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NNSA Supercomputer Breaks Computing Record

Posted by timothy on from the we're-simulating-a-stockpile dept.

Lecutis writes "National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton F. Brooks announced that on March 23, 2005, a supercomputer developed through the Advanced Simulation and Computing program for NNSAs Stockpile Stewardship efforts has performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOP/s) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world."

11 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Neat by neccoant · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's amazing that we were stalled at 50TFLOPS for two years, and are piling on the FLOPS now.

    1. Re:Neat by woah · · Score: 3, Interesting
      The reason is, of course, that we've been stuck with sameish desktop performance as well. Which correlates with supercomputer performance, since nowdays most of them use Intel/AMD processors.

      Just goes to show that Moore's law won't hold forever.

    2. Re:Neat by imsabbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, in fact the truth is a right in the middle.
      Linpack is VERY easy to parallize. Earth simulator and other vector machines get over 85% of their theoretical processing power with linpack, and even clusters with relatively abyssmal interconnects are still in the 50% range.

      Lots of computational problems need orders of magnitutes more inter-node communication, up to the point where linpack doesnt even matter anymore and clusters and vector computers with the same linpack score are a factor of 10 or 20 apart.

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
  2. Re:From the press release... by Daniel+Boisvert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The closest I've heard of is the Cray X1E, but even that only claims 147 TFLOPS.

  3. Re:hmmmmm... by a1cypher · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just for a point of reference, does anybody know how many floating point operations a 3.2ghz processor can do per seccond?

    I know its not 3.2billion because most micro operations take at least 3 or 4 clock cycles.

  4. LINPACK usage? by Gleepy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think of LAPACK as being much more up-to-date for benchmarking.

    --
    Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
  5. Human Intelligence? by kyle90 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Isn't the human brain supposed to be equivalent to a supercomputer running at about ~100 teraflops? And if so, shouldn't this computer be smarter than us?

    --
    Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
    1. Re:Human Intelligence? by Kethinov · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Isn't the human brain supposed to be equivalent to a supercomputer running at about ~100 teraflops? And if so, shouldn't this computer be smarter than us?
      In Star Trek TNG 2x09 Data was quoted at having a total memory capacity of somewhere around 90 petabytes with a total linear computational speed of 60 trillian operations per second.

      One would say this supercomputer is already more than twice as smart as Data!
      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
  6. Re:Wow! by ucblockhead · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Heh. I guess I wasn't the only one who christianed a new machine by running fractint on it. Gave it up around 1998 because there was just no point.

    --
    The cake is a pie
  7. Human Intelligence is More than Speed by Ted+Holmes · · Score: 2, Interesting
    One of the landmarks we needed to pass in order for computers to approximate Human intelligence is the processing speed.

    Estimates are that the Human brain computes somewhere between 100 Teraflops and 1000 Teraflops,
    and Google was performing somewhere between 100 and 300 Teraflops. in late 2004.

    P.S. Since doing that bit of research, every time Google checks my spelling and responds with "did you mean..." the hair stands on the back of my neck :)

    But it's more than processing speed. It needs to have the software to do things like decision making, analysis, reasoning, evaluating, judging, information-organizing, learning, logic etc. which would normally require a human to perform.

    We're not far off though...

    --

    Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence

  8. DOE's Senior Activity Center by Animats · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The "stockpile stewardship program" is basically a senior activity center for retired physicists. They have busywork projects to keep people thinking about how to design nuclear weapons. DOE is worried that all the old bomb designers will die off, and no new ones will replace them.

    Remember, everything in the inventory was designed with far less compute power than today's desktops.