Slashdot Mirror
Software to Make Blue Gene Top 200 Teraflops
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."
How do they know they got it right?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
C64 takes a totally different approach to high performance computing. Most supercomputer architectures are built around a moderate to large number of very, very fast (and power-hungry) processors. For example, Big Mac at Virgina Tech had something like 10,000 pentium 4 class processors. Cyclops64 is have an *enormous* number of processors (on the order of a million), but running only at 500 mhz, making them much easier to cool). The idea is to give the programmer more thread units than he knows what to do with, running very close together at a low level.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Imagine, if you will, taking this super-computing ability out a few years. Can the U.S. justify the invasion of a country X because X successfully simulated an attack on the U.S? Or maybe they just had the computing power to simulate it.
To the UN: We'd like you to look at these satellite images that clearly show a super computer simulating the destruction of the U.S. We have to take out these terrorists and we're willing to go it alone.
Afterward: Well it turns out that they didn't have the computing power at all, the images we had were of a mobile home park.
Bzzt Whir Click