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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.'"
OS/2 compiles your homemade C code faster than you've ever seen before!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Just in time for the Vista RC1 release!
I guess.
IBM is also building a slightly slower computer, called "Wile E. Coyote", which is slightly slower. They are currently attempting to work out the bugs, as it keeps crashing...
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
So, is this the reason why the PS3 release has been delayed?
The owls are not what they seem
For one, they gloss over whether they mean floating point operations or "calculations" per second. The article seems to equate a flop with "calculations per second". The flop, of course, came from floating point operation. Even then it's vague--is it single, double or double-extended?
Yes, it's certainly better than the old "megahurts" races. But I think they could come up with something better.
has been identifed as sub-standard components delivered by a third party company called "acme".
These components had a tendency to either explode at in-opportune moments, or behave in a manner that while was true to the letter of their description was totally ineffective for the desired purpose.
At the moment each side is gathering its hoards of lawyers and all involved are jumping up and down, waving thigh-bones in the air and screaming incomprehensible abuse at each other.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
16,000 *600$= 9.6 million. That doesn't seem like much for the biggest super computer.
God spoke to me.
The roadrunner is also the state bird of New Mexico, location of LANL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(bird)
It was always ironic to see them running up and down the road in front of my grandparents home.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Interesting sidenote in the article not mentioned here:
"The laboratory is owned by the US Department of Energy (DOE). Eventually the machine could be used for a programme that ensures the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable, the DOE said in a statement."
Why do I get a weird feeling that I've seen this sort of thing in one too many movies?
And this is from BBC News, no less. <sigh>
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
And still it only runs F.E.A.R. at 25fps... weak...
I Like Pie...
Yeah, go figure. Stupid Brits can't even speak English.
My blog
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."
[Z?]
we'll laugh at such a large room full of computer equipment, the equivalent of which will be powering our mobile communications devices in a 150mm x 150mm package.
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.
But is it fast enough to figure out the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
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.
GHz is a measurement of how fast the clock cycle of a processor is. This system will have lots of processors, that will contibute to the computing power (# of flops [floating point operations]) of the overall system. So, GHz isn't a good measurement. However, I'll try to give you a meaningless comparison.
From wikipedia:
A GFLOP is 10^9 FLOPS or 1,000,000,000 FLOPS
A petaFLOP is 10^15 FLOPS or 1,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS
So for the comparison purposes (assuming the few GLOPS from above is 5) this would be like a standard desktop running at ~4,000,000 GHz
I hope I did that math correctly...
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
I can do 1.8pflops with a #2 pencil, some scratch paper, and a few grams of peyote.
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: