Sandia Wants To Build Exaflop Computer

Dan100 brings us an announcement that Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are setting their sights on an exaflop supercomputer. Researchers from the two laboratories jointly launched the Institute for Advanced Architectures to facilitate development. One of the problems they hope to solve is how to provide each core of each processor with enough data so that cycles aren't going to waste. "The idea behind the institute — under consideration for a year and a half prior to its opening — is 'to close critical gaps between theoretical peak performance and actual performance on current supercomputers,' says Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. 'We believe this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer architectures.' The institute is funded in FY08 by congressional mandate at $7.4 million."

Comments

AI will not happen soon

[uuxququex]

So far the advances in the field of AI have been non-spectacular. Yes, there have been somewhat succesful reasoning systems (rule based or probability based) and neural networks have made classification easier.

However, at the moment there are no serious applications that will only become feasible by having more computer power.

More speed in calculation has plenty of benefits, but AI as a research field will not be making major announcements soon because of this new machine.

FLOP? FLOPS? FLOPS^2?

[Lars Clausen]

It'd be cool if TFA's headline was actually correct: Then we'd have a machine whose performance actually accelerated by a 10^15 floating point operations per second *per second*. That gets to be a lot of FLOPS real fast.

OTOH, it might just be the singularity happening. We wouldn't notice until it was too late.