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Cell-based "Roadrunner" Tops Elusive Petaflop Mark
prunedude writes "The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."
They're trying to pull 1000 times your lab's results.
1350 IBM Linux cluster team. xCAT for pwning.
That's scary.
By can it run Crysis?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What exactly would the military use a supercomputer for? Being a pessimist, the only thing I can really think of is the air force doing the obvious shady things that it does. But there has to be some statistical purpose for such a beastly machine.
Something witty.
Who cares? It's awesome sui generis.
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> Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change.
Great. It will be the first classified nuclear simulation to be infected with the Storm worm.
Who didn't see this coming from Cell?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
...what if you had a beowulf cluster of these?
"if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."
This contraption makes lots of people really, really, tired of punching on calculators?
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
The military is more progressive because there's not a whole lot they can do to advance things.
They can hope for random breakthroughs, mostly based on chance/luck/etc..
Or they can follow the natural progression of things. If you want to make things explode you have to know the nature of the explosion. And to know the nature of explosions you have to know all about high-energy physics at a molecular level. And to know about high-energy physics you have to know about how molecules and atoms interact. Now, with all of these things you can either make them yourself and study the real explosion, or you can simulate it and confirm with real-world results..which is what they're doing.
They have the resources AND the desire to do so, and therefore, they are doing so. Private industries will rarely do things like this on their own. They're much more likely to wait for someone else to do the research, or research with grants and then patent the results for their own profit. Its the same reason NASA has spurred many developments and improvements in the rest of the civilian world.
This setup will make it easier to study weather, physics, etc, etc. On the other hand, it'll also make it easier to figure out how to make bigger sticks that are lighter and sharper.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If one looks at http://www.top500.org/ list and compare the CPU frequencies of the top supercomputers - all BlueGene CPUs were running at less than a GHz. And it seemed those low power cores were key to HPC (high performance computing). Cell and opteron - both run at multiple GHz and (presumably consume more power). IBM still has next generation of BlueGene/Q in works and is also for +Petaflop computation.
...There's no catapult in the world that will catch THAT roadrunner!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
is a macbook pro!
Can we have a better comparison? Everyone know that computer caculate much faster than a man with a caculator.
and roadrunner's always been cel-based, at least in the modern era. i bought one of those cels from the warner bros. store before they went under, nice one too with his tongue sticking out
Military taking the lead on computing as usual. Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?
Are you kidding?
I don't respond to AC's.
Livermore uses their Blue Genie/L for mostly the same thing. They are responsible for the country's nuclear technology. The upcoming Blue Genie/P will also do weapons simulations, among other things.
Simon's Rock College
:(){
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cell wasn't designed originally for the PS3, even though that is the primary role it has found itself in.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
probably because most of those people would either try to eat the calculator or sell it for food and medicine
"I certainly didn't"
He was obviously asking about people with a clue, not stupid little fanboys who love to spout obviously false quotes and claims supposedly made by console makers.
Sony NEVER once claimed the PS2 was a supercomputer. Not ONCE.
The EE WAS powerful, cheap, and power efficient enough that at the time of its arrival on the market it fell under government scrutiny for its potential military uses. The EE utterly SHIT over any other chip on the market or would be on the market for another two years after its release with regards to its floating point power and heat/power usage combination.
Let me guess, you're another one of those pathetic little fanboys who go around repeating that tired old lie about Sony, the PS2, and Toy Story graphics...
http://builder-news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html
"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"
The kids these days are lazy, back in my day if we wanted to know if a nuke worked we'd take it out back test it!
Whatever happened to nuked marsh mellows or sitting round with Geiger counters trying to make funny sounds?
Kids are lazy these days!
I bet if everyone had the TI-57, it'll take the aforementioned 46 years.
But the TI-68 will cut it down to 23 years.
Not really. The post you link to describes the defense budget as it dwarfs other spending, but doesn't really argue why or why not that spending is progressive/regressive.
The military was one of the first racially integrated public institutions in the U.S., it researched and funded the Internet, it's pouring money into synthetic fuels right now, and it's pushing the limits of computing power as seen in this article. There are numerous other scientific and social areas in which the military advances society, with far more practical results than do-gooders in other government or public institutions.
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To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
That does not put the performance of the machine in perspective at all. Technical details would be much more accurate and effective.
The previous model was able to simulate a mouse brain at quarter speed IIRC
And if you tried to re-produce the energy present in a single tank of gas it would take you a year of back-breaking labor. Probably more like five years.
Which isn't to say that I don't think the machine is impressive. Were it only around a few years ago it might have calculated that the Iraq war wouldn't be a lil' "let freedom ring!" jaunt.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
I missed all of the general-audience talks which have been given at LANL so far about Roadrunner, but this makes me want to try a bit harder at making it to some of them:
http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/1663.article/d/200805/id/13277
As a software developer who's worked on the Lab's previous ASC machines (Blue Mountain, Q, Lightning) I can say that once the calculation is run to get a machine atop Jack Dongarra's gee-golly list, it's partitioned, segmented, divided, and subjected to such crappy resource management that if I could trade the entire machine for a pair of coupled 8-core Mac Pros I'd do it in a heartbeat.
The real PITA with these machines is that the powers that be are trying to kill two birds with one stone: they want an R&D platform for advanced computing, but they also want to certify an aging and untestable nuclear stockpile. That rather requires a fairly static platform, and so far our experience with ASC has been that when a machine hits that sweet state, they yank it and give us the next one.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
if those calculators were RPN, it would take only 32 years.
which translates into wrong answers most of the time. Me guess is that for problems requireing double-precision numerics, you should divide CELL based supercomputer by 10 to 100 (software emulation of double precision is MASSIVELY SLOW), so this is really a teraflop machine. No big whoop...NEXT!!!
"There are numerous other scientific and social areas in which the military advances society, with far more practical results than do-gooders in other government or public institutions."
It's because the military doesn't have the scrutiny and oversight other institutions do, lets face it. Do public institutions besides the miilitary get secret prison's and liscense to do whatever the want? The military is not held back by moral qualms. We've seen this with all sorts of classified documents coming out of the government. The military has budgets that are kept secret. For anyone to claim the 'military helps us' vs public institutions, we'd have to do an analysis. But that would be fairly difficult and politically sensitive, now wouldn't it?
"Let my people goto!"
The answer is 42. The question is left as an exercise for the reader.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Are you really arguing that the scientific and social advances from the military arise from secret prisons and lack of moral qualms?
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Folks,
It is the Department of Energy that runs Los Alamos National Laboratory. Even if it is on a military base.
...a source from the last week (I can't put my finger on it right now) says that some boffs have built a cluster with over 120,000 cores; this system was used during testing to simulate ten seconds of processing in half a mouse brain. This processing took three /days/ to complete.
Does this mean that mice are smarter than humans?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I suspect the first example of this happening was trying to estimate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
Other meaningless analogies could be:
The simple fact is that a petaflop computer works faster than humans can conceive and any kind of analogy cannot be comprehended.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day
I'm glad to see the continuing trend of creatively "dumbing down" units of measure (in this case, flops) to the point where they are not only practically useless, but entirely divorced from reality. I would like to propose the following similar, hype-worthy measure for fuel economy:
Old: Miles per gallon
New: Number of miles from which one would smell the excrement from the number of cattle one could feed for a day with the amount of corn it would take to produce one gallon.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Now get out there and supercompute!
--
make install -not war
The opterons are used to feed the cell processors. They are paired up, one opteron for each cell.
You sound like a lot of the scary fin de siècle German political theorists that I have to read for my poli-sci Ph.D. studies. Calm down--we all know how that story ended.
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This was covered last year, and the Los Alamos website had a few interviews with some people involved on what the uses of Roadrunner are. They had a time-line of what phases are to be done, and as far as memory serves me, they were going with Opterons for the first phase, then performance assessment, then add the Cell processors in the third phase.
From these pictures, it clearly shows they're using IBM Blades (4 chassis in each rack), and IBM already offers BladeQ servers which use Cell processors for HPC applications. The IBM BladeQ servers pack double the CPUs of a PS3.
If you take a look at the Folding@Home project statistics, you can see the performance of PS3 boxes, and almost relate...Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Can I have that figure in something more useful, like Library of Congresses / Fortnight or an automotive analogy?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No, not at all scary. It's apparently twice is fast as the BlueGene/L, which apparently set a record of 478.2 teraFLOPS. Let's assume it takes 1 floating-point operation to test a single key, which is a gross underestimate. We'll thus assume the Roadrunner can test 10^15 keys per second. Testing 2^128 keys would then take about 10^16 years.
The analogy I've liked best is distance: in this case, in the time it takes ars's God Box to get to the supermarket, this puppy has been around the world a few times.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
My point is they do not have the same barriers other institutions do: i.e. the gaps funding and scrutiny. My point about mentioning secret prisons was merely an example of the previous point.
It is highly doubtful that the "zettaflop", a million times this petaflop, will be achieved by "conventional" circuitry. That will take optical or some other kind of computing (probably not quantum). The yottaflop will likely be quantum or molecular-state computing, or something unexpected.
Roadrunner = Audrey III ?
Thanx - I should have done the back of envelope like you've done here before coming up with that particular analogy.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Each Compute or I/O node is a single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips. The ASIC integrates two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors, each with a double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit (FPU), a cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller and the logic to support multiple communication sub-systems. The dual FPUs give each BlueGene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6 GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS). Node CPUs are not cache coherent with one another.
But will it blend?
Things move fast in technology Jethro, including this 2nd gen of the CELL proc, this is what you missed:
Double Precision FP - 190TFLOPS (5 times faster than 1st CELL)
Memory: Expanded to 32gb
Memory: DDR2 instead of Rambus
65nm (I know, I know, but it's better than 90nm)
From my understanding of the "So, it also has Cell-based processors AND Opterons. I wonder what the functional division between the two chip types is?" question is that the Cell is awful for doing any type of management, so a supercomputer requires the Opteron to handle the delegation of tasks to the Cell processors. I have to hand it to the Cell's for their fp calculations though.
Each node has two Opterons and 4 PowerXCell 8 processors (an upgrade to the PS3's Cell processor). This allows a developer writing code for the platform to run in a number of different modes: all Opteron, all Cell, or something in between. The first of these (all Opteron) may constitute a significant amount of the early work on the machine by practitioners, as they can simply compile legacy codes to the platform and ignore the Cell processors. Of course, to reap the full benefit of the machine, developers will exploit both the Cell chips and the Opteron chips.
The military's done a far better job of restraining itself than the Bush Administration, at least as far as secret prisons, rash wars, and torture goes. Far better than Congress, too, as well as the courts.
The job that JAG's done in opposing Bush and Yoo--and defending both the Gitmo detainees and the Constitution--at the cost of tens, if not hundreds, of individual careers--is nothing less than heroic. It makes me proud to be an American.
They follow orders, yes, but they aren't blinded by them.
Lame. Obligatory. Comment.
Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?
I'd say it's just tradition. If it's progressive you're after, try Japan - not only did the MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer reach the petaflops performance level a couple of years ago already, but it's more or less filled with special-purpose processors for doing chemical, microbiological and pharmaceutical simulations.
This is so different (and better, I'd argue) from Roadrunner on so many different levels. Honestly, I'm a little ashamed that in this day and age we are actually proud of having stuffed a bunch of mass-market processors in a room to study nukes.
Name: roadrunner (teraflopus excesus)
Wtf is wrong with these people?
Either they think that the general population is retarded (I can't argue against that fact), Or
They are retarded, (I can't argue against that fact either), or both (A fact that I also can not argue against)!.
They are comparing these "Chips" to Handheld calculators and, get this, Turbochargers! , wow, yeah, the super computer is full of chips, turbochargers and handheld calculators, fucking genius!!!
It's the department of energy, not the military. Specifically, it is at Los Alamos, which is not a military base.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Petaphiles??
My first thought when I saw the article title was a cellphone based networked super computer. Something along the lines of Rainbow's End or Halting State.
I wonder how many iphones would be needed to do a cellphone petaflop computer.
They are more progressive because lives are at stake in an immediate fashion. Who wants to be the guy that says "yea we could have built a supercomputer to test nuclear mishandling, but we decided it would take too long and be too expensive.. oh, yea sorry about turning the Dallas metroplex into a cherry red ember."
Who's excited? I'm not saying if it's good or bad, I'm saying this is the truth.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Take everyone on earth, and put them each in a different Ferrari Testarossa with no engine, no gas in the tank, and no ignition system. That is how fast this thing moves.
Some other equally useful analogies:
Take the same aforementioned people, and give them a OLPC. The amount of time it takes them all to calculate their degree of separation from Kevin Bacon, and divide by a googolplex. , then round up. That is the number of people that think the calculator analogy in the article was a good one.
Take the inverse of the clock frequency and multiply it by the number of instructions required for Windows to boot far enough to attempt to obtain an IP Address dynamically. Add to that the time it takes for the DHCP request to reach your Billion made router. That is the amount of time it takes for it to hose your router. Take the inverse of the clock frequency and multiply it by the number of instructions it takes to apply a service pack. Add it to the boot time, calculated as described above. That is the amount of time it takes to achieve a BSOD.
HTH,
- Thomas P. D'Agostino
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Finding cheap and powerful processors like the Cell processor is an amazing step forward for everyone. Not because it can be part of a supercomputer, but because you can fit 5 of them on your desktop and have a supercomputer at home.
:) IMO anyway.
If you can put 5 PS3s inside your desktop system, and use the big CPU you normally have as the admin CPU, you could have a virtual world as your desktop UI. Imagine walking your little avatar to your home office, clicking on a file cabinet, opening the folder for your budget, clicking on the latest date report folder, and it opens the right file for you. It would allow people to use computers and their tools in the same way that they operate in normal life, just VR.
Then you walk to the kitchen of your desktop interface and click on the cook book and it opens a web browser loaded with links to cooking recipes and information. There are many more ways to use it, that's just an example. There are many more.
If such power is made available to the home user, it will get used, and the uses will be amazing
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
That got me thinking...what is the most expensive computer anyway? How does the fastest computer rank with the costliest computers?
Google Google Google, and presto. The Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer cost $400 million dollars.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
old women use supercomputers to dry laundry !
Wouldn't that be murder to battery life?
A fool and his lamb are worth two in the bush.
No analysis is required to see the many, many open source projects funded by the military. For example, neither UNIX nor the Internet would have come to be without DARPA funding (not to mention OpenBSD, Reiserfs, etc., etc., etc.) No analysis is required to see the many, many public works performed in the U.S. and world wide by the Army Corps of Engineers. No analysis is required to see the dozen or two humanitarian aid missions being carried out at any given time by the U.S. military. No analysis is necessary to see the preferential treatment given by the U.S. military in awarding tens of billions of dollars in contracts (as a matter of policy) to small businesses, minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and businesses operating in economically depressed communities. Just because those socially-beneficial activities aren't the kind of sensationalist blather (like "OMG secrit prisonz") that NBC or CNN like to pump into "inquiring minds" like yours does not mean the information is not readily available and widely-known.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
>> "six billion people on earth used hand calculators
/. stories with the most crazy-ass units?!!
>> and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven
>> days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what
>> the Roadrunner can in one day."
Who the hell is sitting out there submitting
6-billion-people-hand-calculating-24/7-years?
Libraries of Congress?
Rods per hogshead?
Coyotos?
[they do get a lot of military funding, iirc.]
I am in the process of building and ACME "Coyote" supercomputer cluster made of used toasters, open cans of beans and bottle caps.
Well I'm definitely gonna start my password with a 'z'. People who start it with the letter 'a' have their passwords cracked by brute force in one 26th of the time!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
42!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Military taking the lead on computing as usual. Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government
Just a wild guess: budget?
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
One two three four five six!
Roadrunner, roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna drive past the Stop 'n' Shop
With the radio on
I'm in love with Massachusetts
And the neon when it's cold outside
And the highway when it's late at night
Got the radio on
I'm like the roadrunner
Alright
I'm in love with modern moonlight
128 when it's dark outside
I'm in love with Massachusetts
I'm in love with the radio on
It helps me from being alone late at night
It helps me from being lonely late at night
I don't feel so bad now in the car
Don't feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
That's right
Said welcome to the spirit of 1956
Patient in the bushes next to '57
The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick
Suburban trees, suburban speed
And it smells like heaven(thunder)
And I say roadrunner once
Roadrunner twice
I'm in love with rock & roll and I'll be out all night
Roadrunner
That's right
Well now
Roadrunner, roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna drive to the Stop 'n' Shop
With the radio on at night
And me in love with modern moonlight
Me in love with modern rock & roll
Modern girls and modern rock & roll
Don't feel so alone, got the radio on
Like the roadrunner
O.K., now you sing Modern Lovers
(Radio On!)
I got the AM
(Radio On!)
Got the car, got the AM
(Radio On!)
Got the AM sound, got the
(Radio On!)
Got the rockin' modern neon sound
(Radio On!)
I got the car from Massachusetts, got the
(Radio On!)
I got the power of Massachusetts when it's late at night
(Radio On!)
I got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts
I've got the world, got the turnpike, got the
I've got the, got the power of the AM
Got the, late at night, rock & roll late at night
The factories and the auto signs got the power of modern sounds
Alright
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
maybe he should get 6 billion hand calculators and mail them out ?
That's probably a new contender for the stupidest metric ever, it beats 'libraries of congress per second' hands down.
MP3 Search Engine
Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
But how many Libraries of Congress of data can it handle?
You just got troll'd!
It will also take all these 6 billion people armed with calculators 46 years to write "Hello World" that uses half of the computing power of the beast.
...if all six billion people ... what a stupid statistic ... If all six hundred million grandmothers on earth tried to program a video recorder (sorry about this reference to an archaic machine for the very young) every hour, 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to record what I can in one day.
Looks like they use the standard deceptive practice amongst such groups of only including discretionary spending in the pie chart; since discretionary spending is less than half the spending and shrinking quickly as the "entitlements" grow at an insane rate, the pie chart is worse than useless; it's lying with statistics, to borrow the title of Darrell Huff's classic book.
... Get the hell out of Iraq.
...we will have this kind of power on our desktop? Wikipedia tells me that a current desktop PC is equivalent to the top supercomputer of 15 years ago in terms of operations. I can't imagine having this amount of computing power in 15 years time, but it makes me think of the possible programs we will run.
One thing to remember is that there is various iterations of the cell processor. The Xbox is a 3 core version The Playstation. I believe the Playstation is a 6 core processor. The roadrunner will use a 8 core processor. IBM originally discussed having a 16 core processor. There was not much talk about it afterwards. My guess is that there was significant bus contention issues. The original Power4's shut down one of their cores while running at full speed to avoid contention. The Power6 was designed to overcome these issues.
Does a brute force cracker have to go from a to z? When done in a non linear sequence it removes any advantage by starting with a z (or disadvantage starting with an a).
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.-Thomas Szasz
That's assuming you have to try every single key to break 128-bit SSL encryption. Is that actually the case?
"Does a brute force cracker have to go from a to z?"
No absolutely not, and with encryption methods used for ssl, generally randomly created large/prime keys are used rather than passwords, so you'd be searching for numbers rather than words.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Not sure about the software though...
/Z
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
It takes a whole day for this supercomputer to do the same number of calculations as 6 billion hand calculators can do in 24 years? I am not at all impressed.
If it could do that in something like, umm... a second! yeah, that would be something.
The military has created all the drool over weapons in games like Call of Duty 4, Crisis, and FEAR the military created the whole genre of FPS!
Well, you don't have to try all 2^128 combinations. You could use the general number field sieve to factorize the key exchange. This would probably use much much less time than 10^16 years.
"Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?"
They are organised, well funded, and have a definite goal in sight
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Genesis turned into a bland pop act 2 albums after Peter Gabriel left. But I think you know that.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
So what about actual benchmarks? How many FPS do they get in Crysis?
Yes, this machine is difficult to program, but that is true of all capability class supercomputers. This one will be a little bit more difficult than others, in so much as it is not a simple evolution of an existing design. However, even when you upgrade from 1000 nodes of power5 to 2000 nodes of power6, you still have to do a lot of tuning to your codes to get them to run well. That's the rule, not the exception, in large supercomputer instalations.
This machine is very expensive. I would suspect that more traditional designs could hit a petaflop for less money. The must believe that this programming model will perform well for several of their critical codes, or they would not have spent so much money.
Furthermore, since the machine is so expensive, and will be available for open research for only a limited time, one can assume they are only going to run a handful of codes on it. They have probably already taken the time to optimise those codes for the wierd architecture.
Does this Road Runner have the hemi or the 440 6 pack?
from the standpoint of supercomputers, the big SMP systems from SUN/IBM/HP are not big-iron. They are baby sized. They are also machines design differently, to solve a different set of problems.
The big sun/HP servers are designed to host enterprise-sized databases, supply-chain/ business-intelligence / operations server jobs. They are generally highly parallel transaction processors, not running parallel compute tasks. This doesn't make them easier to design or build, far from it, but it does mean that the requirements are different. You will notice that linux is just now making inroads onto the really large business SMPs. These vendors, as well as the peoplesoft/SAP/oracle/novell/websphere/etc-types have spent decades and billions of dollars developing software that will efficiently use those monster machines. They're pretty amazing systems, but they are not supercomputers.
"An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines"...and nobody made a single WarGames joke? Slashdot user base seems to be getting way too young.
FWIW, here's the software it uses:
XCAT + Warewulf (now named perceus) for imaging/diskless booting
http://xcat.sourceforge.net/
http://www.perceus.org/portal/
Linux 2.6.18 kernel
Torque as the resource manager : http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/torque-resource-manager.php
Moab Cluster Manager as the scheduler : http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/moab-cluster-suite.php
The Moab scheduler is on four of the top ten super computers as of November 2007 : http://insidehpc.com/2008/01/21/the-411-cluster-resources/
Source: http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/hpc/roadrunner/rrinfo/RR%20webPDFs/RRSysMgt-with-LAUR.pdf
.... the RoadRunner system has been put to work by the DoD on the problem of developing a successful Iraq strategy. It should be completed by McCain's second term in office.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?
The military gets results because, unlike the rest of government, it doesn't exist through simple self-perpetuation, and must attempt to justify its existence. At its core, military serves as the national immune system, protecting the body. If it does not perform, the body it serves ceases to exist.
In contrast, most government exists to serve itself; a lack of performance is simply indicative of government performing as it was always meant to perform: to serve those in power. The significance of failure or success is irrelevant, provided the politicians are still able to promise something progressive come next election so as to grant them more power.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I am generally a supporter of the military institutions in the US, but I find the vague assertion that the military advances society more practically than other government institutions
Specifically regarding computing, how are the military's results mre practically beneficial to social or scientific areas than, say, the Department of Energy? How do the results of the military outstrip the results of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? In what ways does the military advance science and society more than the National Science Foundation? What results does the military provide that are more practical than those of the Department of the Interior?
Unless the 128-bit cipher being used is weak, that is the worst case, and the average case is that it takes half that long.
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Even the most simple process that the body can perform -- like paying the doctor -- would take a piece of asbestos over 9 billion years to work out. If you can imagine a man at a cocktail party congratulating the hostess on the avocado dip 40,000 times every second for 2 1/2 hours twice a week for 28,000 years you can begin to realise what an extraordinarily wonderful thing the human body is.
To put it even more simply, if you can imagine a doctor leaving his lucrative Harley St. practice to a younger partner, and cruising round the world 4 times a year, drinking 3 bottles of champagne with a friend's wife every afternoon, and writing an article on How Your Body Works once every 96 days, you'll get some idea of why I was struck off the register. Good evening.
(from "Monty Python's Brand New Papperbok")
The emphasis in my post is on practical results, differentiating the military from other institutions by its consistent focus on mass implementation rather than simply research. Notwithstanding the immense research and development budget controlled by the various military and defense institutions in the U.S., the other agencies you cite are focus principally on research, statutory and regulatory law change, and expert-level implementation of their various advances.
This is in contrast to the military, whose social and technological innovations require propagation en masse, either throughout military society (which then has knock-on effects to the rest of society) or on a mass usability basis (universal communication frameworks or mass produced technology available to the individual enlisted man or woman on the front).
Because the military's focus is on the logic of necessity and the logic of life-and-death, they are often more able than other agencies to cut through the Gordian knot of domestic political factions, ideologies, and interests. For example, this allowed them to justify racial integration well ahead of most public and private institutions in U.S. history, despite prevailing political conflicts and racist ideologies.
So while DoE does energy research and proof-of-concept designs, the military makes the practical push to make alternative energy use a reality, in part because they are driven by a logic of necessity, and in part because they are perceived as less political than the DoE. Similarly, the CDC does a tremendous amount of research on vaccinations, cures, and epidemiological health policy. On the other hand, the military makes the practical push to get easy-to-administer, cheap-to-mass-produce vaccines and treatments available, because they're necessary to the strategic logic of warfare--witness the history of penicillin for example.
The military certainly is no substitute for the other organizations that you cite. But in terms of practical effect on a mass scale, the military is more often than not on the leading edge.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
SSL uses two ciphers for each communications link: a public key cipher and a symmetric cipher. A random symmetric key is selected and used to encrypt the actual data. A public key is used to encrypt the selected symmetric key to deliver it securely to the other end.
The "128-bit" cipher in an SSL exchange is the symmetric cipher, not the public key cipher. A 128-bit public key would be horribly weak, crackable in minutes, if not seconds, using GNFS so 1024-bit and 2048-bit keys are normally used. The 128-bit symmetric cipher (commonly AES) does not use composites of large primes in its keys and is not amenable to attack with the GNFS. The best known attack on AES128 is a brute force search through the keyspace.
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Last I heard they blew stuff up. You may see impressive results, but you are looking at what you can see. So, what about all the things that would have been made that consumers were actually willing to pay for? How many things haven't been invented and created in the private sector that would have been if loads of scientists, engineers, money and other resources weren't ploughed into making stuff that blows stuff up? A net loss is hardly progressive, sounds rather regressive to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I understand the sense of what you are saying; the military, by necessity, puts things into practice rather than engaging in what one might characterize as "academic research".
However, you have still not offered any specific evidence that the social or scientific benefits of the practical application of research by the military are greater than the practical applications of research by other government entities (except as a result of scale) or that the investment in academic research by other government entities does not produce substantial scientific or social results.
Ah, but tell me this: How many schoolbuses is it from end to end? How does the size of one transistor compare with the width of a human hair? If the cooling systems fail, will it get many times hotter than a pizza oven?
I think answers to these questions will go a long way toward helping us understand how this thing works.
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"BlueGene/L--first on the TOP500 list of supercomputers with a sustained world-record speed of 478.2 teraFLOPS--is a revolutionary, low-cost machine delivering extraordinary computing power for the nation's Stockpile Stewardship Program."
"Established in 1995, the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program supports the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Defense Programs' shift in emphasis from test-based confidence to simulation-based confidence."
Very funny way to say: "we use this enourmous computers with extremely difficult programming to test our aging nuclear weapons."
This computer has nothing to do with practical results. There is no (or almost no) software that will run on it. It is simply a political stunt used to give LANL/DOE a big number; peta-hype. This computer is not going to solve any real world problems, and LANL has put zero resources into the very significant software engineering that would be required to actually make it useful. Go ahead and lust, but its an even bigger piece of crap than past LANL supercomputers like "Q" and "BlueMountain".
Well, yes, not as much need to justify activity, or rather, easier to justify because it targets individual and collective self interest directly.
But the real motivator is strategic:- the first one to the top controls the game.
Yikes. I don't see why this link feels the need to inflate American military spending; the actual/factual numbers stand for themselves. tsk, tsk.