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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."
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
Specs here and yes, Suse
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!!!!
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.
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.
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
42.
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.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
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