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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.
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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.
Slap an X850 in there and you've got some serious Doom 3 action.
...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.
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"
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.
An Apple Xserve G5 does 30+ gigaflops.
Sig Nature
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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."