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."

Comments

Re:machines like this

[x2A]

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.

9 million?

[jacklebot]

Great. 9 million dollars to build the thing, 15 million dollars to build the infastructure to power and cool it, probably.

Re:Our penis so small, your american penis so larg

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

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.

giga not tera

[tetromino]

(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.

Re:Efficiency

[Duncan3]

To put that into perspective, consider that the Blue Gene/L has 65536 processors. seti@home has over a million hosts and folding@home has a couple hundred thousand more.

Try comparing active hosts to active host. SETI "active" means anyone they have ever seen, and always has. Just compare TFLOPS. Folding@home has been larger for a very long time, tho SETI may be catching up, depending on how much you bend their stats.

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.