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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).
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
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.
"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!"
You can also accomplish the same thing by holding down the shift key while Acrobat is launching. It will prevent the plugins from loading.