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."

Comments

hmmm

[jigjigga]

lets put folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) on that mother!

Re:hmmm

[thesupraman]

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).

Re:hmmm

[deglr6328]

"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.

Re:hmmm

[VENONA]

Yeah, right. That's very sensitive of you, I'm sure.

We don't do chemical or biological warfare. All we have is nuclear weapons. So how do we respond, if and when some nutcase state hits us with a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack? Harsh language? Throw some nicely-folded proteins?

Personally, I prefer that we have some assurance that our nukes will work if we ever need them.

You can make any sort of argument you'd care to about our messed up foreign policy. I'd probably agree with quite a bit of it. But I still want our stockpiles to work if we ever need them.

It's a harsh world. Sensitivity and political correctness will only take you so far in dealing with it.

Re:hmmm

[LordFnord]

> Oh, and BTW, the IO nodes of this beast run linux

Yeah? Hmmmm.

lordfnord@eris:~$ ssh bluegene-l.ibm.com

Welcome to Linux 2.6.14

bluegene-l login: falken
Password: joshua

Greetings, Professor Falken. Would you like to play a game?

1. Checkers
2. Chess
3. Protein folding
4. Global thermonuclear war

Uh-oh.

Re:hmmm

[troc]

Greetings, Professor Falken. Would you like to play a game?

Am I the only one who is incapable of reading that (even in the dubious privacy of my own head), without saying it in a "computer" voice?

Troc.

Re:hmmm

[Silverstrike]

Because, when you're in agony dying of radiation poisoning, its really going to make your day a lot better to be assured that somewhere else in the world another person, equally as removed from the political context of the nuclear conflict as you are, will be in just as much agony as you are.

Now, just maybe, the presence of these weapons can be called a deterant, so its possible that possessing them is a necessary evil. However, to be quite honest, if we ever "need" them -- I really do hope they fail to work.

Reader

[Jozer99]

They say it can launch Adobe Acrobat Reader in ELEVEN SECONDS!!!

Re:Reader

[Phat_Tony]

I was going to use:

It even meets the minimum system requirements for Longhorn!

Re:Reader

[robvangelder]

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.

Re:Reader

[wikkiewikkie]

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

Perhaps we could use it to..

[278MorkandMindy]

..figure out what the hell we are going to be doing for energy in 15 years??

"Look to the future and the present will be safe"

For various uses

[strider44]

An IBM engineer was caught remarking "And boy can it hold a lot of porn."

That's a bloody fast supercomputer...

[kyle90]

The damn thing's smarter than I am. Well, that's taking an estimate of 100 teraflops for the human brain, which seems to be popular.

Re:That's a bloody fast supercomputer...

[Quirk]

Here's a quick rundown on the numbers. Brain Computing

I have just one question for Blue Gene/L

[Anonymous Coward]

and the answer had better not be 42.

Cool

[sheuer]

Back when It was only half installed I got to take a tour of it while it was in Rochester, MN... Got to walk through it and touch it. Turns out the computer that controls blue gene takes up about half as much space as blue gene itself.

Re:Results?

[tpv]

Whats that? This was made by a private company?

But it was paid for by the US government.

not a compiler issue

[Quadraginta]

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.

Electricity Bill

[tpv]

I'd be able to figure out how to heck to pay the huge electric bill this would generate.

Easy - you'd run a huge federal deficit, and let future generations sort it out.

Re:Results?

[Jeremy Erwin]

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

Picture

[TechnoGuyRob]

Here's a picture of the momma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BlueGeneL-600x4 50.jpg

Re:Results?

[LarsWestergren]

What useful science has the "Earth Simulator" produced?

Yes, better climate models and weather forecasts are obviously not needed. A little rain never hurt anyone, as this years hurricane season clearly shows.

Re:compiler?

[Aardpig]

On something like this, they would probably be programming in High Performance Fortran or Fortran w/ OpenMP -- or some similar dialect that supports massively parallel execution. I'm sure IBM develop an in-house compiler for the language.

Re:compiler?

[joib]

Actually, the system is provided with the IBM XL family of compilers.

I know what I'd do...

[Jack Earl]

If I had a computer that fast...

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
int answer = 42;
printf("%d", answer);
}

Notice that performance had increased per cpu...

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that the performance has actually increased PER proccessor as you add more proccessors... This is very remarkable in computer technology.

Normally when you add cpus to a computer you get a increase in performance, but it doesn't increase linearly with each cpu. You have one cpu you have 100% performance, add one more and you may have 180% the performance and add 2 more you may have 300% of the performance etc etc.

Notice that with half the machine there it got 138 GFlops.

So if you doubled the size of the machine you'd expect to get something like 260 Gflops per second.

But you have 280 Gflops per second.

This pretty much means that as you add cpus the performance of each cpu actually increases slightly. That's a exponentional growth rate, at the beginning of the curve.

Of course there has to be a technical limit to the system and the amount of space, heat, and electricity it can handle.. but technically if you double the size of the cluster again I wouldn't be suprised if you'd get close to 750 GFlops per second performance.

This is some seriously hardcore stuff, the future of computing hardware. Todays supercomputer, tomorrow's desktop.. I can't wait.

Re:compiler?

[SnowZero]

Don't forget to compile with:
make -j 65536

Re:still en vogue?

[sgant]

When this was announced, world chess champion Gary Kasparov said "ok, no way am I playing this fricken thing"

Re:Notice that performance had increased per cpu..

[mj_1903]

That probably only means that they have optimised the architecture over time as would be expected. Things like improved resource management, a slimmer kernel for each CPU, a better compiler, etc. can easily make up for that small performance gain.

Re:Results?

[indifferent children]

Seem like it's just a wang dangling contest

No, this is IBM. Wang went out of business years ago.