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Sandia Wants To Build Exaflop Computer

Posted by Soulskill on from the an-exaflop-ought-to-be-enough-for-anyone dept.

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."

22 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. To Be used by Which Application? by curmudgeon99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
      --
      My blog
    2. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by PowerEdge · · Score: 5, Informative

      You don't usually run one program on these type of systems. The compute cycles are bidded out to researchers and they get x number of compute hours. The system is partitioned out to a few nodes and given to the researcher to run their codes on. You could have on a system like this hundreds of jobs running simultaneously. Also, with the tens of thousands of cores needed to reach this status, a node failure, or other hardware failure is inevitable. Right now if a node fails in the middle of the job, everything is lost from the last checkpoint. The chances of failures impeding work go up greatly the more nodes and cores you run the job on.

    3. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by Huntr · · Score: 5, Funny

      What program would you run on this?

      Vista, with Aero enabled.

    4. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I am a flopped hex, you insensitive clod!

      (or did you mean exaflops, as in 10^18 FLoating point Operations Per Second?)

    5. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

    6. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by Albert+Sandberg · · Score: 3, Funny

      ... they will be the best prepared for duke nukem forever that's for sure.

    7. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by olafva · · Score: 2, Informative

      Try Climate & Weather Codes, Fusion, Combustion, CFD, Bio (genomics), and
      a host of large science/engineering, partial differential equation=based applications
      requiring the solution of large systems of matrix equations,... Check out:

      http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20061025-00

      --
      What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
    8. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by Gospodin · · Score: 4, Funny

      And if a Democrat it would be: "Who would Marx tax?"

      --
      ...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
    9. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by PowerEdge · · Score: 2, Informative

      We have elected a republican president... twice. In fact it is this republican president that has put the emphasis on American primacy in the super computing arena. Something called the earth simulator out of Japan put us in our place. This president opened up funding and in effect mandated the classes of systems you see today being built at NASA, DoE facilities, and academia. But, go on with your blind hatred and closed mindedness.

    10. Re:To Be used by Which Application? by Rolgar · · Score: 2

      They probably need it to run Windows for Warships properly. You wouldn't want to run out of cycles in the middle of a battlefield.

  2. AI will not happen soon by uuxququex · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:AI will not happen soon by curmudgeon99 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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...

    2. Re:AI will not happen soon by kestasjk · · Score: 2, Informative

      Many people have worked on the area which they think AI is lacking in, but until we understand the brain (or even come up with a good definition of "intelligence") I don't think we'll get very far. But who knows, keep on looking!

      There are a lot of uses for extra computing power though, it's not like we've reached a point where we have too much. Protein folding and climate models are the first that come to mind, but I'm sure there are many others. Companies aren't building these things for fun.

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
  3. Flow Down? by webword · · Score: 2, Funny

    How long does it typically take for memory and sotrage advances to make to end consumers? For example, when we first heard about "gigabytes" back in the day, how long did it take to get there once it was being done in the laboratory?

    OK, here's the truth. I'm just wondering since I need more memory to carrying around the entire internet in my pocket. Right now, I can only fit Ron Paul fanatic postings on my USB stick. They are taking up a lot of room. (Nothing against Ron Paul, mind you.)

    --
    How to Download YouTube Videos
  4. I swear I thought... by kazade84 · · Score: 3, Funny

    it said Santa was building a super computer :)

    1. Re:I swear I thought... by loafula · · Score: 4, Funny

      Santa doesn't build shit. Santa's elves build shit.

      --
      FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
  5. Have it run SETI@HOME by vstat · · Score: 4, Funny

    No cycles wasted there!

  6. I want one by sm62704 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  7. FLOP? FLOPS? FLOPS^2? by Lars+Clausen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Not Build, only think about it by Guybrush_T · · Score: 4, Informative

    Reading the article, the goal is nowhere near building a real exaflop computer, but more about thinking about issues (like processor data feeding).

    In a year and a half, we shouln't have more than 100 GFlops per socket, which means that you will still need 10 millions of processors (not cores!) to achieve the exaflop computer. No chance to build a cluster that big (at least these years).

    The all-times progression of the top500 shows that exaflop computers should arrive around year 2020, definetly not tomorrow. (x10 every ~4 years, 2008:1 PF, 2012:10 PF, 2016:100 PF, 2020:1 EF)

  9. Re:SSD SAN? by Digi-John · · Score: 2, Informative

    If your work tends to be I/O bound... it doesn't belong on an exaflop cluster. You know BlueGene/L? Most of its nodes don't even talk directly to the storage system--they're connected to special I/O nodes which then talk to the storage system.

    Scientific computing doesn't really deal with THAT much data. The scientists here at Sandia (yeah I work at Sandia CA) think they are just HUGE data creators. "We generate a PETABYTE per YEAR!" they say... not realizing that a petabyte is a drop in the bucket for the guys running these systems. As a colleague from LLNL said the other day, a petabyte isn't even worth charging for--they've got that much storage available in the tapes lying around the machine room.

    --
    Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.