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Supercomputer to Hit 1.6 Petaflops With 16,000 Cell Chips
tygerstripes writes, "IBM has announced that they are gearing up to build the world's fastest supercomputer, more than four times faster than the reigning champ, IBM's BlueGene/L. Nicknamed 'Roadrunner,' the new machine will be a hybrid of off-the-shelf CPUs and Cell chips designed for the PS3. Roadrunner is to be installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side). According to the BBC: 'The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 Cell processors... each Cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second.'"
Sony did say they were having trouble acquiring key components on the assembly line...
Maybe not so much a joke after all?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
No. Sony said it was due to shortages of the blue laser diode in the Blu-ray drives. Also, you'll note they're short a couple million PS3s, not a measley 16000.
First, there's a shortage of blue diode lasers. Now, there's a shortage of Cell processors. If you were expecting a Sony discount before Christmas, forget about it.
Roadrunner is to be installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side)
.. enough for 4 interns including desks.
Why mix the units like that? It's either 33 meters a side, or its 12,100 square feet. Mixing units is the sort of thing that can only lead to errors.
And for the record, sqrt(1100m2) = 33.17 meters = 108.83 feet a side. 110 feet per side gets you an extra 24.13 square meters
http://twitter.com/onion2k
> Yes, it's certainly better than the old "megahurts" races. But I think they could come up with something better.
Bogomips?
I think they've switched over, from Wikipedia: "Short scale is the English translation of the French term échelle courte, which designates a system of numeric names in which the word billion means a thousand millions.
Long scale is the English translation of the French term échelle longue, which designates a system of numeric names in which the word billion means a million millions.
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United Kingdom uniformly used the long scale, while the United States of America used the short scale, so the two systems were often (and accurately at that time) referred to as "British" and "American" usage, respectively. However, today the United Kingdom uses the short scale so widely that the term "British usage" is no longer an appropriate phrase."
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I know the cluster has ~ 2,200 4-socket dual core 2.2 ghz opteron systems (x3755) in the aggregate, each socket tied to 8GB consisting of 8 1 GB DIMMs. Each node will be connected to a blade using infinband, the blade having 2 first-gen (i.e. PS3) cell processors. I'm not sure how the second gen cell processor part will be (that's when it is supposed to get interesting for 64-bit precision operations, the only ones that count for top500). BTW the systems will also all be connected to each other by an inifinband fabric. I don't know if ultimately the cell processors add up to 16,000 chips, but I do know the number of physical AMD parts will be about 8,000 or so, though you could either say 8,000 processors or 16,000 depending on how you count dual core...
Of course, there may be other challenges top500 wise beyond the first-gen cell limitations. I know the cluster is supposed to have some bits operate on classified problems and that will begin before the entire setup is there, while other bits are to remain working on unclassified stuff. I don't know how that impacts them, someone at LANL may be able to answer as to whether they could run a big linpack run once complete across the typically distinct units of the cluster. Of course, the first gen cell blades will not deliver remotely impressive top500 numbers, only 32-bit precision operations. The 1.6 petaflops number I'm not sure is intended to be a 64-bit precision number, and therefore isn't necessarily directly comparable with the BlueGene numbers on Top500.
Also, I'm not sure if the cell blade is a proven platform for IO performance (i.e. pushing the Infiniband). The blade is largely based on the PS3 reference implementation, afaik, and of course in designing that they didn't necessarily worry too much about high-speed interconnects. Of course the cell blades have no high-speed graphics to worry about, so whatever communication mechanism used for that may be redirected for inter-blade ccommunications.
Other tidbits, the x3755 is a 4U box, and they have no more than 6 per rack (to leave room for bladecenters), and this means on the order of 400 racks or so. It will be running linux (that's nearly a given in the top500 nowadays). For a cell processor to qualify to be in one of the blades, all 8 SPEs must be workable, and all 8 will be usable by developers/users, the core os generally running only on the modest PPC core, unlike the PS3 which will contain a single cell part that may contain a failed SPE, and Sony reserves the use of one of the others at all times, limiting application developers to 6 SPEs, but the Cell blade of course doesn't have anything but serial console, so no gaming on cell blades....
Though not necessarily 64-bit precision flops, as are required for top500 scores... The cell isn't impressive double-precision wise.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/
The toolchain and a simulator are freely available and run on Fedora Core 5 systems. Take a look for yourself.
Unless IBM happens to be using blue lasers in their new supercomputer, it has absolutely nothing to do with PS3's launch numbers.
Here's an explanation. Keep this in mind whenever you read PR about vapor hardware... Most likely the confusion between FLOPS and "calculations per second" is not unlike the confusion between peak PR numbers, peak Linpack results, sustained Linpack results, and sustained application FLOPS. For example, no Cell processor ever reaches the impossible speed of 360 GFLOPS on any real world scientific application because of the real world problems of a slow interface to memory, storage, network, etc. which all chips have to contend with. When numbers are being used in a press release, all vendors in the industry benefit greatly from using whichever number is the largest and most impressive to the reader, even if it is completely impractical to a supercomputer user. Also, there can only be theoretical Linpack numbers for a machine that isn't built yet, so they have a rationale to explain such behavior.
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
Huh? A million is a thousand times a thousand. A billion is a thousand times a million. A trillion is a thousand times a billion. Continue with quadrillion, quintillion, etc. Note the prefixes here (mi is mono, bi, tri) indicate how many thousands of times larger they are than a thousand, or I suppose sets of three orders of magnitude larger if you insist (one three-digit seperator's worth). I think this is the one case where our logic is more consistant. I'm sure there's a more technical term for such a digit grouping, but each American prefix increase adds a corresponding number of digit groupings. Though it'll get interesting when the lazy number-crunchers decide to apply 'polyllion' to anything equating to a trillion or more.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
According to today's Austin American Statesman article , the other 16,000+ CPUs in this machine will be AMD Opterons.
And, the article also confirms that the machine will indeed be running Linux.
No - I've been around a few years and was never taught "billion = million million" at school (and I do remember changing from pounds, shillings and pence, so that should help you put a date on it).
w ww.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.as p%3Fthreadid%3D6977%26posts%3D18+billion+million+b ritish+treasury+%22million+million%22&hl=en&gl=uk& ct=clnk&cd=11&client=firefox-a
I think that the "official" changeover (as far as the treasury was concerned) was late 60s / early 70s. A quick google can't find a cite for it but a post here mentions "the official announcement some three decades ago":
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:O4P5O5xh-6sJ: