IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title

dshaw858 writes "BBC News reports that IBM has unveiled its new Blue Gene/L machine. The Blue Gene project already has two of the top ten supercomputers in the world. Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now... maybe I should get a stronger PGP key."

Comments

Re:Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The machine has more nodes this time. It clocked in at over 70 teraflops, instead of the "mere" 36 that they had last time.

They probably did this because NASA/SGI's Columbia machine did over 40 teraflops a few weeks ago and the Top 500 list is coming out this Monday. They wanted to be on top, I think. :)

Re:Chaos Theory...

[nwbvt]

"What are our odds of hitting the protein jackpot?"

100%. Given that we exist on this planet (which is of course a necessary fact in order for there to be a 'we' in the equation), proteins must exist on our planet. The probability of any given planet having proteins evolve is irrelevant as we do not live on just 'any given planet', we must (as a condition of our existence) live on a planet on which life did evolve.

Re:Don't worry

[Duncan3]

I wonder how the Fold@Home total CPU power compare to this in terms of percentage?

Folding@home has almost 3x the FLOPS, but we're all on the same side here. Slightly different problems can be tackled when you have local bandwidth.

Also keep in mind that Folding@home is not one project, but dozens of projects sharing the same CPU pool.

Years to go before we figure out how folding really happens...

Re:Chaos Theory...

[Coryoth]

They really need to get these things crackin on chaos theory... How many inhabited planets equals one amino acid chain? What are our odds of hitting the protein jackpot? You know?

Ah, Chaos Theory possibly the most widely popularised, yet least widely understood areas of mathematics ever. Exactly how is Chaos Theory going to help in counting extrasolar planets, or calculating probabilities? You need to actually have some understanding of the system before you can hope to actually apply any dynamical system theory to it at all. Presently, I don't think we do understand exactly how random chemicals manage to form proteins, and self replicating chemicals. I don't see how a fast computer and a fueld of math largely irrelevant to the subject at hand is going to help.

Jedidiah.

Guessing vs Gut feeling

[Taco Cowboy]

In this business, more than others, Gut feeling plays a leading role.

Financial Data Modelling is a fine idea, but the whole thing boils down to human psyche - and unless someone comes up with a perfect AI - one that is one step ahead in psycho term than human, - be it GT or OR or whatever else, market trend is very much based on butterfly effect + herd instinct + stochastic resonance with a whole lot of chaos effects thrown in.

That is why it's so dynamic !

Re:Guessing vs Gut feeling

[metlin]

Absolutely.

That's why a lot of these systems use such things as socio-cultural influences, press and media data and the like.

Unfortunately, the stock market is an area that is an ecosystem of its own -- preys and victims -- and therefore, predicting that is almost as hard as predicting human behaviour.

And ofcourse, the only reason the economies _thrive_ is because of the chaos - everyone would like to believe that they can leverage it to make a profit for themselves. :-)

And the best part is, everyone can, if they played their cards carefully enough.

Re:Guessing vs Gut feeling

[name773]

an ecosystem of its own -- preys and victims...And the best part is, everyone can, if they played their cards carefully enough.
how can everyone be making money? you already said there are preys & victims, and people have to be making that money from somewhere

Re:What about SGI?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it just means that IBM (this time, at least) are full of PR-shit. The supercomputer they're talking about has one big difference from NASA's new system - the IBM box hasn't even left development yet, whereas the SGI system has been shipped and installed at a paying customer's site.

Need proof? Here's one way you could go about getting it:

(you) Hi IBM, I'm thinking of buying a BlueGene system for my lab, but I'm wondering - what operating system can I install on it?
(IBM) It runs Linux!
(you) But I looked carefully through the Linux source code, and couldn't find any mention of BlueGene systems. Are you sure it'll work?
(IBM) Actually, you need to use our modified version of Linux.
(you) Oh okay, no problem. Where can I get the source?

At this point, the IBM sales rep's head will implode as he realises he has only two options: he can either stall (and the longer he stalls, the more it looks like he might be violating the GPL!), or he can admit the truth: the operating system doesn't _actually_ exist yet in any sort of finished form yet.

On the other hand, SGI's version of Linux that runs on the 256-way Altix BX2 systems is a free download, as it should be. Start here.

Hope this helps! Your post does raise the interesting question of where the Top500 group (or benchmarking people more generally) should drawn the line: it's nice to know about cutting edge machines, which may even be "one of a kind" installations, but somehow it's not so helpful when companies announce performance results of things they haven't even finished building it. It would not be out of the realms of possibility that the final BlueGene machine shares little (or nothing) in common with the machine they're talking about today, which would mean that this PR is basically nothing but a fairly baseless grab at mindshare.

Re:Climate modeling

[HeghmoH]

Playing devil's advocate:

Just because people are running a bunch of simulations on climate change doesn't mean the results are useful. If people were running a bunch of simulations on the existence of dragons and fairies, I would hardly expect reasoning people to use that as evidence that they're real.