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

[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.

I have just one question for Blue Gene/L

[Anonymous Coward]

and the answer had better not be 42.

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.

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.