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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.
Who cares? It's awesome sui generis.
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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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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.
The military will use this advanced technology to assist and perhaps automate the RTFA process, also known as Reading The Fucking Article, which would allow you to answer your query without posting.
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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.
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.
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.
:(){
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.
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.
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
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.
"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?
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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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
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?
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.
And I've heard that republicans eat babies. As someone who has worked with climate models including data collection I can safely say you're full of shit. There are thousands of research stations collecting the data. For it to be generally corrupted, there'd have to be some vast global conspiracy whereby publically competing research stations and countries agree to privately skew their data.
Now there IS something of a vast global conspiracy (PNAC, Republicans, Bilderberg, etc), but, er, it's not on the pro-environmental-sanity side.
FWIW, if anything, the climate change stuff you usually see is an underestimate. 8-(
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.
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.
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)
Quick, make it play tic tac toe against itself.
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.
Perhaps they should invest in a computer to track warhead parts.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
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.
I understand that you really don't like certain politicians and certain stances and ideas. I have to wonder though, can you really say that a major political party be considered a conspiracy? This is a political party that holds open elections, has existed since the 1800's and has 55 million members (roughly 1/6 the population of the US) in all 50 states. It doesn't seem to really make great argument for conspiracy.
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
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.
That might be just the standard meme here, but this time it really got me to think. Having run a Beowulf cluster in the past, what would one use to connect all of these supercomputer nodes together to make a more massive computer? Cat5 just won't cut it in this situation. I have to wonder if fiber could even keep up.
The game.
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).
They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.
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
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
The previous model used hundreds of dual core P4s, just running NOP's at full speed. The heat generated, being equivelant to that outputted by a nuke, meant they could run simulations without having to actually write any code.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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.
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Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Not sure about the software though...
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.
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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