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Oak Ridge Lab Supercomputer Doubles Performance
Anonymous Coward writes "The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the United States has undergone an upgrade that's doubled its peak performance. The Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now perform up to 54 trillion calculations per second, up from its previous peak of 25 trillion calculations. 'It is probably the fifth-fastest machine' in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. 'It is clearly the fastest open-science machine in the U.S. today.'"
FTFA: The overhaul was the first step in a multiyear, nearly $200 million contract between Seattle-based Cray Inc. and the Department of Energy to increase Oak Ridge's supercomputing capability to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop, by 2009. 54 -> 1,000 seems like an awful lot to jump upto!
for the Vista upgrade.
Jumping the gun a bit, probably.
Now that we have all that horsepower, the big decision comes....what to do with it? I have some suggestions that I think would greatly benefit mankind as a whole.
1) Decrypt NSA keys so we can spy on them for a change
2) Develop a fool-proof method of determing what is spam and forwarding it all to Bill Gates
3) Calculate winning lotto numbers and donate the money to random charities
4) Develop an algorythm that decides where to go for dinner
5) Figure out how to make a pad that acutally stays in place AND doesn't stick to my a$$
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
I live in Tennessee, not too far from Oak Ridge (45 mins away). Most kids don't even know that there are labs there. The teachers don't mention them in school, and nobody cares.
Honestly, there's not much in Tennessee that's special (I've lived here for all 18 years of my life), so I wish they'd actually TELL us about the awesome stuff we _DO_ have near us.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
They have to double it every 18 months.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Did someone lean on the turbo button?
In ST:TNG, Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion operations per second. If they could just squeeze 6 more trillion operations out of that supercomputer, and get the right software and memory access speed, and fit it all into a Mac Mini-sized space, we could have our first sentient starfleet officer ready before Dr. Sung.
Oh yeah, teraflops so that it can run Vista... But can it run linux?
Does it use Blue Ray or HD-DVD?
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
How is the speed measured? Blurb says "54 trillion calculations per second", but what kind of calculations is it? Moving of register content? Multiplication of 64 bit floating point numbers?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
question of life the universe and everything it was not, of course, as big as the Earth. A computer so large that it was often mistaken for a planet. Except by the IAU who saw through the Earth's feeble attempt to be considered a planet and reclassified it as a large pocket calculator...
Whether the inhabitants of Earth's matrix retaliate by reclassifying astronomers as pseudoscientists remains to be seen...
Johnny: Wow, I tell ya, that new Oak Ridge supercomputer is fast.
Crowd: How fast is it?
Johnny: Awh, it's so fast, it'll do an infinite loop in seven seconds.
MaMahon: Yessss!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It is times 2.16 when going from 25 to 54 trillion, not just times 2. Does that thing run on Pentiums?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
adding more pipes so the internet can run faster?
From http://www.ornl.gov/ornlhome/visiting.shtml#public
"Public Tours
The 2006 DOE Oak Ridge Facilities Public Tour continues through Friday, Sept. 29. The 2 ½-hour tour begins and ends at the American Museum of Science and Energy, 300 S. Tulane, Ave., Oak Ridge. The tour is open to U.S. citizens 10 years of age and older. Charge is $3-$5 and registration is conducted the morning of each tour at the museum. The route focuses on DOE missions and the history of Oak Ridge. The program highlights all three DOE Oak Ridge facilities - Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, and the East Tennessee Technology Park -- and includes an off-the-bus stop at ORNL's Graphite Reactor Museum, the New Bethel Baptist Church and the East Tennessee Technology Park Visitors Overlook. The Friday tour stops at the new Spallation Neutron Source.
Nearly 20,000 people from 50 states have taken the public tour since its inception. The program is offered primarily for visitors who have a nontechnical interest in the DOE facilities. For more information, contact Fred Strohl (strohlhf [add an at sign here] ornl [add a dot here] gov, 865.574.4165). "
is it powerful enough to run Vista?
- one of the last quality U.S. amateur radio manufacturers!
(avoiding the obvious)
...was it designed on a Mac?
"Ah, so that's what that turbo button does!"
The original press release:
= irol-newsArticle&ID=873357
http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p
All they do is upgrade to dual-core Opterons, hence the double performance.
So this public computer is now processing at 54 Teraflops? In the Terminator series didn't Skynet take over the world when it reached 60?
I for one welcome our new supercomputer overlords.
No, its just an easy 'upgrade'. build in the speed, and when the customer pays more, you go in, spend a few days pretendending to do an upgrade when all you do is flip a swtich somewhere.
( yes im kidding, but it has been done in the past... intentoinally crippling hardware so that there is 'room for growth' when you pay more )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Oh man, I told you to used the quad core chips for this upgrade, ;-)
not the duals!"
Our labs are prepared for our uber-rich Magrathea - customer overlords.
... that's just the minimum recommended system configuration for release 2 of the Windows Vista Home edition.
Have gnu, will travel.
50 times faster than the original Peacer bobbler, and probably with better accuracy.
Not to shabby.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I recall visiting ORNL as part of a recruiting visit to UT-Knoxville (the position offered a joint appointment at ORNL -- how cool is that?)
Two curious events from that trip:
First, I was working at the University of Chicago at the time, and when I checked in with security I had to sign in. I remember it being a wood building that looked like it had been built in the 1940s as a "temporary" war-building and never replaced. It gave me an odd feeling to sign in with security in a 1940s-looking building as Dr. So-and-so, from the University of Chicago, here to visit the Oak Ridge facility. If you know your history of The Bomb, you'll recall there was much traffic between the U of C, where Fermi and others did academic-type work on nuclear fission, including building the first pile, and Oak Ridge, where they worked on many practical aspects of atomic weapons. It was a moment that brought the history to life for me.
Second, a post-doc took me on a tour of the spectroscopy facilities near one of the reactors, and as we were picking our way through the equipment, designed to collect beams of neutrons from the reactor core, I remember him stopping suddenly before crossing an unremarkable gap in the equipment. He thought carefully for a while, then stepped across the gap, muttering in a somewhat off-hand way "Oh this will be all right, I remember now the reactor is not running today." Uh...ok.
I consider myself pretty modern and enlightened, but in that momemt I could kind of understand all those people who have paranoid fears of nuclear technology. It is unnerving to think that something completely silent and invisible, yet completely deadly, could be right next to you, and you need to take the word of some distracted-looking pocket-protector-type that, gee, it's OK today, the reactor isn't on. (I think we should take his word, but I can understand how it makes people nervous.)
When does it come onto the market? And can I put Linux on it?
... to play doom.
...in Soviet Tennessee, supercomputer doubles you!
Apparently, so do they.
Maybe they could find Bush's brain with it.Or atlases narrow it to a 100 mile radius.The Skynet Corp. can probally help out at 60 Terafloppies!!!
Plasma Pong is a BRILLIANT and clever game that uses genuine fluid-dynamics simulation done on the GPU to create an incredibly beutiful game. It is utterly hypnotic on my 24" Dell widescreen and would be mesmerizing as a wall sized projection. I also find it extremely amusing how we have enough computing poewer nowadays to use real-time accurate physics like this just to enhance Pong, of all things. It seems down-right decadent, like using $100 bills to wipe your ass.