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Blue Gene/L Tops Its Own Supercomputer Record
DIY News writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM unveiled the Blue Gene/L supercomputer Thursday and announced it's broken its own record again for the world's fastest supercomputer. The 65,536-processor machine can sustain 280.6 teraflops. That's the top end of the range IBM forecast and more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraflops, set when only half the machine was installed."
While I know that you are joking, one of the major targets of this particular machine is actually basically that, not of course for any direct public benefit, but for the owners.
This particular machine is of course targeted at LANL, and weapons development (oops, did I say that? I mean 'stockpile stewardship')
However, protein folding is one of the primary targets of the architecture.
Oh, and BTW, the IO nodes of this beast run linux. Not exactly a standard kernel, but not far off. The compute nodes run a very simple custom kernel to minimise resource use (after all, they have very limited needs as the IO nodes provide them most services).
Awesome! Wish it ran that fast on mine! Use FoxItReader. It's a lot faster and smalller. Homepage here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ Download here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/pdfrd.zip
Have you metaroderated recently?
But it was paid for by the US government.
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I have some very limited experience with this kind of computing, and I don't think the compiler is anywhere near the limiting factor.
I strongly suspect the limiting factor is algorithms. That is, the problem is designing code that can efficiently use a massively parallel machine. It's enormously difficult to even imagine how a problem could be solved by breaking it up into 65,000 mini-problems that can be solved simultaneously, and therefore mostly but not entirely independently. People just don't think that way. (Or rather, they do, but only at such a basic level close to the neurons that they are utterly unaware of how it's done.)
This is one reason "parallel computing" has been the Wave Of The Future(TM) for decades, and exhibits the same kind of "promise" as fusion power -- namely, we are told that ten years from now it will change everything -- and we hear it again every ten years.
Here's a quick rundown on the numbers. Brain Computing
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
What useful science has the "Earth Simulator" produced?
You might try reading The Journal of the Earth Simulator.
Or perhaps this summary of 2003 research
The 2005 projects are listed here
Here's a picture of the momma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BlueGeneL-600x4 50.jpg
Let's see, the entire multi-year experiment at ClimatePrediction.net could be completed in about... oh 13 days. :^)
;) ).
(Not really; I made that up. But if you're curious about how much crunching power we have on tap, visit the project website
the article states 10 Mega watts (although I think that was the combined power usage for this and another supercomputer)
watch "the money masters" on google video
Don't pay much heed to that page, there's so little understanding of QM in there that he'd better been making a joke while writing it. Come to that, QG, you should be marking it as such, least people who don't know better take those 'interpretations' seriously - you can never underestimate the desire of people to believe in things :-)
;-) Just as you don't compute relativistic corrections for a moving car ... at least not for the near future evolutions of cars.
now, as to your question, the light speed limit on signals is imposed by the assumption that the Lorentz group is a valid symmetry of the universe. Apply that to classical mechanics and you get special relativity; apply it to QM and you get relativistic QM. And relativistic QM is alive and well in atomic physics/chemistry, starting with the electron spin - or, less trivially, with corrections to the electron energy levels that usually involve the fine-structure factor (particularly for inner electrons of heavy atoms, but you can look up the solution of the Dirac equation for the Hydrogen atom). Of course, if those corrections are too small for your purpose (or level of numerical error) then you might as well make your life less complicated and ignore them
I hate Acrobat Reader's load time too. Here is how to speed that up.
Go to the Acrobat program folder:
eg. C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\
Move all of the files and folders under the "plug_ins" folder to the "Optional" folder
The plug_ins folder should now be empty. Acrobat Reader loads faster.
I don't know what those plugins are for, but my PDFs read fine.
What's so hard about releasing these things under an open source license.
Basic scientific method, really - control the environment as tightly as you can, and then document everything as thoroughly as you can. The first precludes open source while the experiment is ongoing, while the second requires opening up the source once the experiment's done.
Aren't universities supposed to encourage the spread of information?
Accurate information, yes. How would you propose that accuracy could be guaranteed with an open client that anyone could alter?
Oh, and don't bother starting in on how binary-only nodes could be hacked, wires can be tapped, etc. - I know that. It's irrelevant. The goal of an experiment like this is to eliminate any variables other than the ones you're testing. Not every variable can be eliminated, but that's not a legitimate reason to abandon the effort entirely. Besides which, only someone with malicious intent would bother going to that kind of trouble; an open-source client could be comprimised by a well-meaning hacker who tried to "optimize" his copy of the client by taking short-cuts.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
"This particular machine is of course targeted at LANL, and weapons development (oops, did I say that? I mean 'stockpile stewardship')"
Just to expand on that, it is worth noting that the ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer at LLNL was the first to run a fully three dimensional simulation of a nuclear trigger (plutonium fission) implosion and shortly thereafter was the first to run a full 3D simulation of the secondary fusion stage in a thermonuclear device. This computer was capable of ~3 teraflops and took something like 20 days to run those sims. Blue Gene is ~100 times faster than that computer and judging from the time it took ASCI White (~10 Tflops) to complete a simulation of a full thermonuclear detonation, it would therefore probably not be unreasonable to assume this new computer is capable of full 3D simulation of a complete thermonuclear bomb detonation (primary and secondary) in mere hours to a couple days. It is a shame that we even "need" nuclear weapons, but if we're going to have them I for one would much rather see tests of them done in silicon instead of in a big mushroom cloud!
Yes, it is also sad that while other countries use thier supercomputing power mostly to investigate protien folding and earthquake propagation and other purposes generally recognized as peaceful we mainly use ours for simulation nuclear weapons designs; but it is not all bad. The simulations of imploding fusion fuel can (and will) also be used to simulate the implosion of the tiny fusion microcapsules which are imploded in laboratory laserfusion facilities like NIF. This has the potential to eventually result in laserfusion (inertial confinement fusion) as a power source. Supercomputers which were mainly intended to be used for weapons research in the past have occasionally also served up a few surprises in completely unrelated fields. The supercomputer Cray X-MP (?) at Sandia (?) labs in the mid 80s was where the first simulations of the giant impact theory of the formation of the moon were validated. Its now the predominant theory of the moon's origin. It is hard to imagine that this new computer won't have a few surprises of its own to reveal even if it only donates a small amount of time to non-defense related research.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Actually, most machines are partitioned into front end and back end. The back end is for running large production runs (1000's of PEs) and is usually on accessible as a batch queue. The front end is for compiling and debugging and is interactive (perhaps even running serially). The front end might even be another machine.
Contrary to popular /. opinion, compiling is not a big task. Especially when compared to the real calculations done.
Big machines like this usually have another queue on the front end for long compilation jobs.
So make -j 4 might be more appropriate. Unless you wanted to piss other users off.
Actaully would need to install distcc and probably do somthing like:
make -j 65536 CXX=distcc
what?
Here's another option: go to http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ and get GSview (the Ghostscript file viewer), and associate that with PDF files. Admittedly, you'll get a nagging screen when it starts up telling you to register, but it's fast, it works, and maybe most importantly, it does not contain any "phone home" functionality or Javascript-in-documents handling or the like (well, it's unlikely that it does, at least).
I've ditched Acrobat Reader in favour of this, and it's one of the best decisions I ever made.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
You can also accomplish the same thing by holding down the shift key while Acrobat is launching. It will prevent the plugins from loading.