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Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin
SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
So now we know why there is such a shortage of quad-core AMD Opterons otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
that it completes an infinite loop in only 5 seconds!
a beowolf cluster of those...
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
Perhaps it can run spell- and grammar-checks on Slashdot submissions!
A: The more flops, the more powerful it grows.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Is that the year it's name changes to SkyNet and launches a world-wide attack? (me, a pro-scientific-singularitist, trying to be funny).
I'm glad to see AMD based projects like this, as they have certainly took a hit in the HPC space as of late.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
lets hope those TLB's don't go all wonky :P
ATTENTION RESEARCHERS:
Processing time on the new Ranger supercomputer is limited, and will be allocated to projects according to merit. Projects that aim to reinforce the current Doctrine naturally have greater merit. Projects that challenge the Doctrine, or that aim to refute it, will be placed in the secondary queue, and will receive an allocation of resources if and when the primary queue is empty.
In answer to the obvious objection: The University of Texas is a Public institution, and the Ranger supercomputer was built with Public funds, and so it is only appropriate that Ranger's resource allocation mirrors Public opinion. The Public does not like cognitive dissonance, and neither does the board of Regents.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
What, is it an android from Blade Runner? It's going to die in four years? Slashdot summaries are the Suxx0rs!
And the other half is deployed in Dallas?
It's nice to know we're that much closer to skynet, but... won't there always be a faster computer?
I think more shocking news would be "No supercomputing records beat this year!" But I suppose that would just be fiction.
(15,744 processors) * (4 cores/processor) * (24 hours/day) * (365 days/year) * (4 years) = 2,206,679,040 core hours
Seems like the "processor hours" metric needs some adjustment to account for multi-core. Otherwise I could build one of these with 15,744 single-core processors and claim the same performance.
Gee, this computer is the BIGGEST flop generator of them all!
That's too bad.
NO! That's GOOD!
It is?
Yeah, lots and lots of flops per second - the more the better!
So the bigger the flops, the better?
Right!
Fewer flops is bad?
You got it!
And researchers want more money for more time with bigger flops?
Now you get it!
So they got $59 million for this humongous flop generator?
Yep!
Why don't they just burn the money if they want to generate a really big flop?
That wouldn't work - that wouldn't make any useful computing flops!
So this generates all these "useful computing flops"
Yes.
Was Vista one of their prototypes?
The 4 year lifespan in the /. article refers to the amount of time the award money covers for operations costs. So if it finds some others mean s of operation funds it could live longer... of course those funds will probably be from a private organization and the ranger would no longer be open for research.
freaking lame, 59 million dollars... i go to UT, and if this means no more free condoms then we're gonna have words.
Couldn't see details, but this may use Sun's hypertransport switch as an interconnect. Until Intel's next generation of chips with QPI, you couldn't do that sort of interconnect with Intel processors. Admittedly though, I'm not convinced that it is significant enough a benefit over recent Infiniband solutions despite the penalty of going through an Infiniband chip and then a PCI express controller.
Even with the L3 errata straightened out, it still looks to be a rough road for AMD, who hasn't demonstrated clock-for-clock performance up to Core 2 yet, and also has lower clock speeds to boot. Unless AMD pulls something dramatic, it will be hard to justify AMD in supercomputing once Intel goes to QPI. They can pull off price-performance tricks to some extent, but in large deployments the power/cooling penalty is non-trivial.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Both Opteron and Phenom were at the same B2 stepping, complete with the same L3 errata, despite the different packaging. That's why you haven't seen a Tier one vendor touch the Opterons with a 10 foot poll for a generally available product. You can bet your ass this is the reason AMD released the kernel patch so 'some customer' could proceed with a Linux Opteron deployment with B2 parts without the performance penalty nor risk of the L3 errata.
This deployment is probably where AMD focused a firesale of B2 parts, since it's nice and well controlled.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
No, it's hoped that within that time you'll learn how to correctly use the apostrophe.
In their backyard, and Sun gets the job instead. (Maybe this is why Dell has started offering AMD?)
They say the mind is the first thing to
...that will be caused by generating enough electricity to power the Ranger to calculate the global climate change that will be caused by generating enough electricity to power the Ranger to calculate the global climate change that will be caused by... etc etc etc...
Just how much juice will it take to light this sucker up anyway?
Oh wait, you said deployed, not destroyed..
carry on
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Hey. Is a Googleplex ever counted in as one of these big a$$ multi-processor monsters? If not, why? Those suckers are ginormous. R
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Petaflop? Teraflop? Say what? Are these actual terms, and did someone get paid to think them up?
I was at TACC a few weeks ago, and the peak performance was around 519 teraflops.... Sadly, they also said the word on the street is that IBM wont take too kindly to the new king in town, and since TOP500 is biannually, everyone is biting their nails about blue-gene getting a quick upgrade in time to stay on top. Turns out the blue-gene systems are so scalable its quite easy to strap a few thousand new processors for a nice performance boost.
Chuck Norris doesn't need high performance supercomputers, he can threaten any old 486 into running twice as fast.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those
And the answer is apparently yes. According to techtarget.com It'll be running CentOS just like slashdot does.
It's peak processing power
"Its".
Sure they will work on climate calculations.. but first on the agenda is being able to play Crysis in hi-res with all options on.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
how many bogomips per petaflop?
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
BlueGene/L has a peak of 596 TFLOP and a sustained of 478.2 TFLOP. Ranger would have to get nearly 95% efficiency to tie for #1.
It sounds like they don't need faster super computers but instead to narrow the number of areas they are crunching away at. Why not pick the top 2 or 3 issues and crunch away at those instead of running 20 jobs, all of which will hardly get anywhere in the four years this supercomputer has to live?
Hmmm...you sound like somebody I used to work with.
All i could think of is, after 4 years, i am sure the seti, or folding projects would love to have that system. I wouldn't mind it either.
SimonTek
UT students have been pushing against putting a polluting plant in Austin (very green-aware city) for years. This is just a move to placate the protestors, I'm sure. 4 years? What happens after that?
moox. for a new generation.
Jug-a-lator obviously wants to pet-a-flop later. (.)^(.) =P
Nah. They should donate the spare cycles into running slashdot. Can you imagine how fast the main page could be updated?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
this is truly the begining of skynet, as sarah connor predicted.
Odd to have a computer of this magnitude only in use for four years, though that might speak of its power inefficiency perhaps in light of new technology in 2012.
BUT
The year 2012 is the end of the Mayan calendar. This computer may have been actually assigned to find out what is going to happen in 2012. So it better have the answer in 4 years.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Through my semi-conscious hangover blurred vision I read "Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Destroys Austin", the adrenalin rush caused by the potential start of the robot-wars really sorted out my hangover, Cheers.
What if I want a different color than green for my I.T.?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Explanation: this affirmation that "a computer is so fast it runs an infinite loop in X seconds" is actually true. Integers overflow, if you increase the largest positive number you get a negative number. But of course, this program uses 32-bit integers, it would take four billion times longer running in 64 bits.
Four years is not how long the hardware will last, it's how long the $59 million funding for covering operation costs will last. After that they will have to get money from somewhere else.
Some fraction of this machine was originally supposed to be in production in May of last year (a requirement of the original request for proposals), but as far as I know it wasn't even accessible to friendly users until some time last fall. I don't understand how TACC, Sun, and/or AMD avoided getting hit with penalties from the NSF.
I'm saying in order to get the same number of flops and using price-performance instead of straightforward performance, you must increase node count. If the processor performance/watt *was* better (I believe with the 45 nm process on Intel's side for the moment, a Xeon 2.33 quad core comes in a 50W TDP variant, for example, Barcelona comes in at 95W TDP, goes along way toward offsetting the FB-DIMM power), you still have to worry about more AC power supply inefficiencies, general power usage of extra motherboards, fans, hard drives, etc. I hear Opteron may be able to more effectively reduce power consumption when bits are idle, but if you aren't overbuilding your cluster and will always have jobs in the queue, the goal is to avoid being idle. If utilization of the cluster is consistantly under 90%, you probably overplanned and paid too much.
The FB-Dimms do suck however. Expensive, power-sucking, and so far only yields none of the promised memory throughput benefit while incurring a significant latency penalty. The only theoretical benefit achieved is that a simpler trace situation is possible (i.e. can scale out memory without a ludicrous trace design requiring many layers), but I haven't seen that leveraged in practice beyond what AMD offerings have scaled to. The other thought put forth is that PCBs could be done with fewer layers with respect to the DIMMs, but I think for other reasons the boards have to have so many layers anyway, so that could be a moot point.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I wonder if this supercomputer has bandwith caps like most aussies.
Computing at Ludicrous Speed!
From "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
Chapter 25
There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pan- dimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pan-dimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.
And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.
It was the size of a small city.
Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic pot plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.
On the day of the Great On-Turning two soberly dressed programmers with brief cases arrived and were shown discreetly into the office. They were aware that this day they would represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they seated themselves deferentially before the desk, opened their brief cases and took out their leather-bound notebooks.
Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.
For a few moments they sat in respectful silence, then, after exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and touched a small black panel.
The subtlest of hums indicated that the massive computer was now in total active mode. After a pause it spoke to them in a voice rich resonant and deep.
It said: "What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have been called into existence?" Lunkwill and Fook glanced at each other in surprise.
"Your task, O Computer
"No, wait a minute, this isn't right," said Lunkwill, worried. "We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one ever and we're not making do with second best. Deep Thought," he addressed the computer, "are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest most powerful computer in all time?"
"I described myself as the second greatest," intoned Deep Thought, "and such I am."
Another worried look passed between the two programmers. Lunkwill cleared his throat.
"There must be some mistake," he said, "are you not a greatest computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?"
"The Milliard Gargantubrain?" said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. "A mere abacus - mention it not."
"And are you not," said Fook leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"
"A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
The two programmers sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment. Then Lunkwill leaned forward again.
"But are you not," he said, "a more fiendish disputant than the G
OK, the end of the skit from Hitchhiker's Guide:
..."
... The Time of Waiting is over!"
Chapter 26
"Yes, very salutary," said Arthur, after Slartibartfast had related the salient points of the story to him, "but I don't understand what all this has got to do with the Earth and mice and things."
"That is but the first half of the story Earthman," said the old man. "If you would care to discover what happened seven and a half millions later, on the great day of the Answer, allow me to invite you to my study where you can experience the events yourself on our Sens-O-Tape records. That is unless you would care to take a quick stroll on the surface of New Earth. It's only half completed I'm afraid - we haven't even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then we have the Tertiary and Quarternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay down, and
"No thank you," said Arthur, "it wouldn't be quite the same."
"No," said Slartibartfast, "it won't be," and he turned the aircar round and headed back towards the mind-numbing wall.
Chapter 27
Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library. The old man frowned as they stepped in.
"Terribly unfortunate," he said, "a diode blew in one of the life-support computers. When we tried to revive our cleaning staff we discovered they'd been dead for nearly thirty thousand years. Who's going to clear away the bodies, that's what I want to know. Look why don't you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?"
He gestured Arthur towards a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus.
"It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man as he pottered about fishing bits of wire out from under tottering piles of paper and drawing instruments. "Here," he said, "hold these," and passed a couple of stripped wire end to Arthur.
The instant he took hold of them a bird flew straight through him.
He was suspended in mid-air and totally invisible to himself. Beneath him was a pretty treelined city square, and all around it as far as the eye could see were white concrete buildings of airy spacious design but somewhat the worse for wear - many were cracked and stained with rain. Today however the sun was shining, a fresh breeze danced lightly through the trees, and the odd sensation that all the buildings were quietly humming was probably caused by the fact that the square and all the streets around it were thronged with cheerful excited people. Somewhere a band was playing, brightly coloured flags were fluttering in the breeze and the spirit of carnival was in the air.
Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above it all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time to reflect on this a voice rang out across the square and called for everyone's attention.
A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a Tannoy.
"O people waiting in the Shadow of Deep Thought!" he cried out. "Honoured Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known
Wild cheers broke out amongst the crowd. Flags, streamers and wolf whistles sailed through the air. The narrower streets looked rather like centipedes rolled over on their backs and frantically waving their legs in the air.
"Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!" cried the cheer leader. "The Day of the Answer!"
Hurrahs burst from the ecstatic crowd.
"Never again," cried the man, "never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don't get up and go to work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problem
And finally, Chapter 28 to end the story:
... Everything ..." offered Phouchg weakly.
... The Earth."
...
Chapter 28
It was a long time before anyone spoke.
Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside.
"We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered.
"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly. "Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
"But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl.
"Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?"
A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.
"Well, you know, it's just Everything
"Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."
"Oh terrific," muttered Phouchg flinging aside his notebook and wiping away a tiny tear.
"Look, alright, alright," said Loonquawl, "can you just please tell us the Question?"
"The Ultimate Question?"
"Yes!"
"Of Life, the Universe, and Everything?"
"Yes!"
Deep Thought pondered this for a moment.
"Tricky," he said.
"But can you do it?" cried Loonquawl.
Deep Thought pondered this for another long moment.
Finally: "No," he said firmly.
Both men collapsed on to their chairs in despair.
"But I'll tell you who can," said Deep Thought.
They both looked up sharply.
"Who?" "Tell us!"
Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently non-existent scalp begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably forward towards the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on the part of whoever had made the recording he assumed.
"I speak of none other than the computer that is to come after me," intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. "A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate - and yet I will design it for you. A computer which can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called
Phouchg gaped at Deep Thought.
"What a dull name," he said and great incisions appeared down the length of his body. Loonquawl too suddenly sustained horrific gashed from nowhere. The Computer console blotched and cracked, the walls flickered and crumbled and the room crashed upwards into its own ceiling
Slartibartfast was standing in front of Arthur holding the two wires.
"End of the tape," he explained.
In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster imagines you !!!
...
Next
Now it's time for the real test... Can it run Crysis smoothly on the highest detail?