Would you LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?"

What is a supercomputer ? by Animaether · 2004-10-26 00:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'm curious as to the answer to the question (What is a supercomputer ?).

The reason is this.. more and more of these 'supercomputer' entries appear to be many machines hooked up together, possibly doing a distributed calculation.

However, would projects such as SETI, GRID, and UD qualify with their many thousands of computers all hooked up and performing a distributed calculation ?

If not, then what about the WETA/Pixar/ILM/Digital Domain/Blur/You-name-it renderfarms ? Any one machine on those renderfarms could be put to use for only a single purpose: to render a movie sequence. Any one machine could be working on a single frame of that sequence. Does that count ?

I seem to think more and more that the answer is 'no', from my perspective. They mostly appear to me as rather simple computers (very often not even the top-of-the-line in their own class), with the only thing going for them that there are many of them.

The definition of supercomputer (thanks Google, and by linkage dictionary.reference.com ) is :

A mainframe computer that is among the largest, fastest, or most powerful of those available at a given time.

And for mainframe :

A large powerful computer, often serving many connected terminals and usually used by large complex organizations.
The central processing unit of a computer exclusive of peripheral and remote devices.

Doesn't the above imply that a supercomputer should really be just a single computer, and not a network or cluster of many computers ?
( The mention of 'terminals' does not mean they're nodes. Terminals are, after all, chiefly CPU-less devices intended for data entry and display only. They are not part of the mainframe's computing capabilities. )

If the above holds true, then what is *really* the world's top 3 of supercomputers ? I.e. which aren't 'simply' a cluster of nodes.

Any mistakes in the above write-up/though process ? Please do point them out :)

Re:What is a supercomputer ? by log0n · 2004-10-26 02:08 · Score: 2, Interesting

[quote]Doesn't the above imply that a supercomputer should really be just a single computer, and not a network or cluster of many computers ?[/quote]

But if all of the networked/clustered computers are all working on the same task with information flowing between nodes dependant on other nodes processing , doesn't that make them all effectively one large computer?

A renderfarm is similar in many ways to a supercomputer, but I wouldn't think of it as one. Renderfarm nodes generally work on a specific task that is assigned to them. They can be of a larger over all project (like rendering for a film), but really they only process what is given to them then spit the info back. There's a queue manager that sends out tasks, but very little of the information that gets processed by a node is dependant on information that is in use by another node. A renderfarm basically gives out raw processing for a task when requested, it doesn't do much beyond that.

You can still have multiple terminals for data in/out, and in the VT case these are definitely systems that are exclusive of peripheral devices (remote device doesn't make sense - a connected terminal is a remote device).

I do think that definitions have blurred from what they used to be thanks to improving technology, but I do think that the generalities of what they represent are still valid.

$.02, etc
Re:What is a supercomputer ? by fitten · 2004-10-26 02:42 · Score: 2, Informative

The reason is this.. more and more of these 'supercomputer' entries appear to be many machines hooked up together, possibly doing a distributed calculation.

However, would projects such as SETI, GRID, and UD qualify with their many thousands of computers all hooked up and performing a distributed calculation ?

If not, then what about the WETA/Pixar/ILM/Digital Domain/Blur/You-name-it renderfarms ? Any one machine on those renderfarms could be put to use for only a single purpose: to render a movie sequence. Any one machine could be working on a single frame of that sequence. Does that count ?

Yes, all of these mentioned belong to a class of supercomputer applications called "Embarassingly Parallel". These types of algorithms are (by far) the easiest to implement since their calculations don't depend on anything being calculated by other nodes in the system. They are characterized by minimal/no communication among nodes (many times, just the communication to hand the node the data on which it is to compute and then one communication at the end to submit the results back to the central node) and lots of compute resources working on the local data. So, they *are* supercomputing of a type, just one that isn't that interesting from a computer science point of view.

There are many problems that require much more communication between the nodes. Calculations performed by one node is dependent upon the results generated by other nodes in the system. Some known solutions require so much communication/synchronization between nodes that it isn't practical to parallelize the problem and a serial solution is more optimal. There has been lots of work on various problems creating algorithms that are more "parallel friendly" in order to speed the solutions. There are some problems that have prizes for someone who can invent a way to make them more parallel.

Anyway, there are many "grains" of parallel computing. The "granularity" of a problem is the ratio of the amount of communication required per computation of the solution algorithm. Coarse grained problems are problems that have low communication/computation requirements. Embarassingly parallel problems are an example of this. The amount of communication required by a distributed node running SETI@HOME is very tiny compared to the amount of computation required for each WU. The same can be said for a render farm. Each node in a render farm receives the image to be rendered, then goes off for a while and renders that frame of the movie and hands the result back to the coordinator, which gives the node the next frame to render. Fine grained problems are the other side of the spectrum and require more communication for each computation operation. Solutions to systems of equations are an example. A problem that has to communicate its results to each of its "neighbors" and receive the results from each of its neighbors on each iteration so that the next iteration can be calculated is more finely grained.

Beowulf clusters, with their slow interconnects, are good at solving coarse grained problems. Other systems, like the new Cray with the high bandwidth, low latency interconnects, work better for fine grained problems. In a fine grained problem, a machine with "slow" processors but a fast interconnect may outperform a Beowulf type cluster that has the fastest commodity CPUs available but a slow interconnect.

By the way, LINPack (the benchmark used for the Top500) is a rather coarse grained problem. That's why Beowulf style clusters appear in the list. There are plenty of other benchmarks that could be used where these clusters would have a hard time.

There were AI CPUs by scattol · 2004-10-26 01:10 · Score: 2, Informative

For a while there were CPUs specifically designed to run LISP, aka AI . Symbolics was one of the better knowns one.

It failed in bankrupcy. My vague understanding was that the designing dedicated LISP processors was hard and slow and with little resources they could not keep up. Essentially the Symbolics computers ran LIPS pretty quickly given the MHZ but SUN and Intel kept moving up the MHZ faster than Symbolics could keep up. In the end there were not speed advantage to a dedicated LISP machine, just an increase in price. Economics might change eventually. Who knows.

don't forget... by Geek_3.3 · 2004-10-26 01:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

(those that go to despair.com will recognize this) that "You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor." Point being, I'm sure having essentially free labor (sans pizza, of course... ;-) might have cut the price down just a little bit too...

Not to poo poo their efforts, but the whole system was essentially a 'loss-leader' for future supercomputers projects using the G5's and Xserve....

Actually, VT will be #8 this time around by daveschroeder · 2004-10-26 01:17 · Score: 4, Interesting

Prof. Jack Dongarra of UTK is the keeper of the official list in the interim between the twice yearly Top 500 lists:

http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.pdf (see page 54)

There have been some new entries, including IBM's BlueGene/L, at 36Tflops, finally displacing Japan's Earth Simulator, and a couple other new entries in the top 5.

Here's just the top 16 as of 10/25/04:

http://das.doit.wisc.edu/misc/top500.jpg

No matter what anyone says, Virginia Tech pulled an absolute coup when they appeared on the list at the end of 2003: no one will likely EVER be able to be #3 on the Top 500 list for a mere US$5.2M...even if the original cluster didn't perform much, or any, "real" work, the publicity and recognition that came of it was absolutely more than worth it.

Also interesting is that there is also a non-Apple PowerPC 970 entry in the top 10, using IBM's JS20 blades...

Hm.. with this much compute power.. by elemur · 2004-10-26 01:29 · Score: 4, Funny

If you add in VirtualPC... presumably the clustered version.. you should start to get to the level of compute power that was recommended by Microsoft for Longhorn... though it still wouldn't be the high end. Expect some sluggishness..

Re:What is the point? by daveschroeder · 2004-10-26 01:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

Rich guys that buy Ferraris and never drive them don't get untold amounts of recognition, publicity, free advertising, news articles, and the capability to catapult themselves to the forefront of the supercomputing community overnight for a paltry sum of money, thus attracting millions of dollars of additional funding and grants to build clusters that WILL be doing real work, such as the one we're talking about now, and the several additional clusters they plan to build in the future, not to mention the benefit of proving that a new architecture, interconnect, and OS will perform well as a supercomputer, allowing more choice, competition, and innovation to enter the scene, which ultimately results in more and better choices for everyone.

Does that answer your question?

Simulations by Ian_Bailey · 2004-10-26 01:51 · Score: 4, Informative

The vast majority of clusters are for simulating very complex systems that require lots and lots of calculations.

You can get a few hints by looking just at their names.

The number one "Earth Simulator Centre" is fairly self-explanatory, going to their website show they create a variety of models for things such as weather, tectonic plate movement, etc.

The number 3 LANL supercomputer "is a key part of DOE's plan to simulate nuclear weapons tests in the absence of actual explosions. The more powerful computers are designed to model explosions in three dimensions, a far more complex task than the two-dimensional models used in weapons design years ago." I imagine that most US government simulations would be doing something simmilar.

Rankings by thopkins · 2004-10-26 02:51 · Score: 3, Funny

should still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November.

Wow, ranked higher than the Virginia Tech football team this year.

Re:So he's saying that... by OmniVector · 2004-10-26 03:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

pricing a top of the line dual 250 opteron with a mobo that has similar features to a powermac (gigabit, pci-x, 8 ram slots, firewire 400 and 800.. which no opterons offer, etc) gives you a system at rough price around $2,473.00. that doesn't include a case, powersupply, hard disk, cdrom, keyboard, or mouse like the powermac does.

what planet are you pricing yoru "similar" x86 hardware on? look, i know mac doesn't have a low end $200 pc. but their high end offerings are not only competitive, but cheap.

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- tristan

Theoretically Speaking by MooseByte · 2004-10-26 03:37 · Score: 2, Funny

"Everything works in theory, but not pratice."

In theory, anyway.

Re:Wow! by Ohreally_factor · 2004-10-26 04:32 · Score: 2, Funny

What, compared to the people who post the Beowulf/Soviet Russia/SCO jokes a million times over? Hard to get a worse sense of humour than them, as even this "new" 7xxxxx user is sick of their lame jokes.

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf cluster jokes are sick of you.

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It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.

this is ground-breaking by SethJohnson · 2004-10-26 07:15 · Score: 2, Funny

I'm a robotic software researcher, so this notion really affects me.

This post deserves its own slashdot article all to itself. Not only has an AI-driven robot posted on slashdot, but apparently someone has designed the robot to research software. So it would make sense that the robot would be reading slashdot. I think the editors should set up an interview with this AI drone known as SnowZero.

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$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!

That's all nice and all... by xornor · 2004-10-26 10:46 · Score: 2, Funny

But it only has 1150 mouse buttons...

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Virginia Tech Supercomputer Up To 12.25 Teraflops

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