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Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer
deepexplorer writes "Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back. Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73 times faster than the
Blue Gene. Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teraflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops."
It's Vista, Not Longhorn.
There are 5 BlueGene projects (the last of which, Q, is on hold until IBM can tell whether BlueGene/L or BlueGene/C is better). Beyond that, I know very little of the other projects.
To paraphrase my boss - "BlueGene/L was evolutionary; Blue/GeneC is revolutionary." That is, Blue/Gene L was an attempt to build the world's fastest computer using a more-or-less tried and trusted design. Blue/GeneC is going to be radically different. Each BlueGene/C chip contains almost 100 processors (each running at 500 mhz), and there are going to be tons and tons of those chips in the final machine. They are keeping the final number a secret, but it's going to be gigantic.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
From what I recall about Peloton(that's what the presenter called it), they wish to have a 14.8 TF/s scalable unit with 4x Infiniband interconnect. This scalable unit itself is more than half the power of Thunder(ranked 7 in Top 500) http://top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2005&M=06 They plan to have 16 such scalable units.
For those who are interested in the specs: Peloton is 16 SU with 236.5 TeraFLOP/s, 215 TiB memory, 5.0 PB global disk system with 6,720 SMPs and 48+24 = 72 IBA 4x DDR sw. Power is 4.05 MW.
If you think about it, US has the same "penis thing" more or less.
;)
Japanese has the ESC that reaches 36TFlops in 2002. US, not wanting to be left behind, build Blue Gene that will reaches 1PFlops by 2006 (28x in 4 years relative to ESC).
Japan, in response to that, wants to build one that reaches 10PFlops by 2010 (10x in 6 years relative to Blue Gene).
Japanese - surpasses opponent by 10 times in 6 years.
US - surpasses opponent by 28 times in 4 years.
Now, tell me, which one has the more serious disease known as "look at the size of my ego" syndrome.
US of course
Info from Wikipedia
How did that get rated insightful? Do you mods have no idea what bogomips are? It stands for BOGUS MIPS. It's how linux deals with certain timing issues. Basically, how long it takes to go through a loop that does absolutly nothing. It has no meaning in terms of flops or even MIPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogomips
Now, for a more "realistic" benchmark than hplinpack, this has been tried and talked about for quite some time. It is a hard problem actually, because different supercomputers are designed for different usage. HPL is a useful upper bound for realistic calculations over the whole computer, but it is far from the whole truth.
The BlueGenes out there have don real work, in doing the signal processing of a distributed radio telescope (the one in the netherlands) and protein folding/molecular dynamics (the US one).
And while efficiency might be important, remember that if you can get a machine twice as big by going down to 90% of the efficiency for the same price, the smart move is usually, but not always, to buy the larger machine.
The man said revolutionary, not exotic. This chip is going to create a revolution because it packs **immense** computing power (the 500Mhz clock given in the post is misleading in that a lot happens in each processor in a clock cycle) while consuming very little electrical power and costing just what one chip produced in the zillions costs.
These features are what you need to build machines that interact with the real environment. A welding robot in a factory places a weld at the right spot whether the part is there or not. The machine that drives a vehicle in the desert *reliably* (un)like in the DARPA challenge needs thousands of times more computing power. Or consider a machine that moves around in an orchard and picks ripe fruit, trims the trees, fertilizes and removes weeds and is overall cost competitive with a migrant worker.
Our technology is moving in that direction now, it is the next logical step. Whether it will be Blue Gene Cyclops or a similar chip from http://www.clearspeed.com/ or a Chinese design depends on company politics. The older ones here will remember that the IBM PC was consistently downgraded by IBM management because it did what another IBM competing product (the Displaywriter) was doing, for one third the cost.As result, IBM profited from it mildly, everybody else profited wildly.