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