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."

Comments

Re:Question

[anaesthetica]

What exactly would the military use a supercomputer for?

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.

Re:Question

[Anthony Rosequist]

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.

Change in paradigm

[karvind]

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.

so what else is new?

[WheresMyDingo]

the roadrunner always wins, so it no surprise it topped this "petaflop mark" guy (yeesh, what a name).

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

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[DogDude]

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?

Perspective?

[Bob54321]

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 really put it in perspective for me. I normally judge a supercomputer by how many "all Earth people hand calculation years" it can do in a day...

ummm...

[WheresMyDingo]

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

probably because most of those people would either try to eat the calculator or sell it for food and medicine

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[blahplusplus]

"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?

Re:Not in perspective - this is a media number

[mykepredko]

This is a perfect example of a propellor head trying to come up with an analogy for a media/marketing type. I suspect that this was the only one that the powers that be felt non-techies could relate to. I've been asked to come up with these analogies a couple of times and it can be pretty frustrating on both sides.

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:

• How long it would take Roadrunner to count all the atoms in the universe
  
• What speed your car would run at if the speed difference between Roadrunner and your home computer was multiplied by 60 mph
  
• If we could go this many times faster than the speed of light, how fast could we cross the universe
  
• If in every instruction it could take in one byte of text, how long it would take to read the Library of Congress
  
• How fast it could render "The Incredibles" compared to how long it took the original server farm (actually, this might be one that's understandable)
  
• How fast it could break the 128 bit encryption used when you log onto your bank's web page to pay your bills (this might also be understandable and would probably be a bit scary)
  

The simple fact is that a petaflop computer works faster than humans can conceive and any kind of analogy cannot be comprehended.

myke

Re:The future

[Thalin]

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.

Re:Question

[kylehase]

Perhaps they should invest in a computer to track warhead parts.