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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."

6 of 171 comments (clear)

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

    Specs here and yes, Suse

  2. 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!!!!
  3. ...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.

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    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.

  4. 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

  5. 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

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