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Japan's Petaflop Supercomputer
slashthedot writes "Japan has built the fastest supercomputer in the world. While the BlueGene/L contains 130,000 processors, Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips, and it cost just $9 million to develop."
Having a computer do something very very fast is only of any use if you have the software to do what you want done very very fast. As far as I know, the hard part of what you suggest is writing such capable software, not running it.
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the supercomputer is quite cheap. they can probably sell a lot of these machines and will sweep the top500 list. however, it mentioned that the processor is specialized in doing astrophysics calculation. i am not sure if this will be useful for other fields.
but the good think about it is that it is more energy efficient. it seems the trend in desktop/servers right now are also going to the supercomputers. maybe they could include a performance per watt ratio in the top500 list as well.
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Great. 9 million dollars to build the thing, 15 million dollars to build the infastructure to power and cool it, probably.
Nuff said.
Where are the really neato results we should be getting from these? I'm tired of "Country X builds massive TeraWatt computer system." I want to read about "Country X mapped the cancer genome" or some such.
Besides, these are relatively not impressive. Sure in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s we were maturing the technology. Inventing new technology, analyzing it, etc. Now it's more of the same. Huge budget, lots of space and infiniband connections...
Show me the MFlops/Watt rating of this? Are they improving it? Are we wasting less resources? The irony of this is they pollute by wasting tons of energy, all so we can predict global warming or whatever.
Tom
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Oh, please. This machine only uses 300kW - that's maybe the equivalent of 150 American homes. These folks are building a specialized (as in not "more of the same") machine to support a particular bit of science (molecular dynamics simulations) that isn't gonna make for flashy headlines, and I say more power to them. I'd rather there were more scientists out there doing basic research that may actually be useful, than have them chasing after stuff for headlines that will make you happy.
And if you're trolling, yeah, you got me, so congratulations.
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You've all been had by a reporter with an overactive imagination talking to a researcher selling his own shit. The MDGrape is a specialized processor (you can actually buy it commercially as a separate board for your computer) that does exactly one thing: particle simulation using traditional laws of physics. This will allow it to do computational molecular dynamics on the small scale or universe modeling on the large scale. All it understands is data input in the form of particle positions and will output the new positions in the next time step. Can you place two numbers in a register and ask it to add the results? No. Can it do any piece of the HPL benchmark required to get on the supercomputing list? No. It does one thing, but it does it well. This whole article is like comparing the rendering capabilities of your new Nvidia GPU and the latest AMD CPU, then concluding AMD is full of idiots who can't engineer because the Nvidia chip renders more polygons.
(10^15)/4808 = 207 986 688 852, i.e. ~208 billion flops, i.e. if the chip executed only 1 instruction per clock, it would be 208GHz (not THz as you imply). Except of course the chip does more than 1 instruction per clock. Modern x86 chips do multiple flops per cycle. A Cell should be able to do at least 9 per cycle. I imagine that a dedicated vector processor, of the sort that NEC used to make, can do tens of flops per cycle.
Furthermore, many processor architectures have instructions to do several basic floating point instruction in one step. For instance, PowerPC has a one-cycle multiply-accumulate instruction (multiply and add in one step), so for marketing purposes, a PowerPC has twice the flops. Now, imagine if you have a vector processor that has a highly-optimized instruction for taking square roots or doing trig in one cycle. A square root operation will translate into dozens of basic flops (add, multiply, subtract). Such a processor might therefore be rated at 208 gigaflops even though its operating frequency is <1GHz.
Of course, if you compare USEFUL results, it's Folding@home: lots (over 50 papers), SETI: 0
The Japan box will be faster for a little while then Folding@home, but will also likely produce RESULTS instead of just alot of global warming.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/