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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."
Who cares? It's awesome sui generis.
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Lets say you have designed a nuclear weapon.
Wouldn't it be really neat to run some tests before you build it?
For instance, how cool would it be to have a simulation that could test a weapon being mishandled, or shot. At every single point from every possible angle at every possible velocity?
It would be nice to know that there is a possibility of detonation if it were to drop off of a loading rack.
My mom says I'm cool.
Why would anyone want to?
Crysis is a miserably boring game.
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?
probably because most of those people would either try to eat the calculator or sell it for food and medicine
the only thing I can really think of is the air force doing the obvious shady things that it does.
... what exactly do you mean by "shady things"? If you have a problem with what our armed forces are doing, you'd be better off leveling your charges at Congress. Ultimately, they're the ones that fund any "shady" things the military does.
Uh
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
"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?
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.
That'd work, too.
You'd need a very large number of abnormalities to make a significant difference, unless there is a disappointingly low number of measuring devices, which I find unlikely. But by all means, if you can find a systematic skew in the results that reinforces itself (rather than cancels itself out by erring in both directions randomly), please present this evidence; accuracy of evidence is a legitimate issue.
Yes, but it would only work if you made that funding available to everyone in the world, or else the data out of wherever it wasn't available would conflict with where the funding was available.
In fact you could analyse such systemic bias by comparing data sets from varying geopolitical areas (say comparing Russian data to US data).
But would any of them be full speed. By your argument, based solely on flops, you could get a cluster of pentium II's to run Crysis. Given enough of them, you could get enough instructions to run many instances of it. However, could you ever accomplish the task of displaying it full screen, with a high frame rate? The game only runs as many threads as it is programmed to run. You can only parallelize it out to as many processors as you have threads. And then the distribution and gathering of the data streams in order to put the actual game on the screen would be so slow, that the game would be unplayable. FLOPS is not the only measure of speed that is important.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads.
BTW, the original Cell can do Double Precision in hardware. The big limitation it had was the DP was not PIPELINED so all DP instructions caused huge stalls in processing. You can use DP on the PS3 just fine and it's still fairly fast (especially compared to software DP) -- it's just not nearly as fast as SP.
The Cell's double precision hardware attains a very respectable 25 Gigaflops per second (peak), but its single precision performance is a phenomenal 256 Gigaflops (also peak).
The main new features of the PowerXCell 8i Processor are that DP is now fully pipelined and can attain over 100 GFLOPS (about a 5X improvement in DP execution due to stall removal) and that the memory interface now supports industry standard DDR2 memory so 16 GB of RAM per Cell can be used. The memory limitation with XDR was just as bad as the DP in limiting more common use of the Cell since XDR is expensive and hard to come by.