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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."
Making that computer must have been harder than getting a story from MSN posted on the main page of Slashdot!
It now costs 15 dollars per gigaflop. In the early 90s, a million dollars per gigaflop was normal.
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should be used in conjunction with the topic from the previous article. Creating coutless means by which, to not only find vulnerabilities in things like Javascript, but equally, construct fixes to those vulnerabilities. Once it creates an open door, it generates the fix for closing it and keeping it closed. Machines like this can think thousands of times faster than your average black-hat-crackah, so why not use them as a fight fire with fire tool?
Every one is so concerned with internet safety, on would think that at some point massive resources with be set forth in order to effectively deal with the flaw finding few out there making it difficult for the rest of to simply enjoy the benefits of the internet.
The article says that this machine is much more efficient than other supercomputers. Is it actually cheaper to run large programs like SETI@HOME on a supercomputer? Electricity isn't cheap.
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Not unless that is what they are going to use to render the tentacle porn; it IS a Japanese Supercomputer, after all.
Y'know, I have a feeling I should really post this as anonymous coward.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
The original article seems to be unreachable, so I can't read it, but the precis has the wrong chip count: It does have 4808 LSI chips, but it also has 19,122 Xeon processors.
Will this run Vista at a decent speed, or should I wait for the Rev B and SP1?
If this petaflop supercomputer really only costs $9 million and only occupies the space of a large walk-in closet, why don't they mass-produce it and sell it. No, not to individuals but to corporations and governments. Folding@Home and Seti@Home could suddenly be like, sorry guys we don't need you anymore - we got something better. Having hundreds of copies of this super computer could quickly solve problems across the globe that much slower supercomputers are currently having trouble with!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
NOT what the VP of Marketing wants to hear:
"Not just a flop, but a flop a million billion times over."
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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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Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips...
FLOP = floating operation [per second].
PETA = 10 ^ 15, or "a quadrillion".
(10 ^ 15) / 4808 = about 207,986,688,852, which would indicate that each chip is running at several hundred TERA-hertz [and, even then, the machine would have to possess an operating system so efficient that it could consistently perform one floating point operation per clock increment, which seems extraordinarily unlikely].
Or is this an "analog" computer and are these "analog" FLOPS?
And no, I did not RTFA.
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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
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
...its Geforce MX 420.
ROFL at the "From the renders-a-million-tentacles-a-minute dept" ... nice choice!
"Show me the MFlops/Watt rating of this?"
No problemo!
The number of flops: (10 ^ 15) / 4808 = about 207,986,688,852 flops per chip, - from a previous poster.
The number of watts: 300,000 - from the manufacturers' site = 62 watts/chip
207,986,688,852 / 62 = 33,546,240 flops (33 MFlops) / watt.
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.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
but I thought Japan already had a lot of studys on protein?
I've seen the videos of it a few times and stumbled across entire collections of them! they call it something like bukkake.
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.
The problem with that is that this computer is very specialised to molecular simulations. It can't very easily do other things, like seti or folding (okay, well, maybe that it can do). It was easy to design and cheap because it didn't have to be general purpose and adaptable, like BlueGene/L is.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
(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.
If it costs $15/gigaflop, then they would have paid... $15 million
A $6 million subsidy (40%) isn't small change.
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o0t!
>Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
/know/ that you're going to get modded down.
With a side order of hot grits!
A tip: if you can fit your message in the subject line, then do it, particularly when you
I remember back when that comment would have gotten +5 "Whoa duuuuude" mods.
Yet you can still get good mods if you say:
"A petaflop that fits in a closet for just $9M for the first one? You could make more for a couple million, at least by the time you got your [impressive knowlegeable-sounding ultra-tech adjectives] cluster interconnect together - why not spend a quarter of a billion and push the limits of computing out another couple orders of magnitude? This thing can do protein folding, so it can likely do bomb physics and a bunch of other big-money problems that can be represented in similar math."
Which translates to:
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Though the theoretical performance of this computer is higher than that of BlueGene and may have higher realworld performance too, you can't compare this supercomputer with BlueGene and other TOP500 supercomputers since it can't run LINPACK. It's just too specialized for its use.
I compiled some quick facts which compare those three supercomputers and added pointers to other resources for your convenience:
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ITnomad?id=126
Cheers, Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
This computer, like all the previous (md)grape generations, is a central force potential calculation accelerator.
it does nothing but calculate 1/sqrt(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2)*variable, but really really often.
Grape 6, 5 years or so ago, was already running at 200Mhz, had a throughput of one force calculation per pipleline and 6 pipelines on once chip. So it counts as 1.2 billion force calculations, each being (1* inverse, 1 sqrt, 3 adds, 3 squares, 2 fmul, ect).
A lot of flops, but totally useless as general purpose computers.
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