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NNSA Supercomputer Breaks Computing Record
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."
It's amazing that we were stalled at 50TFLOPS for two years, and are piling on the FLOPS now.
wait till its fully online.
-
This performance was achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at only the half-system point of the IBM BlueGene/L installation. Last November, just one-quarter of BlueGene/L topped the TOP500 List of the world's top supercomputers.
Is there anything that will be able to touch this when it's complete?
Didn't IBM push Blue Gene to 180'something teraflops recently?? News story herer
a Beowulf cluster of these !
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Just imagine running Fractint on this puppy!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
There was another machine that had already beaten that record, but unfortunately failed a diagnostic test for banned substances...
> 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."
Did you read the fucking article?
"This performance was achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at only the half-system point of the IBM BlueGene/L installation. Last November, just one-quarter of BlueGene/L topped the TOP500 List of the world's top supercomputers."
See, this is the SAME supercomputer that has already topped the list last November, so the latest record did NOT make it the fastest supercomputer in the world.
It already had been the fastest supercomputer in the world.
that it almost meets the minimum requirements for Longhorn.
Slap an X850 in there and you've got some serious Doom 3 action.
... or safer and more efficient nuclear reactors.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
...will it run NetHack?
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.
This computer is still way too slow for things like studying molecular structure, even with simplified models.
I rather miss the time when the world's most
powerful supercomputer was used to study our
planet. It was something to be proud of, actually.
These machines are essentially weapons. Pity, that.
FYI the top 500 supercomputers list is maintained at http://www.top500.org/.
With SSE instructions, you can process 4 floats at once, so I'm guessing that 3.2 GHz processor can do a few gigaflops.
This is the same flawed logic that people try to apply to NASA on here a lot, that we shouldn't send people to the Moon/Mars until we fix all the problems on earth.
Halting scientific research to worry about all of our other problems is the wrong approach for many reasons. It is often scientific advances which lead to improved quality of life in many other areas of society.
Didn't we cover this before ?
I think of LAPACK as being much more up-to-date for benchmarking.
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
RTFA
Or, at least the article's title:
"NNSA Supercomputer Breaks Computing Record: Exceeds 100 TERAFLOPS DOE/NNSA and IBM partnership on BlueGene/L, a tool for national security"
I know its not 3.2billion because most micro operations take at least 3 or 4 clock cycles.
That used to be true, but with pipelining and parallelism you can no longer just divide the cycles per second by cycles per instruction and get instructions per second. Pipelining means that an operation does not have to finish before the next one is begun, and parallelism means that more than one operation can begin at the same time.
So now, the answer is to basically look it up.
Kill, Tux, kill!
The irony is that all of that topics already have an solution... they're not put in pratice because of politics. Please, don't blame the scientists... blame the governament, or blame the people that elected the politicians that run your country!
So instead of writing this on Slashdot, why don't you make a telephone call to you Senator? Why don't you gather people that think like you and tell it to him?
If he got your vote, he might have a minute or two to listen what you has to say... You voted, didn't you?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
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.
It may be sad that we live in a world where nuclear weapons research is driving the computing power, but it doesn't mean that the power of BlueGene/L isn't going to be used for thousands of other peaceful scientific applications, too.
Depends on the problem and the memory performance as much as it does on the GPU. There's no good answer to that question. For kicks though, this paper has some measurements for matrix multiply using ATLAS. It's comparing a Pentium 4 to an NV40 GPU. The P4 wins at about 7 GFlops, and the NV40 loses due to horrible memory performance. That's pretty ironic considering that the NV40 has quite a few more FPU's, and that they're in parallel. It's a good example of why you can't ever say for sure how a processor's going to perform until you test it on a real workload.
The issue I have with this kind of reasoning is that even with the facts known, pollution especially goes on unabated! Our own president (Bush) chose to opt out of Kyoto. Meanwhile, some of our people are being found with diseases that were once unheard of just a few decades ago. Childhood diabetes is one, and what about juvenile cancer? The current research in fuel efficient vehicles and the like is driven not much by pollution, but by profits, when the price of oil reaches way up there. Who doesn't know this? Don't you?
I think that as long as we have the research going on actively, there's still some hope. Once people stop caring about even finding out, then we're in trouble.
An Apple Xserve G5 does 30+ gigaflops.
Sig Nature
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
All these increment "my computer is faster than your computer" articles are getting boring. I'll be interested in when they reach a petaflop. With "Moore's law" predicting a 10x speed up every five years, that should be around 2010.
Or we can model protein folding even faster.
Run more accurate climate simulations even faster.
Run population simulations even faster.
Run CAD/CAM simulations even faster.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processor performs 6.4gflops, but clock speed isn't the only determining factor.
I'd like to see a computing measurement unit for comparing how much energy it takes to perform those TFLOPS.
must... stay... awake...
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
They bought them from the Canadians.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Having massive computing power in the hands of Lawrence Livermore scientists reduces or even eliminates the need for U.S. nuclear forces to actually detonate nuclear and thermonuclear explosions.
Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Remember, everything in the inventory was designed with far less compute power than today's desktops.
Or we can model protein folding even faster. The Folding@Home wars have begun! BlueGene versus the human race!
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
...to FINALLY have working voice recognition! :)
Now for the obligatory...
* Now imagine a Beowolf cluster of these!
* This would make a hell of a MAME PC!
* Windows will finally boot up in under five minutes!
* Any Java GUI app would STILL run like a dog on this!
Did I miss any??
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
thats all fine but does it run doom 3. and whats the framerate? shouldnt computers be measured by the fps and not flops.
Hmmm... I wonder how long it would take this puppy to crack my 4096 Diffie-Hellman/DSS PGP key...
João Pinheiro
Can it play Doom 3 on the highest settings?
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
A small amount of logic would probably dictate that NASA is probably interested in modeling spaceflight stresses, or simulations of large parts of the universe, or large physical properties, like a supernova or black holes.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
A slightly larger dose of logic would tell you that NASA has nothing to do with this cluster, that it belongs to the NNSA or the National Nuclear Security Agency. They are probably more interested in testing new reactor designes or running simulations to demonstrate the effects of an aircraft crashing into one of their reactor domes (though I honestly believe that no one really believes that will happen).
"making it the fastest supercomputer in the world"
Or rather the fastest supercomputer with published LINPACK results. There are a number of reasons that agencies with supercomputers might not want to publish results.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
What we need to realize is that this "good" and "bad" is also a product of relations of power in society. Therefore we have to study societal structures; how they result in a certain way of thinking that produces technological "innovations," and how these innovations in turn are deployed by us and according to our understanding of what is good or bad.
To sum up, the "bigger picture" is not that sometimes technology can be good, but that good and bad itself is a thing of this world. If there is a mistake in logic that is made all too-often, it is trying to evaluate technology in itself rather than focusing on these social structures and how it shapes our understanding of technology and ourselves.
A PowerPC G5 running at 2 GHz churns out 8 GFLOPS, just for reference. I imagine the numbers of out an Intel-type CPU would be similar, but I don't know how the vector unit on an Intel-type CPU works --if at all --so I can't say for sure.
then you have to fix it. No supper until that.
135.3 trillion floating point operations per second
Does this mean we can't slashdot it?
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
You can now open a Mozilla session in under a minute!
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I think the moderators need to RTFA before they mod you down.
Microsoft just announced that NNSA is the fastest because it uses the upcoming version of Microsoft Office XP 2005, which offers faster startup times and a talking paperclip optimized for modern processors.
I wonder if Google has ever Linpack'd its clusters to get some idea of the computational power driving their services. I would imagine it would rank pretty high. Here is a tidbit from an article I found...
e &type=news&ID=1893
"Assuming that the 1Ghz chip is going at about a third the gigaflops of a 2Ghz processor (3.3Gflops), we can then guess at the size of the Google supercomputer. Just for the sake of argument, let's go with 1 Gigaflop per processor. This means that the Google supercomputer has about 189 teraflops of power on the low end of my estimates, 253 teraflops on the middle end, and 316 teraflops on the high end. This would easily put it on top of the list of fastest computers in the world."
http://www.addict3d.org/index.php?page=viewarticl
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
you are to be sentenced to use Windows ME for all eternity
How 'bout we use Blue Gene for climate modeling, and start setting off full-yield nuclear tests to insure the viability of the stockpile? I don't terribly like the idea of nukes, but the genie is out of the bottle and there's no stuffing it back in - we need to have the things, and if god forbid we ever have to use them, I'd like to see them work properly. Seriously...unless you use one of the interconnect cables to garrote somebody, these computers are hardly "weapons", quite the opposite in fact.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
When I worked at the NSA (I'm free to say this now because I live in Canada), I often heard the IT guys talking about how the supercomputer we used for sorting and decrypting telecommunications was faster than the ones they used at NASA, and a new cluster was in the planning stages to exceed 200 TFLOPS.
This was back in 2001.
I really have a strong feeling the NSA is still ahead of NASA on this one, but they don't publish information about their clusters... for obvious reasons.
Ah - the standard "cynical" litany 1 A. How unimaginative.
Here's an article describing some of the specs.
/ gupta.pdf
http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegene/talks
It's from the days when BlueGene/L was still relatively small, but the basic design hasn't changed since then.
Turns out it's split into I/O and computing nodes. The 1024 I/O nodes run Linux. Each controls 64 dual-cpu nodes, which use simplistic microkernels written from scratch using Linux as an example.
The network architecture sounds funky: apparantly it's based on a torus!
The problem with this sort of discussion is that in academia, when you have a huge collection of really smart people, intelligence isn't general purpose. I'm a computational engineering guy. That's what I do, that's what I'm good at. I'm not good at balancing budgets, I can't do chem worth shit, and politics is way, way beyond me. However, I can simulate stuff.
A lot of my friends are math people. They do math. If the policy people need math, my friends will be there for them. They're good at math. I'm good at computational engineering. If you need something simulated, I can do that. We build computers. That's what we do. Rocket guys build rockets, math guys do math, and I build computers to simulate stuff.
Money can be repurposed. People can't.
-twb
apples to oranges....
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
On the LHC project, One person's 3.4ghz does 1.4 gigaflops. but that's per cpu in a dual cpu machine. http://lhcathome.cern.ch/show_host_detail.php?host id=27742
But more importantly, what's it 3dmark score?
You just gotta love a sentence like that!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure everyone can agree that N. Korea is a clear-and-present danger.
l l
p osts
However, according to the lastest poll in late May, most of Europe does not see Iran as a threat. I'm not sure if this poll was conducted before or after the 30+ reporters got access to underground facilities where they were shown 50,000 (yes, fifty bloody thousand) certrifuge rods to process the fuel into bomb making matrial. Obviously, Iran did not say they would make a bomb...but lets just lay the cards on the table and let facts speak for itself. The answer is rather obvious. And as an American, it scares me to hear members of Iran political parties chant "Death to America".
Sites below.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/03/30/iran.po
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=7768
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1374229/
Life is not for the lazy.
Don't forget the canonical 'how many fps in [insert 3d game/benchmark here] would it get?'
The issue I have with this kind of reasoning is that even with the facts known, pollution especially goes on unabated! Our own president (Bush) chose to opt out of Kyoto. Meanwhile, some of our people are being found with diseases that were once unheard of just a few decades ago. Childhood diabetes is one, and what about juvenile cancer? The current research in fuel efficient vehicles and the like is driven not much by pollution, but by profits, when the price of oil reaches way up there. Who doesn't know this? Don't you?
Science can't change the minds of people who aren't willing to base their decisions on it.
Most Americans don't know or care about things like atmospheric CO2 levels, electron orbitals, or thrust/weight ratios. They care about things that cause immediate emotional responses in themselves, usually from the media, and which are usually completely trivial in the big picture.
Those are the people that elect our politicians, and so our government is made up of people who cater to that mentality.
Unless that changes, US governmental decisions will always be made based on creating a desirable emotional response in that large constituency, or at least a good percentage of it.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
a total linear computational speed of 60 trillian operations per second
BlueGene/L is highly parallel, yes? What speed can just one of its processors do?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
does this mean that quake 3 will support more then 8 players? Such a change would bode better for the human race, as videogames are truly becoming the next best drug for the masses. People would come together just like in that book, the Comet. Wars would cease to exist, China would put welcome mats at its borders, etc.. etc..
I'm currently running Folding@Home...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
2 + 2 = 4.
2 + 2 = 4.
Orville wright was an english writer. He wrote nineteen eighty four and animal matter.
Now, they're sufficiently wacko that that that's not an impossibility, but the real threat to them isn't military - it's that the US, South Korea, or Japan might just start air-dropping handheld TV sets on them and let them see the propaganda that modern industrial commercialism puts out for their markets (government propaganda directed at the North Koreans would probably be less effective - random Korean MTV with restaurant and grocery store and clothing commercials tends to be the really devastating stuff for communist regimes.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
the one that they're not telling us about... how many teraBOPS can that 1 do...
Get your torrents...
Speaking of evil... From the press release: "ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal" They don't mention, in these press releases, how they have redefined the words "safety" and "reliability". In their usage, "safety" is defined as "it really will pop when you press the button", and "reliability" is defined as "it really will demolish as much as it's rated to demolish". This is a neat bit of Orwellianism on their part. Everybody likes safety, right? But nothing in the charter, under their interpretation, says that it's their job to make sure they don't leak, or pop by accident, or vanish mysteriously, despite that any normal person would assume that from reading it.