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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
But does it run VM 370? (You have to older than 35 to get this.)
For harboring petaphiles!
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
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)
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
"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.
I hate the intolerant, and the French.
And I hate irony!
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.
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.