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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."

23 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Slight clarification by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 4, Funny

    It does not perform very complex quantum calculations, instead
    It simulates interactions between 1000 molybdenum atoms under high pressure using equations that take the quantum behaviour of electrons into account.

    Also, when its not being used to dynamically model atomic structures, the IRS uses it to calculate Bill gates's taxes.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
    1. Re:Slight clarification by rolfwind · · Score: 4, Funny

      And it almost makes the requirements for Vista!

    2. Re:Slight clarification by Memnos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      At the unfortunate risk of repeating myself on Slashdot (Oh, the Humanity!) you are correct. It is intrinsically impossible for a discrete-state system to model quantum mechanical events, unless you somehow sneaked under the Planck limit (There is no spoon..) So, they're faking it.. However, if it is a good model of "reality", then it is good science. If it can predict, it is useful.

      --
      I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
  2. Yeah, but... by wiz31337 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah, but can it beat Kasparov at chess?

    --
    /whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
    1. Re:Yeah, but... by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Funny
      It's so powerful, it can beat Kasparov in chess and monitor millions of phone calls for the NSA *at the same time*!

      -Eric

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    2. Re:Yeah, but... by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Funny
      Geez, I am sick of getting modded down for this. Can /. please stop giving the White House unlimited mod points?

      -Eric

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. Too bad for Q-box... by vishbar · · Score: 3, Funny
    New Scientist has a story about the most intensive computer program ever created.

    Too bad for Q-Box that their title will be stripped of them so soon. Vista's almost here.

    Wait a minute, Vista? Nevermind...Q-box should have it for a long while.

    --
    Ride the skies
  4. Re:Linux by spun · · Score: 3, Funny

    Only after it calculates Bill Gates' taxes and beats Kasparov at chess, apparently.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  5. Specs by neonprimetime · · Score: 5, Informative

    Specs here and yes, Suse

  6. Only the most intensive USEFUL program by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Funny

    I mean, I'm sure I could use up more than 200 teraflops with my "while (1);" program.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  7. ...wow... by sarlos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    Regardless, as a computer scientist, I say way to go to these guys, this is damn impressive.

    --
    Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
    1. 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.

  8. Molest me not by Weaselmancer · · Score: 4, Funny

    The program, called Qbox, performs very complex quantum calculations to simulate the behaviour of thousands of atoms in three dimensions.

    "Molest me not with this pocket calcualtor stuff."

    --
    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
  9. How to test a nuke.. without testing one by ScottLindner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How do they know they got it right?

    --
    Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
  10. Smart, sure. But is it happy? by fred_sanford · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oblig. H2G2. "Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't." - Marvin

  11. Just wait... by Raul654 · · Score: 3, Informative

    BlueGene/L has a sister project, Cyclops64 (formerly known as BlueGene/C) due out sometime late in 2006 or early 2007. My research group is (a) helping IBM do hardware verification on it. and (b) developing the systems software for it [esp. the compiler]. Cyclops64 could very well blow BlueGene/L out of the water.

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
    1. Re:Just wait... by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:Just wait... by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Cell was designed around one single objective - to get a clock rate as sickeningly high as possible, because clock speed cells. Trust me when I say that programmability was not (at all) a consideration (I should mention - my research group got one of the very first Cell processor's sent to the US. We are currently in the process of implimenting OpenMP on it to make it a little nicer to program).

      As far as writing multi-threaded code, I've spent the last 5 months rewriting the NAS CG benchmark to work effeciently on Cyclops64, which will probably play some part of my PhD thesis. (A sidenote: All of NASA's NAS implimentations are written in Fortran (except Integer Sort), which would have necessitated me rewriting NAS-CG in C. Fortunately, I didn't have to start from scratch, because the Japanese had already done the hard part).

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
    3. Re:Just wait... by Raul654 · · Score: 3, Informative

      What you are describing has already been done, and was done quite a while ago. Around 1990, NASA realized that the way we do parallel benchmarks sucks. The way most benchmarks (including hte parallel ones) work is that some organization posts the code, and people have to compile and run the code as-is. There's not much room there for optimization (other than tweaking the compiler flags, some trivial hardware settings, 'etc), which is essential to getting good parallel performance (because parallel machines vary so widely). So performance was tied very closely to the implimention over which nobody had any control.

      NASA approached the problem differently. Their numerical analysis group put out a set of "paper and pencil" benchmarks (based on real world problems that one would encounter, for example, fluid dynamics). The actual implimentation was left up to the individual companies. This is what we know today as the NAS benchmark suite.

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
  12. I suspect the answer ends up by jhw539 · · Score: 4, Funny

    42.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. A few more iterations by ender_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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