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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."
"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.
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...
Ah...
Must be those 2 guys I always see playing Quake with 1ms pings.
No, that record was set by a previous machine. This one is just a prototype for a much larger/faster version, and still managed to hit 70 teraflops...
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
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.
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.
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
The parent poster is referring to this book, which was from about three years ago.
I have read it. It's fundamentally a hatchet job. IBM was the prime supplier of Hollerith punched card machines worldwide, whether they were sorters or keypunch machines or whatever. The fact that they supplied them to the Nazis was used to create a conspiracy whereby IBM favored the extermination of Jews.
The book appeared to be angling to tarnish Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, primarily, rather than the modern company.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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?
"Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now..."
Their sales of Linux.
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 !
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?
"...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.
I would rather get a list of top secret fatest computers in the world.
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.
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
As mentioned in this article http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/06/ 0511220&tid=127&tid=208&tid=10
computers have no problem beating humans at chess.
What would really make news is if computers would
start beating humans at Go. Then again, Go is much less about brute force and deep searching; and more
about pattern recognition. Something that humans
seen to have a monopoly on.
Indeed. Not so long ago I heard that a team had succesfully factorized 12 (into 4*3) using a quantum computer. (It was a 7 qubit 'puter) :)
Quantum computer has a way to go, even by paranoid standards.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
*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.
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]
Yes and no.
The Linux-based host nodes manage user interaction functions, while the Linux-based service nodes provide control and monitoring capabilities.
Linux is also used in I/O nodes, which provide a gigabit Ethernet connection to the outside world for each group of 64 compute nodes, or every 128 processors. Thus, the full BlueGene/L system will have 1024 I/O nodes, which essentially form a Linux cluster.
The actual compute nodes -- the 128,000 processors -- do not run Linux, but instead run a very simple operating system written from scratch by the Project's scientists.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
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
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.
That and it's really low power... somwhere in the powerpoint presentations they have a graphic showing the Blue Gene/L uses a little less power than the same volume of IBM thinkpads.
Oh.. and given the costs involved I think idle time will wind up being sort of low.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.