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."

Comments

I want! I want!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I want a Stargate, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna get one. I bet OpenOffice.org will still take 5 minutes to start on it.

Re:I want! I want!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Well I want a Stargate, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna get one. I bet OpenOffice.org will still take 5 minutes to start on it.

I didn't realize that Stargates ran Linux...

Re:I want! I want!

[maotx]

Thats Field Programable Gate Arrays, not Female Pro Golfers Associtation.

Yes, but which one is more attractive?
Better yet, which one will I have a better shot at?

Re:I want! I want!

[goneutt]

Considering your on /. I'd say the Field Programmable Gate Array is the one you have a better shot at, (following comment refraind from because I'm not that drunk, but I think the general idea about the membership of the Female PGA is self evident of where this joke was going)

Re:I want! I want!

[RRRussian]

Alas, your mythical FPGA is known as the LPGA. Because I guess the females prefer to be called ladies...

Re:I want! I want!

[16K Ram Pack]

That's the L word I was thinking of...

What the article doesn't say

[Anonymous Coward]

The supercomputer will be pocket-sized and ran on two AA batteries.

Re:What the article doesn't say

[Em Adespoton]

TeaFLOPS - Tea FLoating Operations Per Second -- it's how many bits escape from the teabag/strainer/ball and float to the surface per second, of course. The delightful thing about this computer is that instead of only having two states, and a fixed size of 32 bits per bite, you can have an infinitely scalable states, and slurps can be of a variable size. Thermal cooling is done via Milk.

Ahh

[pHatidic]

I see they are upgrading to get ready for Longhorn.

Re:Ahh

[Savatte]

they still won't be able to run doom3, though

Re:Ahh

[__aaclcg7560]

Yeah. It's a Windows Longhorn test system that can determine all the sercurity and system vulnerabilities in a matter of seconds instead of weeks. Windows still crashes but now you don't have to wait. ;)

Re:Ahh

[aurb]

It's Vista, Not Longhorn.

Re:Ahh

[WhiteBandit]

What's incredible is that Doom 3 is the first graphics engine to bring a computer to its knees by simply rendering darkness. It's amazing!

136.8 teaflops

[Anonymous Coward]

These 136.8 teaflops could have been avoided if the proper specifications were used before hardware development and programming began. Essential tea technical info.

Re:136.8 teaflops

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is a key component of the infinite improbability drive when combined with not teaflops.

BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[Raul654]

BlueGene/L is the fastest super computer at the moment; however, BlueGene/C (which, for the record, I'm working on as part of my PhD) will be finished very soon (it was supposed to be out of the foundry by the end of August, but the project is running slightly behind schedule). I'm told there are, as yet, no plans to publish any performance benchmarks.

Re:BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[hazzey]

Is there a reason why they aren't even close to alphabetical order?

Do the letters stand for something else?

Re:BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[mfloy]

I'm obviously not as close to the source as you are, but aren't there other computers in the BlueGene family being worked on also, that will be faster than both L and C? The quote of the Japanese computer being 73 times faster than BlueGene/L, but by the time the computer is actually built I will be suprised if it is faster than the current incarnation of BlueGene. IBM has been doing some great work as far as supercomputing goes, working on it must be a blast.

Re:BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[unit00]

Roman numerals perhaps? C=100 L=50

Re:BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[Raul654]

The C in BlueGene/C stands for "Cyclops64", which is the name of the architecture. (It's usually shortened to C64)

Re:BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[Raul654]

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.

Re:BlueGene/C will be finished soon

[Raul654]

Linux (w/ a custom made compiler that my group has already written)

If the project fails

[Neo-Rio-101]

If funding runs out for this one, they'll end up with a 1 Belly-flop supercomputer

*ba-dum-dum ching!*

Japan wants a 10 petaflop supercomputer...

[daveschroeder]

...and I want a pony.

Guess which two things aren't happening anytime soon?

Re:Eh?

[Transcendent]

What the hell is "Wot"?

Getting a little ahead of themselves?

[Valarauk]

I mean seriously... Doom 4 isn't even out yet.

Re:Getting a little ahead of themselves?

[inu_maru]

Of course is not meant for Doom 4... is for a date Simulator!

Re:Getting a little ahead of themselves?

[techno-vampire]

I thought they were planning to have it run Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Getting a little ahead of themselves?

[Shazow]

The universe doesn't have enough atoms to construct a computer capable of running Doom 4.

All they want to do is just be able to run Doom 3 on max settings.

- shazow

I've seen better

[Anonymous Coward]

Big deal, the white mice have had this beat for years...

Mommy, mommy

[icepick72]

Japan wants to gain the fastest supercomputer spot back.
Japan wants to develop ...

Japan wants a lot of things now doesn't it. Well, Japan will just have to be a good little country and maybe Santa will come.

This just in:

[GuitarNeophyte]

The top news story of the hour:

Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, has announced yet a new version of the Windows Operating system. Trying to take advantage of the obvious new market of supercomputers, the computer giant is ready to release Windows SC. The new operating system, designed to beat the Japanese domination in computing power, as well as the Russians in spam-distribution, will link all computers running the operating system into one giant spam^H^H^H^Hcommercial marketing distribution center.

Luke
----
Tired of answering tons of basic computer questions for friends and family? Send them to ChristianNerds.com instead!

Re:WTF is a Teaflop??

[forrestt]

Seven, but the last one doesn't count.

japan's new hotbox

[medep]

japan is thinking "but we just bought this computer, it's obsolete already? shit a brick!" anyone in the market for a slightly used supercomputer?

Man...

[Lobster Cowboy]

The Japanese are really sensitive about the whole "small penis" thing.

Re:Man...

[guardiangod]

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

wow...

[idiotdevel]

yeah... um... so I'm guessing OpenOffice would at least startup semi-fast on that machine

Fast enough to do proper spellchecking

[IoN_PuLse]

If only there was a supercomputer that could revise news posts before they go live? It could be in the form of *gasp* an editor!?

Go go Godzilla!

[Duncan3]

That much heat in one place has got to wake up something doesn't it?

Re:teaflops

[ian rogers]

If your brain was operating at 10 petaflops, it would have only taken a few seconds to realize.

Overclock

[3770]

Big deal!!!

I only have to overclock my Pentium 4 83000 times to beat that little pocket calculator.

(Pentium 4 3.06 GHz has a theoretical max of 12 Gigaflops)

PETA

[ndansmith]

No animals will be harmed in the production of this computer.

Re:PETA

[iendedi]

The engineers working on this project will be very upset when they are told they are being put on a vegitarian diet.

If you want faster , here ya go.

[zymano]

Superconducting supercomputer. Too expensive but maybe need to build one to see how they work.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/hpcc/insights/vol6/supercom .htm

Using 'general' processors is cheap but the wrong direction according to the best supercomputer expert from Stanford. He designed some cray computers.

http://content.techweb.com/wire/26802955

Deserving of the pun...

[EvilLile]

I guess you could say they're Peta-philes.

10 Petaflops?

[mswope]

How many BogoMips is that?

Re:10 Petaflops?

[eluusive]

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

Re:teaflops

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a peaflop is: missing the urinal.
Not to be confused with the p34fl0ppy which requires v14gr4.

Okay, some other observations

[suitepotato]

First, it seems almost powerful enough that it might start and run Adobe Premiere within four or five hours instead of six or seven.

Second, Kingdom of Loathing would finally have zero lag on the server side.

Third, it might be slightly more resistant to Slashdoting and building a router out of one of these might complete the defense.

Fourth, by the time this ends up on my desktop, Duke Nukem Forever will be in beta.

Other than that, should make wonderful blurb filler regarding chess matches with Russians for kids' science news periodicals.

Bad Wording

[Aeiri]

The wording of the article is terrible. "Japan Wants to Build 10 Petaflop Supercomputer", I want to build a 10 petaflop computer, too, does that mean I am capable of that? No. The difference is Japan set forth the process of creating a 10 petaflop computer. The article should read something like "Japan Building 10 Petaflop Supercomputer".

Re:Bad Wording

[coma_bug]

The wording of the article is terrible.

You must be new here.

Re:teaflops

[nwbvt]

I had enough trouble getting past the grammar issues with that sentence:

"Current fastest supercomputer is the partially finished Blue Gene is capable of 136.8 teaflops and the target when finished is 360 teraflops."

Seriously, what do the editors do here? They don't check the writing, they don't check the accuracy of stories, and forget about it if you want them to post a correction to something...

Re:It's all about the $'s

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The other current top performers are PowerPC, Itanium and Opterons. Maybe not vanilla processors but not custom either.

BlueGene's PPC chips ARE custom for that line of computer, though VTech's Mac cluster is pretty much off-the-shelf.

Itanium isn't custom they are not hard to get, just that there isn't much demand. I think they are kind of nifty, though not competitive for general server use, might be OK for supercomputers, and has high-availability features not found in Xeon and Opteron.

I'm not sure if there is anything special about Opterons now, other than having more hypertransport links, and being special binned parts to take higher temperatures and consume less wattage than a comparable Athlon64, much like Xeon is to Pentium4. I think 1xx Opterions are basically the same as Athlon64.

Its a government makework project

[patio11]

I'm sure you guys have heard of our propensity for building bridges here? Including long bridges to islands with no real need for them, built in multiples sufficient to carry the entire population of the island off of it at a single time? Which are then built to withstand typhoons and earthquakes (well, OK, THATS not irrational). This is the same thing, except for the tech industry. And the US government does the same thing -- NASA and a good deal of the Department of Defense R&D fund are basically slushfunds to keep engineers employed in the hope that they come up with something useful in the meantime (and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that pork is well-appreciated come election time).

I don't really know why we love gigantic computers, though. I live in a prefecture which is Japan's answer to rural Iowa and we built a 1,300 node distributed supercomputer without any idea of a feasible application to run on it -- we ended up computing a few zillion solutions to N-Queens before mothballing the project (I was hoping for enough CPU time to take the world record back from the real supercomputer at the Japanese university that currently holds it, but unfortunately it was not to be).

Re:Its a government makework project

[demachina]

Much of the U.S. fixation goes back to the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996. The U.S. had a bunch of powerful labs full of top scientists whose job in life was to build and test nuclear weapons. This treaty pretty much put them out of business. Clinton distracted them by giving them millions of dollars to build gigantic supercomputers. The goal was to simulate nuclear explosions, predict how the U.S. nuclear stockpile would age and insure it would still work if the need arose without ever testing it ever again. They use to prove this by taking one out and setting it off in Nevada to make sure it still worked. Now they write simulations. Maybe the are very good at those simulations and they can in fact insure the nuclear arsenal is sage and potent. Unfortunately if they never set one off again they will never now if their simulations are any good. They might just be wasting billions of dollars.

In many respects the national labs are like NASA, they are high tech job programs for deep thinkers who would be dangerous if they were unemployed like their counterparts in Russia.

So they build giant computers, and hopefully figure out useful code to run on them though its not clear if they do have anything useful to run on them. There are always weather sims and protein foldings to do.

The worst problem is the tyranny of Moore's law. They take years to complete and by the time they are fully operational they are obsolete so you just start building a new one.

You wonder how people designed engineered marvels like the first fission and fusion bombs, Apollo and the SR-71 back in the day when they had next to no computing power. Now we have this extraordinary computing power but we have real problems building interesting things in the real world. The Shuttle made massive use of CFD, CAE etc but its a complete lemon. We keeping doing massive simulations of nuclear bombs but we never actually set any off and really don't even want them anymore. Well thats not true the Bush administration is in fact trying to restart development of new nukes and in fact want to build one for busting bunkers and caves. If they manage to get it built not only will the test ban treaty be out the window but the U.S. will start using them as a matter of routine in conventional wars and maybe just to take out a suspected nest of terrorists here and there. Maybe all this computing power will help make them in to exceptionally good tactical weapons which will get a lot of mileage.

Re:Its a government makework project

[identity0]

Haha, no kidding, but at least they aren't spending it on totally moronic crap like a flight suit for a plane ride for the president. I'd be really funny to see Koizumi or the emperor pulling a stunt like that, though.

I live in a prefecture which is Japan's answer to rural Iowa

Hmmm... Kumamoto? Aomori? Hokkaido? Enquiring minds want to know what part of Japan is their answer to rural Iowa...

Not that I should talk, I'm from Kagoshima. It's not so different from the American deep south, really, including rebellions.

As for the supercomputers, like I said, at least a lot of the stuff that gets pork-barreled in Japan can be useful, unlike here in the US where we spend it in ways that don't benefit society at all. My city just spent millions of tax dollars building a new stadium for our NBA team, when we already have one that just opened in the 90s but turned out to be a boondoggle, and we have an even older stadium that's still usable. But the NBA team controls the old stadium, and doesn't want competition, so we'll probobly end up tearing down the multi-million dollar stadium we built in the 90s. *sigh* I wish they'd just bought a supercomputer instead.

I suspect this supercomputer thing is a combination of politicians who don't really understand what they're useful for but know "we gotta keep up with the Americans/Euros/Chinese", and a excercise in national competition and good old industry pork. Just like NASA over here. I'm suprised Japan isn't spending more on their space program, especially with China and North Korea advancing in the field... how was the Japanese reaction to the Chinese manned mission, btw? Any serious calls for a Japanese one yet?

Columbia

[RobiOne]

Why don't they ever mention the real world stats or operational supercomputers?
They keep saying BlueGene/L when it's not even completed (maybe it finally is). There's also /C which is falling behind, but at least they're not reporting any numbers until it actually works.

The fastest operational (like anything else matters) supercomputer is Columbia at NASA. And guess what? It's doing a ton of usefull work, like helping make sure the Space Shuttle launches without a hitch by computing all the Thermal Protection System problems and various other analyses.

Look at the number of processors it uses and it's performance compared to the others. It's one of the more efficient of the bunch.

Just wait until they upgrade it..

Top500 should include different rankings, like efficiency or measurable areas other than projected TFlops. In the end it's not how many you got, but how well you can use them.

Re:Columbia

[maswan]

The top500 list only includes existing supercomputers, not future ones. You have to run the benchmark, not guess how fast it will go.

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.

/Mattias Wadenstein - sysadmin at #388 on the list

Lookout for Peloton from LLNL

[saratchandra]

Recently at the Linux Clusters HPC Conference http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/Linux-HPC-Re volution/ , I learnt about LLNL's plans(Lawrence Livermore National Labs) for the next biggest supercomputer.

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.

Re:To put 10 Petaflops in perspective

[iendedi]

I just finished reading this article. There is a wonderful excerpt from that article that I would like to quote:

"A petaflop is roughly a human brain-second. Peta is equal to a million gigaflops or a million gigahertz Pentium processors. So we're crossing to a transition of computing power (equivalent to what's) in your head. What will we do with it, or it with us?

I am left with the sense that we should be abandoning flop-talk and simply move to a new measurement: Human brain-second is really alluring. Let's just shorten it to brainsec.

So this new Japanese supercomputer is running at a whopping 10 brainsecs!!! Imagine, you could simulate about 9 people or 47 slashdotters in that supercomputer (some of the power would be required to manage the simulatioins).

Seriously though, AI research will go mainstream with the first supercomputer that can process at greater than 1 brainsec.

Re:WTF is a Teaflop??

[LordEd]

A teaflop is a unit of computation speed in reference to the computer in the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy book that got bogged down trying to create a cup of tea.

A computer with a 500 teaflop capacity is able to produce a perfect cup of tea with just a hint of honey and milk in it in under 2 minutes, while still evading a Vogon fleet.

Unfortunately, it cannot run Linux.

BlueGene/C uses C64 architecture?

[iendedi]

The C in BlueGene/C stands for "Cyclops64", which is the name of the architecture. (It's usually shortened to C64)

When you read this, are you thinking what I am thinking?

Re:BlueGene/C uses C64 architecture?

[Raul654]

I swear I had to stare at my comment for a solid 10 seconds to figure out why I got modded as funny before it dawned on me. It honestly never occured to me before that C64 could refer to something else.

Re:BlueGene/C uses C64 architecture?

[deathy_epl ccs]

I think so, Brain, but where are we going to get a hot tub filled with gelatin, a ping pong ball and a rubber hose at this time of night? NARF!

The world's biggest, fastest, industrial size

[Black Copter Control]

Hot Air Popcorn popper.

The butter pot is sold separately.

Definition of supercomputer getting stretched

[heroine]

Nowadays the supercomputer contest is just a matter of who can buy the most Opteron PC's and Cisco routers from Newegg and connect them. You might as well buy a few million DVD's from Best Buy and say you have the world's largest hard drive.

Eventually small countries will connect all the computers of their entire population with distributed clients and call that the world's largest supercomputer.

This business of entering a command, waiting a minute for zillions of nodes across a slow network to start, and waiting another minute for all the nodes to finish is hardly what supercomputing used to be.

It would be more interesting to see who does the most work with the least latency or who does the most work with the simplest programming model. Anyone can write a massively parallel program to utilize every Opteron in the world but a computer which can do the same work sequentially seems like a much bigger step forward.