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Sun Super Computer May Hit 2 Petaflops
Fletcher writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has revealed their "Constellation System", a new supercomputing platform that the company hopes will put them back in the running for top dog in the supercomputer race. "The linchpin in the system is the switch, the piece of hardware that conducts traffic between the servers, memory and data storage. Code-named Magnum, the switch comes with 3,456 ports, a larger-than-normal number that frees up data pathways inside these powerful computers. 'We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes," said Andy Bechtolsheim, chief architect and senior vice president of the systems group at Sun. "We have been somewhat absent in the supercomputer market in the last few years.'"
Great job Sun!
Once again you have shown us the power of talent, determination, and skill.
Rock Rock On!
a Beowulf cluster of these machines.
...but will it run linux?
Yes, but is it "portable"? As the lovely black boxes. If it is... I'll buy a truck ;)
I dearly, dearly hope that the followups to Magnum are codenamed LaTigra and Blue Steel :)
So Bechtolsheim says Sun has been "somewhat absent" from the supercomputer market in the last few years. OK, I'll bite. Exactly what markets has Sun been going gangbusters in since about 1999?
Still, kudos to Sun, for real. Investors may get mad that Sun is full of terrific technology and solid R&D but can't seem to build the business model that will let Sun capitalize on it all. But from my perspective... God, that sounds almost refreshing, doesn't it?
Breakfast served all day!
IBM Blue Gene/P update slated to run at 3 petaflops.
Java apps still take 3 minutes to start up on it.
Well if they just move the petaflops out of the way before it gets there, they won't have to worry about it hitting them.
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In Soviet Russia, TFA reads you!
Please tell me the first production system will be named "Enterprise." There have to be enough people that will work on it that will be proponents of this.
We are looking at a factor-of-three improvement over the current best system at an equal number of nodes
Whoa, slowdown boy, just tell us how many laptop-miles of power this machine has!
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Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
You missed the official rules.
But does it run Vista?
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
With Sun's slow improvements in the multi-core arena (the T1 & T2 systems) and their low power requirements their probably in for a good run at the top 10-20 spots on the Top 500 list.
:)
Consider 500 top-end T2 systems hooked up to some very fast switching hardware and you're performance per wattage ratio are going to be very persuasive to those running big data centers, although with the T1 systems the only thing which stopped us adopting them was the shared FPU (telephony codec transcoding sucks on them).
Could we see suns equivalent of IBM's BlueGene system appearing next year? I definitely think so
3456 = 2^7 * 3^3, so it's not a completely arbitrary number.
Back in the 1980s, what distinguished the Amiga (and later Steve Job's excellent NeXT) was the ability to split data among multiple co-processors and pipe it quickly around the motherboard, eliminating bottleneck and liberating the processor. Now in the PC world we're finally seeing this architecture recognized as new Intel chips tout their front-side bus and cache more than sheer increase in speed.
This SUN machine is a bigger-scale example of the same. It uses AMD Barcelona chips, and derives its power from internally routing data more efficiently than (most of) its competitors. It seems that in the Moore's-law endgame, what makes the chip a star performer is the surrounding components and their engineering for efficiency.
This will be better for geeks, as it makes the skill of efficient design come back into play after years of "bigger is better." Now if it just extends to software as well, we'll all benefit...
technical writing / development
3,456 ports. Now there's a non-computer number if I've ever seen one. It looks like someone asked, "And just how many ports do we need to be competitive," and someone else just started hitting the number keys in sequence across the top of the keyboard, starting at "3", until either Marketing was happy, or the engineer in charge fainted.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
There ya go
I'll be able to emerge app-office/openoffice before the next version comes out.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
the switch comes with 3,456 ports
Sounds to me like a giant USB-Hub to create a Beowulf-cluster of these.
And before somebody asks: Yes, it DOES run Linux.
But can it do anything useful?
...just to handle all bittorrent streams.
Bechtolsheim compares 131,000 cores of Blue Gene/L to 131,000 cores of constellation, with the sun system offering 3 times the performance.
This is hardly a fair comparison. IBM installed a 131,000 core BG/L 2 years ago, and it's been running customer code for more than a year. The sun system won't be built until late this year, and probably won't be running real customer code until this time next year. Furthermore, the BG/L machine is designed with a low-power node, assuming that a larger number of cores would be used. In IBM's older BG/L design, there are 2048 cores in a rack. Sun is packing 768 opteron cores in a rack. So a per square-meter measure gives IBM's 3 year old design only a 20% disadvantage to Sun's not-yet-released machine.
All of that is moot, of course, as theoretical peak performance is a crappy way to measure supercomputer performance anyway. The opteron is a great processor, and infinaband is a decent, though not remarkable interconnect. I'd be a little concerned, were I to buy the sun solution, that the infinaband bandwidth is being shared by 16 processor cores. That's quite a bit less interconnect performance per processor than IBM's Blue Gene, power5, Cray's XT, or SGI's altix. There's certainly plenty of memory on each of these constellation blades. That said, there are a list of applications that perform very well on Blue Gene, and Sun has a lot of ground to make up in terms of OS, software, and establishing a relationship with the HPC customers.
It's nice to have more options, however.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Okay! Let the first production vs. of this supercomputer be called the Stargazer! Sounds quite fitting... [smile]
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
It's not the number of petaflops, it's how you use it.
Geez, Sun and IBM getting into a prick-waving contest.
I am officially gone from
640k should be enough.
When they came up with the word "petaflop"...Couldn't they have come up with something a little more phonetically scientific?
I'm not one to argue about etimology, but that sounds like something you would use to measure bunny ears.
"Hey Frank, you get a chance to check the stats on those rabbit ear movements?" "Yeah! We're at 2.3 petaflops Mike!"
Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously high-performance?
The switches do sound awesome though, will give infiniband a run for their money.
This will be when and only when the headline actually reads, "Sun Super Computer Hits 2 Petaflops".
Question everything
The police will finally have something they can process their stored petafiles with! Two at a time no less!
today is spelling optional day.
Wake me up when they've released the galaxy class system. Binary is so passe. All the cool kids use trinary systems. Viva la trek!
...how long until the p0rn industry gets a hold of a few?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
ha
Yes, it will!
Can you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these?
I realise you're only joking, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix
So finaly I'll be able to solve all those pesky NP-Hard problems.
The same argument was made for the Commodore 64.
Do you really know what you're talking about? Can you be more specific about the specific data paths between components and how the operating system controlled them or interfaced with them?
I mean, for example, if you wanted to make a video playback or slideshow program could you get the hard disk controller to blit directly to the screen bypassing main memory, or perhaps over the system bus, or a secondary channel? (I doubt it). Or could you describe a similar type of resource-saving scenario?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
All sacred geometry or even cockblockery aside, do you remember the 5, 6, 7 & 8's?
Now, someone help me with trees. I, for one, am unclear how a tree is applicable to ports. If I have an Ethernet router with 5678 ports--perhaps this is even better than 3456 ports-- I don't want some ports to talk immediately to the root node of a 12-ary tree while other ports have to send data meandering through twigs, branches, and trunks. If a 12-ary tree is good, a 3456-ary tree is better. Better yet may be every one of the ports having a single path to each of the 3455 other ports.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The copper, blitter, paula, etc. wasn't all that compared to even early nineties PC hardware, but the Amiga had a clean efficient DMA architecture. Just check out this video about the Amiga and Atari ST from 1985 for details: http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985
The PC caught up/surpassed the old Amiga here with the PCI bus back in '94, just 9 years later ya'know.
Just arguing with a pal. On how to pronounce petaflops. is it pronounced as it is spelt or as PitaFlops.
Back in the days GigaHerts was pronounced JigaHertz and it was OK.
My opinion is we will only know the real pronounciation when Petaflops become more popular.
"Drawing closer to world domination, keystroke by keystroke."
"...and two petaflops should be enough for anybody!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Obligatory post.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these rules!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom