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

To Be used by Which Application?

[curmudgeon99]

Aren't we getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, Sandia? What program would you run on this? This brings up the essential issue: what kind of program would YOU write to take advantage of this? I can only think of one: AI.

Re:To Be used by Which Application?

[morgan_greywolf]

Aren't we getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, Sandia? What program would you run on this? This brings up the essential issue: what kind of program would YOU write to take advantage of this? I can only think of one: AI. Military simulations. That's what Sandia spends most of its supercomputing clock cycles doing. The Department of Energy funds supercomputing centers like Sandia National Laboratories in order to run simulations on military vehicles, nuclear weapons simulations, etc.

Re:To Be used by Which Application?

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to work at Sandia and can assure you that much more than weapons work is done on the computers. In fact, recently a lot of work was done in modeling the huge asteroid that smashed into Russia in the early 20th century. The researchers we able to develop new understanding of the dynamics of such an event and discovered that much smaller asteroids than previously thought could do such damage.

Also, a large portion of the computers are available to outside research (besides research done at the Labs).

Re:AI will not happen soon

[curmudgeon99]

Excellent point. I might add that I have been working on just such a code set for a few years but that's another discussion. The real reason that AI has been stuck is because it has only attempted to replicate the functions of one hemisphere: the left (linear sequential, where language is processed). The visual-simultaneous right hemisphere is the one that no computer today replicates. THAT, my esteemed friends, is where the work needs to be done. I have spent the better part of four years on just that problem...

I want one

[sm62704]

I don't know why, but I want one.

Twenty years ago we had a Compaq portable that ran on a 16 mhz 286 at work, and it was HOT. Blazingly fast, could do anything. That is, for its time. The supercomputers then weren't as powerful as your laptop today.

So if I can manage to stay alive for another 20 years, I'll probably have a laptop more powerful than the supercomputer in TFA. I guess I'll just have to wait a while.

-mcgrew (link is to "Growing Up With Computers", a 2 year old K5 article)