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Software to Make Blue Gene Top 200 Teraflops

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the crunching-rather-than-taste dept.

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has a story about the most intensive computer program ever created. It runs on IBM's big beast, Blue Gene/L, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and carries out 207.3 teraflops (trillion cacluations per second). The program, called Qbox, performs very complex quantum calculations to simulate the behaviour of thousands of atoms in three dimensions. Wow."

4 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Specs by neonprimetime · · Score: 5, Informative

    Specs here and yes, Suse

  2. it doesn't work like that by tpjunkie · · Score: 4, Informative

    It doesn't take .2 teraflops to model one atom, or even two atoms, even account for effects on the quantum level.. However, when you take into acount that each atom will more or less interact with every other atom, you have a massive amount of interactions to model. Thats what takes so much processing power.

  3. HPCWire Interview by multimediavt · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/699401.html

    There's some additional info about BlueGene and what Livermore thinks of it here. What this interview neglects to mention is the millions of dollars being spent on IBM and internal developers to get this code (and any others) working on BlueGene. I was briefed by the hardware and software teams that built BlueGene and I can tell you, it's no easy task to bring apps to that platform. Kuznezov seems to trivialize it in the interview and I'm gonna have to go back and review the process again. Maybe it has changed since my briefing in early 2004, but somehow I doubt it.

  4. Re:...wow... by mhore · · Score: 5, Informative
    So in essence, it takes about .2 teraflops per atom... And that was only after spending a lot of time condensing the algorithms. This makes me wonder two things. First, what do these equations look like such that it takes 200 gigaflops just to model one atom. Second, over what timeframe does this simulation take place? Are we talking real-time, calculating for 50 years, what?

    0.2 TFlops per atom, yes. But there are 1000 atoms, and it's molybdenum which has 42 eletrons... so that's 42,000 particles that all interact with each other. Still... that's not too many. But maybe they're considering interactions between nuclei, too. Who knows...

    As for your question about what the equations look like? They're probably very nasty integrals of sines and cosines and what not to various odd (read: strange) powers and stuff. I do fairly computationally intensive simulations on some big IBM machines and just simple equations can amount to quite a bit of calculations. Nothing like what these guys are doing, though.

    Finally... what time frame is the simulation over? I'd wager VERY SHORT times, maybe nanoseconds or something like that. Even casual "molecular dynamics" simulations can only probe very short timeframes. Their coarse-grained cousins can maybe do microseconds or milliseconds.

    Mike.

    --

    Mmmm......sacrelicious.