Slashdot Mirror
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."
GNAA owns you
OMG LOL LAFFLE~~~~~~~~
"IBM and its partners are currently exploring a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling."
So no PGP key cracking. At least officially.
I wonder how the Fold@Home total CPU power compare to this in terms of percentage?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title
If their supercomputers really were that fast, they would have taken the title back earlier.
Slashdot's Previous story
So, IBM is taking the "Fastest Supercomputer" title away from NEC's Earth Simulator. How can NEC stand for this obvious theft of intellectual property? I sense a lawsuit brewing...
Now imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!...
Obligitory infinite loop comment
IBM can use their computers to help the next Nazi party kill Jews. They have a bad track record, and we shouldn't support them.
Ah...
Must be those 2 guys I always see playing Quake with 1ms pings.
Niggers Niggers, our dark skinned friends. If they're not out working, they'll rape your girlfriend! For jail's their domain, they're society's bane-- Let's hear it for our friend the Nigger!
Linux, linux, it's free as in beer. But if you installed it, you're a goddamn queer! To clear up your pimples, the solutions quite simple-- Just take a bath and use a face wash!
Hitler, Hitler, our glorious fuhrer. With all his jew gassing, he'll make the race purer!
Jews, jews, their noses are long. They don't have to clean the extra skin on their dong! They'll steal all your money, the kabelah's funny-- Let's go for the final solution!
-- May a hundred flowers be planted and a thousand schools of fr1st p0sting contend. Teens4Christ.
I recently read that SGI was to be claiming the world's most powerful supercomputer record from the Earth Simluator...
Does this mean that IBM leapfrogged SGI or does this mean that the SGI machine (to be built for NASA) wasn't all that exciting?
http://www.sgi.com/features/2004/oct/columbia/
I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now...
How 'bout this? 1,000,000! It tatkes pretty long on my P3.
What?
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?
But can it cook me dinner yet? Seriously how much f***ing computer power do we need to bake brownies? I can't wait to throw out my girlfriend 1.0 once they finally come up with one that doesn't put up a inpenetrable firewall in bed.
Will this computer be able to beat humans at chess?
In an apparent first for /. today, mo mention of robots, either.
This is OT, but I never noticed it before - the following HTML works here:
sigs, as if you care.
...this time, it's from NASA. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/nasa_super computer_040809.html
There's been a lot of turnover recently. For those of you keeping track at home, it's now:
IBM BlueGene/L (70.7 teraflops, up from36 in your article)
(?) NEC SX-8 (Not yet installed anywhere; estimated 58.5)
NASA/SGI Columbia (42.7)
NEC Earth Simulator (35.9)
Don't mess with people who measure their server power in acres. :p
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This brings up an enticing possibility. What if Microsoft just patented "being first"? Wouldn't that get rid of all the prior art rubbish they have to cope with with their other patents? I mean, if someone showed prior art for "feline flatulence" or whatever else is developing in Bill Gates' unfortunately windowless office, they would be infringing Microsoft's "being first" patent. This is it folks! The future!
I recall reading on the RealWorldTech forums that these are highly specialized machines and particularly geared to floating point computation. As integer factorization, index calculus computation for discrete logarithm cracking, Pollard rho attacks for computing elliptic curve discrete logarithms, etc. are integer algorithms, crypto should be safe from this particular beast.
And before anyone asks about symmetric/secret-key cryptosystems and hash functions, recall that these are also based on integer operations, so they're safe from the BlueGene as well.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
I did that in hex on a 486DX266 back in the day. It took approximately a month.
I did it in hex because it was easier to write an efficient algorithm.
And then I decided to write a program which would convert that huge resulting hex number to decimal.
Only, that is when I realized that it would take more computational power to convert that number to decimal from hex, than to start from scratch and do it in decimal "natively".
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
But can it play Doom3?
Fuck, yeah!
(for you Team America fans)
"Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now..."
Their sales of Linux.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
It is quite clear what these computers are doing. They are designed to compute the folding patterns of protein molecules, a task which requires immense computational power.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Conan O'Brien, the late-night comedic genius who entertained millions of viewers in the acclaimed "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," died yesterday of natural causes. He would have turned 41 in less than six months.
Conan Christopher O'Brien was born April 18, 1963 to Thomas and Ruth O'Brien in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Mr. O'Brien was raised in an Irish Catholic household as the third of six children, and his struggle for attention as a middle child became a theme throughout life. In a 1998 interview with Irish Independent, Mr. O'Brien said, "My Irish background has had a huge effect on my comedy...I grew up in a large family and there was a lot that went unsaid, so the way we would communicate was through humor. It was the only way we could really express ourselves."
Both of Mr. O'Brien's parents were successful professionals. Dr. Thomas O'Brien graduated from Harvard as an epidemiologist, and taught at Harvard Medical School. Meanwhile, Ruth Reardon O'Brien, Esq. practiced law with a degree from Yale. With strong parental support, Mr. O'Brien was active in youth, taking tap dancing lessons and writing comedic plays that later formed the basis of his career. Mr. O'Brien entered Brookline High School in 1977 and joined the debate team as well as the editorial staff of the student publication "Sagamore." He graduated as Valedictorian in 1981.
Mr. O'Brien then studied at Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1981 to 1985, studying American History and American Literature. He wrote for the comedic publication "Harvard Lampoon" all four years there and was elected president for two consecutive terms, becoming the first student in about 60 years for such a distinction. Mr. O'Brien described his Harvard thesis on Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner as "the least funny thing I ever wrote," in a 1996 interview with Chris Mundy from Rolling Stone magazine. Mr. O'Brien graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1985 with a B.A. in American History.
After graduation, Mr. O'Brien went to Los Angeles seeking career opportunities. After writing for the networks HBO and FOX, then working for a short-lived stage show in Chicago, he moved to New York. In his native east coast, Mr. O'Brien finally got his big break in 1988 as a staff writer for the late-night sketch comedy show "Saturday Night Live." His SNL team was recognized with a 1989 Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series.
Mr. O'Brien left SNL in spring 1991 to explore other career interests. He wrote an unsuccessful TV pilot called "Lookwell," starring Adam West, the former Batman, for whom Mr. O'Brien had an "obsession." After that, he wrote for the FOX hit series "The Simpsons," and later became the show's supervising producer.
Mr. O'Brien's next opportunity in April 1993 secured his long-term future as a talk-show host. Despite his onscreen inexperience, he successfully auditioned to become host of a late-night talk show replacing David Letterman's show on NBC. "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" premiered September 13, 1993, and Mr. O'Brien with his self-deprecating humor entertained a national audience throughout the show's run. Mr. O'Brien and the "Late Night" crew won Writer's Guild Awards in 1997 and 2000, and were consistently nominated for the Emmy Awards from 1996 to 2002.
Mr. O'Brien earned other distinctions throughout his career. Entertainment Weekly magazine featured him as one of "50 Funniest People Alive," and People magazine noted him in 1996 among the "25 Most Intriguing People." In addition, he spoke at Harvard University's Commencement 2000 and hosted the 54th annual Emmy Awards.
In his personal life, Mr. O'Brien tried to achieve consistency between his lifestyle and career demands. For five years, he dated and lived with Lynn Kaplan, the talent coordinator for "Late Night." After the dissolution of that relationship, Mr. O'Brien met advertising executive Liza Powell during a skit on the show. Mr. O'Brien and Liza, daughter of Seattle Dixieland band leader Jake Powell,
why not put it to good use...they build a few of these machines...say like 50, and wire them all up and get to work solving this SPAM problem we seem to have.
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 !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
i wonder how long it would take it to calculate the next prime number for that contest thing: http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
http://www.backstab.net
Well, I'm confused, how can they figure out the speed so easily, when it's so hard to test the difference in speed between x86 AMDs & Intels? The other computers aren't faster at some things? Is it some special bench?
Thew scientists at LLNL are not interested in cracking the code to your collection of homemade wonderwoman erotica.
With the defeat of John Kerry, it is now official. Headcraft confirms: *BEHEADING is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BEHEADING community when Headcraft confirmed that the total number of executions by *BEHEADING dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all executions worldwide. Coming on the heels of a recent Headcraft survey which plainly states that *BEHEADING has dropped dramatically after the US invasion of Iraq, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BEHEADING is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Ruthless Dictators comprehensive execution test.
You don't need to be a Jailed Dictator to predict *BEHEADING's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BEHEADING faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BEHEADING because *BEHEADING is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BEHEADING. As many of us are already aware, *BEHEADING continues to lose market share. Rivers of blood no longer flow from headless corpses..
Ruthless dictator *BEHEADING is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core dictators. The sudden and unpleasant deaths of long time *BEHEADING evangelists Uday and Qusay Hussein only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: *BEHEADING is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
*BEHEADING leader Qusay stated that 500,000 Iraqis 'dissappeard' during Saddam's regime. How many of them died by *BEHEADING? Let's see. Executions were generally carried out by hanging, bullet to the head, or *BEHEADING. With *BEHEADING being to most difficult to clean up after, let's conservatively estimate that only 5% of the Iraqis that 'disappeared' were *BEHEADED, so 500,000 / 20 = 25,000 deaths by *BEHEADING during Saddam's regime. Saddam took power in 1979, meaning his regime lasted 24 years. Therefore there were (25,000 / 24) ~ 1041 *BEHEADINGS PER YEAR during Saddam's regime. This is consistent with human rights reports. Since the US invasion, there have been approximately 50 *BEHEADINGS. Therefore there have been (50 / 1.5) ~ 33 *BEHEADINGS PER YEAR after the US invasion. Clearly, the terrorists are not as efficient at *BEHEADING. *BEHEADINGS have dropped 97% in the past 18 months. Clearly *BEHEADING is dying.
Due to the troubles of Saddam's Regime, what with it being gone and everything, massive amounts of *BEHEADING stopped and was taken over by a dismal few but high profile *BEHEADINGs that were carried out by nothing but cowardly terrorists Now *BEHEADING is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BEHEADING has rapidly declined in market share. *BEHEADING is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BEHEADING is to survive at all it will be among terrorist networks. *BEHEADING continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BEHEADING is dying.
Fact: *BEHEADING is dead.
Fact: *The Tech Vote is dead.
Fact: *.Slashdot.org is dead.
© 2004 CmdrTaco (troll)
I hope high gas prices are depriving your children, you fucking dumbass.
"A Beowulf Cluster of these!!!"
What? No one has posted that already?
"...I can't wait to throw out my girlfriend 1.0 once they finally come up with one that doesn't put up a inpenetrable firewall in bed...."
I defeated your girlfriend's firewall: I used her built-in back door.
it can process an infinite loop in under 3.8 microseconds.
No particular reason.
Mod me down for it. Don't care.
What some people will do to win the RC5-72 prize from Distributed.net... sad really.
I would rather get a list of top secret fatest computers in the world.
The IBM BlueGene/L now get 70.72 T/S,and this is beta machine,it is only 1/4 finale.The more information ,please visitor the site:http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news/NewsReleases/ 2004/NR-04-11-01.html
I wonder if Apple will just sell iPods now and sell the Mac division to IBM?
maybe I should get a stronger PGP key.
I'm using a 4096 bit key. Simply because it's not perceptable slower to use it for encryption but it takes more work to brute force it for decryption. Well, when compared to a 1024 bit key.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That really increases the SGI usefulness. Develop/Debug/setup on your laptop/desktop and ship to the Supercomputer for production.
This is a pretty useful thing I think.
Bluegen hitting over 70TF is a tremendous effort. There is nothing that comes near. And this is only 16 racks ( 25% of the total system) of the 64 rack system.
Hats off to IBM for doing an outstanding job. And to the others in the race better luck next year.
Also this runs ppc chips what else do you want an Itanium/Opteron what you want radiation burns.....
PS I posted this on thursday night but the moronic slashdot editor threw it out. This is old news... Anyway... C'est la vie.
Maybe we are just one really, really, really cool video game.
Perhaps we amuze the people watching and controlling us to no end. Perhaps, just perhaps, the reason there are more humans all the time is people getting into the game, and CPU speed going up. When people die off, and their are wars, thats because the CPU cant handle the calculations for all of the poeple, so a built in life span was included. But, eventually, the CPU will become powerfull enough that no player or power gamer will ever have to have his character die.
OR, maybe this is all just kind of really stupid talk and we should focus on really really cool and very fast super computers.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
The Brain-Mind Institute http://bmi.epfl.ch/ at EPFL (Lausanne, Swiss) is about to aquire one for modeling cortical circuits (or brain modules). This requires simulation of 100,000 neurons, each one is composed of a couple of differential equations. You need a lot of computer power (both speed and memory) just to get results for 1 second of real time. What will be learn from this kind of project is still a open question ...
The final machine will help scientists work out the safety, security and reliability requirements for the US's nuclear weapons stockpile, without the need for underground nuclear testing.
Could someone explain to me why this task requires such a monster of a machine? And how can one address (as in write code for) the numerous unknowable factors that seems to be included in the problem that is to be solved? The definition just seems to be too abstract to be an actual solvable problem, and if it is solvable it would require an immense human resource contribution for the code it is to run. Wouldn't it be simpler to just stick those people into a room and not let them out until they've solved the problem?
I've long wondered who comes up with the code they run on these 'pooters. Anyone who can offer some insight on the usual complexity of the code that is run/problems that are solved?
All rites reversed 2010
June 21, 2004 .. Did I miss something here? This is OLD NEWS.
And what if they build a little quantum computer?
Not too long ago, we had a post regarding SGI's reclaim of the record. Shortly thereafter we now have IBM saying they've got something better in the works and it's only a tenth the speed of the final rollout.
With the next Top 500 list a week away, it seems to me that companies are putting more credence into their position on the list...which begs the question, how much is maintaining the fastest supercomputer in the world worth a company like to IBM, or any other company?
It seems that with IBM's resources, they could easily maintain a machine owned by them that would hold that #1 spot on the list for all time. Of the serious contenders for such a position, I only see IBM as having the manufacturing, research, and consulting potential to use this machine for both marketing and research values. Ergo, anyone with a computational problem could send the job over to IBM and have the answer at a cost representative of the timeliness of the answer and the computing power it would take to solve it.
I don't know how much such an endeavour would cost to build and maintain, but given IBM's financial resources, I think they could afford it.
--sean
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
*snip*
" maybe I should get a stronger PGP key."
We've already calculated your next 250 pgp keys, and divined your future. Hint: avoid badgers.
Just imagine a whole Beowulf cluster of these babies!
When they talk about 5 nines in big iron, who knew it would be the percentage of time spend in the System Idle Process?
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
that Slashdot looks better in Windows than in Linux, despite it being a Linux enthusiast site? All of the fonts are too large, but on other sites the fonts are right. No, it's not JUST a Linux thing - it seems to be the same in Solaris (both with either Mozilla or Firefox). Any solutions?
Machine number one will go to Livermore, probably for doing some nuclear stuf. Number two will go to the Netherlands for the Lofar project. This is a 300 kilometer diameter radio telescope that observes at low frequencies (up to 250 MHz). It constists of thousands of small antennas spread across half the country. Their signals will be interferometrically combined to form the images (compare e.g. to the VLA). Blue Gene will be used to combine all the signals in real time, I believe the total bandwidth from the antennas is some terabyte/sec.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
You've made me think that lots of snapshots updated on some web page that would show an almost real-time measurement of the fastest. These labs would not have to wait half a year before getting recognized, nor would the manufacturers. You wouldn't stay on top consistently perhaps, but it would be very interesting to see the machines climb as the kinks are worked out.
Ok, so of the three fastest computers in the world, one is almost exclusively dedicated to environmental climate models, and the other two have it as part of their tasks.
Perhaps this could bury the arguments on Slashdot that there is no hard data or serious research about global warming.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
No, John, I can't imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
"My logic is undeniable."
i bet this thing can compile as entire OS with multiple desktop WMs & office & other applications from source in less than a minute...
Yeh I bought me a couple, run Doom 3 not too badly...
I really wonder if the list of the worlds fastest supercomputers is fully updated. I wouldn't be surprized if in the future, it is revealed that NSA had the fastest computer all along. I don't think it's too far fetched to say that the worlds fastest computers are used to crack encryptions. ... so yeah, I guess it's time to upgrade those PGP keys! :)
Because IBM's system is a prototype. It's not a real-world production system.
NEC's Earth Simulator in Yokohama is a functioning super computer on which researchers can run simulations. You can't do that yet with the IBM system.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
I'm slipping in the Seti@Home rankings. :)
Currently, it isn't even a chip (or at least, last I heard). It was (a lot of) molekyles with 7 "mutable" spots (I think it was rotation). The state was read using NMR spectroscopy).
It is about as close to a chip as a printing press to a photocopier ;-)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Coincidentally, as I was hiking through the woods yesterday, I was talking about Blue Gene with one of the guys who works on the project at IBM. Blue Gene is intended to go to 400 TFlops, and the 70 TFlops number is due to the second piece of the machine being put together. For a while Earth Simulator was running LINPACK fastest at like 36 TFlops. Then IBM came out with piece one of Blue Gene and ran it at 40 TFlops. Then NEC announced something running at like 46 TFlops. Looks like IBM is back on top. It should be a good race.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
But really, is this not a general misconception? Are computers' capacity measured by how fast they are and not by how powerful they are? After all, the unit Hz already has "per second" defined, and the system isn't running anywhere. :)
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
IIRC, for each qubit you add, the computing power doubles. So while we're not into the really powerful stuff yet, progress should be pretty rapid. I've dug up a little info from google and this seems to be a great place to learn as to how it all works. Because of superposition (read the link), "the number of computations that a quantum computer could undertake is 2^n, where n is the number of qubits used. A quantum computer comprised of 500 qubits would have a potential to do 2^500 calculations in a single step. This is an awesome number - 2^500 is infinitely more atoms than there are in the known universe (this is true parallel processing - classical computers today, even so called parallel processors, still only truly do one thing at a time: there are just two or more of them doing it)". 7 doesn't seem like much, but a few times more and you have an extremely powerful computer. As for the price, I haven't got a clue, Google it.
An old joke (heard it circa 1990 and it was probably old then), but I heard it arose from a supercomputer that really did process an infinite loop in finite time... I don't really remember the details, but I think somebody put it in a loop (for test purposes?), but it had glitchy hardware (memory fault, maybe?) -- it changed the jump instruction or something, and exited the loop. I imagine the operator was quite surprised that the program terminated without being killed by the user or OS.
wow, old news. .)
I think Drudge actually broke this and I submited it to slashdot on Friday.
You guys aren't still sore about that comment I made about Slashdot being run by a bunch of liberal lozers...are you?
awwww, I was just gloating
,
,
,
...to tell us that the meaning of life is 42?
Ya know, it is November and apples drop.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Yey for IBM. Now I can stop hearing about the earth simulator and how great it is
Thank you for trying the IBM PGP key recovery service. Your are entitled to a free 6-month trial period.
As per your request, we analyzed your PGP-signed posts and deduced your passphare. Your current PGP passphrase is:
My b3st computer for a g1rlfriend!
(Strength: 38%)
We suggest you pick a less obvious PGP passphrase in the future.
Thank you,
-- The IBM BlueGene team.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Im sure that the actual fastest supercomputer in the world is probably directly in the hands of the NSA.
they have an undisclosed budget, but one that probably runs into the billions of dollars to spend on hardware each year..