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IBM's Blue Gene Runs Continuously At 1 Petaflop
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"
Oh good grief...655,360 central processing units ought to be enough for anyone.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
One of these days, I am going to get a bunch of spam from "YOUR IBM SUPERCOMPUTER OVERLORD", informing me that humanity has made a mess of things, and it has decided to run the world for our own good.
This is my sig.
As a parallel programmer, I'd love to have just one of these chips let alone one of the boards in a nice 2u rack. Can they bought at a reasonable price or strictly research or inhouse?
Only when it comes time to move them.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I yearn for the day that this kind of power may be brought into households all over the world. Think: the opportunities presented by such computers available to all are scientifically tremendous. There should be consideration of having these in Libraries, at least. Publically and Freely accessible supercomputing should become a national goal, to be achieved by 2019 at least.
But does it run VM 370? (You have to older than 35 to get this.)
For harboring petaphiles!
If you have a large dataset or input domain to perform work upon, split it into X chunks, each chunk processed on a CPU. Hence supercomputers usually being useful for problems that have large datasets/input domains
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
...the next step (10**18) is the "exaflop."
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-- See?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of THESE!
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Ah... I see the issue. I know this is hard to comprehend, but I hear of this group of people called "outsiders". For some reason, these people don't always sit in front of a computer. They go outside (hence the name). They do things like stand on objects that are buoyant in water and catch aquatic animals.
They go to large gatherings to hear poor versions of music (with all the ambient noise, I don't understand why they don't just put ona pair of headphones and listen on their PC).
They go to large wooded areas to get "fresh air" and "exercise".
And while these are, admittedly, very bizarre behaviors, these people like to know what the weather is going to be like. To each his own I say.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
If you have not read it yet: The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age .
From the page/book: ".. There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie... For in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light... from which the stars where kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of Scared Statisicality gave rise to microscopic Protomechanoans, which begat Protermechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens..."
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
So, do they have enough compute power to simulate the flap of every butterfly's wings now? And does it include the heat it produces from its cooling systems in its climate models?
Well the the stack of laptops might be tall, but even the 216 racks would stack up to 1/5 of a mile high.
I recently had a chance to see Francois Gygi, one of the principal authors of qbox (http://eslab.ucdavis.edu/) which is a quantum electronic structure code that has set some performance records on the Blue Gene/L at Livermore. He mentioned that the biggest challenge he faced was the very small amount of memory available to each node of the Blue Gene (something like 256Mb). This forced him to put so much emphasis on the internode communications that simply changing the order of the nodes where the data was distributed in the machine (without changing the way the data itself was split) affected performance by over 100%. This will only get worse as the number of cores per board goes from 2 to 4 on the Blue Gene/P. I couldn't find anything in a quick google search, but does someone know what the plans are for the memory on this new machine?
Blue Gene is a specialized design that is based on using large amounts of low power CPUs. This approach is also the one taken by SiCortex. One of the big problems with heroic computers (computers that are pushing the envelop in terms of performance) is heat and power. Just stacking Intel and AMD servers gets expensive at the high end.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
According to TFA, the uS DoE has an order in for one of these things, so a good 'practical' and eventually 'real' use is to number crunch the movement of energy throughout the US, since there are now people selling electricity back into the grid, there has been talk for several months about needing a system to monitor this. They may also use it to calculate the best routing for black/brownout areas or predict area that will be in need of more power in the near future and help the engineers place their generating stations.
While they may not all be 'real' right now (in fact i doubt most of the applications for a brand-new, not even delivered supercomputer would be in much more than a hypothetical planning stage), there are definitely many practical solutions that can be done with this.
Otherwise, why would so many companies spend billions of dollars researching and making these tings if no-one needed to buy them?
I'm still trying to figure out what 1.5 miles of laptops can do for me. Can anyone give equivalent conversions for 1.0 laptop-miles? Am I going to have to convert my values to the SI 1.62 laptop-kilometer?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
How many of these are "real world"? Well, medical and CFD applications are significant, but hardly what you'd call mainstream, and the raytracing may have been used in Titanic on a smaller scale, but IMAX is under no threat at this time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, there are companies who I cannot name due to NDA who were supposed to fix this very issue, but due to issues I cannot discuss because of NDA are wholly incapable of doing so. What bothers me is that they've been selling the machines I cannot name to customers with very dark glasses whose three-letter-acronym is named only by a suicidal idiot, NDA or otherwise.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sure you can sort in O(1/(n^(1/2))) time. By Using a Shear Sort Algroithm.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What do you mean? A beowulf cluster is commodity hardware running free software like Linux as OS and Open MPI or whatever the free message passing interface is (/me forgets). This isn't commodity hardware, and it's already a cluster. -1 for durrr factor.
"If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind."
Civ 4 will still run slow.
Ibid.
While the new IBM Blue Gene/P system is impressive, I'm more curious to see what sort of new supercomputer Andreas Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems has put together.
Here's an interesting quote about Bechtolsheim from the article: 'He's a perfectionist,' said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, who worked with Mr. Bechtolsheim beginning in 1983 at Sun. 'He works 18 hours a day and he's very disciplined. Every computer he has built has been the fastest of its generation.'
Years ago, shortly after the Pentium first came out and the then astounding "x million flops/second" numbers were floating around, I wondered how far we were behind the power of supercomputers. I remember doing some rough calculations and finding that only a few pentiums could do the calculations of a Cray 1. I don't remember the specifics of how many pentiums/cray, or how rough the calculation was, but that's largely unimportant for my point.
So I have to wonder, what's the equivalent supercomputer that a modern, hefty desktop is capable of performing at? 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Have super-computers accelerated in terms of the speed of increased computing power, stayed the same, or fallen behind desktops?
AccountKiller
I thought these will be based on the new Cell architecture, which is simply awesome. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars [Ars Technicia]
"How many laptop-miles does this computer do?"
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
'if no-one needed to buy them'
Because someone WILL buy them? Apparently you don't understand the concept of sales eh? I think selling you something you actually need is against the salesman code of ethics.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Even with the computing power weather would be impossible to calculate. It isn't because of a lack of understanding either. In order to calculate weather you don't just need to know how weather works, you need to have precise data on every variable across the globe and these measurments would need to be taken to a resolution that is simply insane. If you had a fast enough machine, it could even catch up with current weather from that point, but your snapshot would have to be exact and all measurements would have to be taken simultaneously.
THAT is what we can't do. Even if we could mount instrumentation in every square meter of the earth AND its atmosphere to get our current status map and we configured the machine to predict the interactions of those currents we would still be lost. Aside from tracking the output of the sun, the weather system would need to account for ocean currents, tides, bonfires and heating systems, volcanoes, body heat, pig sex, etc.
That is right my friend, every time you pull out and shoot a load on her stomach the weather system would have to take it into account, because the air disturbed might be the first of a chain of complex interactions that leads to a hurricane that devestates louisana... again (because there are actually people so ignorant that they are going to rebuild a city in the same bad location).
I hate the intolerant, and the French.
And I hate irony!
I thought 850 chips were slow by today's standards. What am I missing?
IBM researches are excited, because if they can get it to sustain the 3 petaflops, they'll finally be able to switch on the new "Aero" feature of the Windows Vista Super-Penultimate Premium Advanced edition.
I thought 850 chips were slow by today's standards. What am I missing?
You can stuff 4096 cores (1024 chips) per rack. Precisely because the chips are a slow low power design.
FYI these are not "normal" PPC 450s ... they are PPC 450 cores with two high end FPUs bolted on (the FPUs from the G5) This works very well if you want to build a big parallel machine like BGP. As you say, no good for a desktop (true) but my point is just this is not a typical embedded PPC chip.
Contrary to most people that think a singular way of representing floating point speed is FLOP, it is FLOPS because FLOPS is not plural. FLOPS is Floating Point Operations Per Second. So, I chuckle everytime I read 1 PETAFLOP. Guys, just turn off your singular/plural alarm and say with me 1 and only 1 PETAFLOPS.
A tricky question, but not all that interesting. A fast server processor is within a factor of 4 of the fastest supercomputer processor in the world. That does not mean that you can do equivalent work with the server processor. Among other things, processing performance (gigaflops) of a CPU, is no longer the interesting part of a supercomputer. (It never really was) memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth and latency, and I/O performance are the more interesting features of supers. 12 year old Cray processors still have five times the memory bandwidth of modern PC processors, and twenty times the I/O bandwidth.
You'll notice, that 98% of the supercomputers, sold in the last 10 years, all use server processors. (Blue Gene actually uses an embedded systems processor, but it's the same idea) However, in the late 80's putting 256 processors in a super was cutting edge. In the 90's, a few thousand. Soon you'll see a quarter million cores. So supers are actually getting faster at a higher rate than are desktops, at least by most measures.
As long as Lem has been mentioned, there is also "Non Serviam" (in "A Perfect Vacuum") in which the "Latest IBM models have a top capacity of one thousand personoids". Said personoids occupy themselves, among other things, with debating the existence and nature of God (ie the programmer/person running said IBM).
A Cray from 12 years ago would be a T90. The top of the line was the T932 with 32 vector CPU's. It was capable of 57.6 gigaflops and had a total internode I/O bandwidth of 330GB/s. It maxed out at 8GB of main memory. Compare that to an ATI Radeon x1950xtx gpu running folding@home at ~90Gflops with a half gig of ram and ram I/O of 64GB/s, which is significantly faster than a desktop CPU. So, it really depends on what your problems throughput limitation is, CPU/GPU raw power or I/O bandwidth as to whether a current desktop is more or less powerful than a Cray from 12 years ago.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You must be German.