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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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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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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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Great. 9 million dollars to build the thing, 15 million dollars to build the infastructure to power and cool it, probably.
The Cell processor can do ~200 GFLOPS - not IEEE quality FLOPS however, however they're 'good enough single precision FLOPs' for it's target uses. This is probably why this new supercomputer won't get into the Top500 list, because it's very specialised and thus probably nowhere near as good at IEEE conformant calculations.
The Cell processor is not running at 200GHz. There's this concept called 'parallelisation', it's how your graphics card can do dozens, if not hundreds, of operations per clock cycle. In Cell's case it can do 8 (number of SPUs) * 4 (128-bit registers, SIMD) * 2 (units) = 64 SP FLOPS per clock cycle, and that's not including the PPU which has VMX128 and an FPU itself.
However make the Cell processor calculate IEEE conformant FLOPS, and it gets a double precision score of around 20GFLOPS. Still good though.
The above was from memory, details may vary, figures are roughly correct, YMMV, etc.
"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.
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>Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
/know/ that you're going to get modded down.
With a side order of hot grits!
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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!"
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