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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."

4 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  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: 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).