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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."
1350 IBM Linux cluster team. xCAT for pwning.
That's scary.
It will be used for nuclear weapons simulations - primarily for investigating issues related to how warheads will perform as they age.
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Before it does weapons simulations, it will first work on some scientific problems, like model testing to predict climate change.
After it's done with that (I wonder how they will determine what done is...), it will go classified and do nuke simulations.
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.
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.
It was designed originally for the PS3. But not solely for it.
Cell was the brainchild of Ken Kutagari of Sony and Peter Hofstee of IBM.
This is actually based on Cell 2 or as IBM marketing likes to say it "Cell eXtreme"!
Cell 1 (the Playstation chip) didn't have the double precision floating performance to achieve the petaflop mark; Cell 2 is far better on that front.
What? You want a sig?
Now get out there and supercompute!
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
XBox360 has a tri-core in-order PowerPC - each core is actually very similar to the single general purpose PPU in the PS3's Cell.
Cell in addition has 8 SPUs. 1 is disabled in the PS3 for yield reasons, and another is reserved, so there are 6 available for general purpose computing.
Both run at 3.2GHz. I think Cell has at least 3x the vector/streaming power of the XBox 360 CPU, but only 1/3rd of the general purpose capability. Figures pulled from thin air, etc.