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"Intrepid" Supercomputer Fastest In the World
Stony Stevenson writes "The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to the Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers.
The list was announced this week during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid,' is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall.
The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application used to measure speed for the Top 500 rankings. According to the list, 74.8 percent of the world's supercomputers (some 374 systems) use Intel processors, a rise of 4 percent in six months. This represents the biggest slice of the supercomputer cake for the firm ever."
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
What happened to Blue Gene M, N and O?
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Apparently, not necessarily. It's just some Fortran routines.
So much for that joke.
Ignore this signature. By order.
This is the first time a system on the TOP500 has passed the Petaflop mark.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
I'm more concerned about A, C, G and T.
Ignore this signature. By order.
And that's the unclassified speed. Just imagine how fast it can really go! Just like the SR-71!
Computer scientists building the monstrosity admit that it still isn't powerful enough to run VISTA with all the bells and whistles turned on.
George Broussard says that when the next generation of this machine reaches the desktop, Duke Nukem 4ever will be released. "Really", he said, "The game's been finished for over five years now. We're just waiting for a powerful enough computer to play it on."
Sources say that besides computitng power, DNF is waiting for the holographic display. The The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system lacks a holographic display.
Gamers were reportedly disappointed in the news, although most said the price of the DoE's new computer wouldn't faze them. "After all" one said, "you have to have a decent machine to play any modern game!"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The title says: "'Intrepid' Supercomputer Fastest In the World" for open science while the article says "IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid', is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall." There needs to be some clarification. Roadrunner is considered the fastest in the world and is also built for the DOE. I'm guessing that Roadrunner is used exclusively by Los Alamos and is not available for open science while Intrepid is.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've got my 2500+ XP overclocked to 1.9GHz. Beat that!
Someone had to say it, this is slashdot after all.
Top500 has the actual list. Would have been nice to have this in TFA or TFS.
The title line of the summary isn't accurate - Intrepid is not the world's fastest supercomputer, just the fastest for 'open science'.
Agreed. DNA computing just sounds too damn weird... Like, after I die, will my DNA be used for a computer, and will "I" be in there anywhere???
I was thinking the Intrepid was the "Fastest in the World", but actually it's the fastest for open science. The DoE owns the top three on the list. Why do they need so many? If you're protecting the nation's energy, why not set and example and use less of it?
Good for open science.
But yet another article that uses the phrase "Fastest supercomputer" for attention because it can qualify in the article which list out of the dozens it's on. We have a fastest supercomputer almost every week of varying speeds. See Roadrunner.
"Fastest supercomputer uses Slashdot"
The fastest supercomputer in Skreech's living room has posted a post on Slashdot.
The top500 list clearly show that roadrunner is #1. What's this one then?
Achievement aside, isn't the name a cliche? Yeah, naming the thing is probably the last thing in their minds, but do they really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with "Intrepid"? How many times have people come up with something fast and then decided "Oh, we'll call it, 'The Intrepid'!"
Wait. How's the #3 the fastest? No I didn't RTFA cause I already read one this morning on Roadrunner
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http://top500.org/list/2008/06/100
Oh, I suppose the "for open science" disclaimer handles that. Way to sensationalize another headline
No, you'd only find "I" in RNA computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inosine
What framerate does Crysis have on this machine with all settings maxed out?
I work with Argonne and am involved with the HPC world. Sadly this article doesn't include a link to the actual top500 that would clear this mess up.
http://www.top500.org/lists/2008/06
The #1 computer, the one over a petaflop, is RoadRunner at Los Alamos.
#2 is a bluegene machine from the DOE
#3 is Intrepid at argonne.
It's not clear to me how they could be so wrong in the article.
Secondly, the real benchmark is the application. Some algorithms run better on some platforms and worse on others. Period. Unless you are running a highly specialized set of applications - and nothing but - the rule of thumb is "design the best system you can, that has the best overall performance for the majority of codes, and if it excels in one area, great". Of course, most supercomputing is FP intensive, so anything that has an excellent FPU architecture will probably be your best bet. And don't forget bottlenecks, like storage, network, memory, etc.
And, last but not least, remember that there are a lot of private companies with incredibly large systems. And most of those companies do not advertise their processing capabilities. Universities and government labs do, private industry generally doesn't. Of course, private industry is often trapped by the portability of their applications to new architectures, thus rendering the use of a system like Blue Gene/P useless to them.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
"Imagine a cluster of these...."
This raises another question: how much porn can fit into one DNA molecule?
And should we store it in female DNA, just to be on the safe side?
Ignore this signature. By order.
That we know about. I bet behind closed doors somewhere there is nearly unlimited funding and there is a faster machine.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I liked (back in the Old Days) when supercomputer rankings where based on linear, single processor performance. Now it's just how much money can you afford to put a lot of processors in a single place. That was a real test of engineering. By the current standards, Google (probably) has the largest supercomputer in the world.
Unfortunately, single core performance seems to have hit the wall.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It seems to me, at least superficially, that supercomputers these days do not use the fastest processors around. I'm sure there are processors faster than the Intels. They just use more of them.
Quite smart, as using commodity processors must save a lot of money compared to specialised processors. And I suppose it may make programming easier as the compilers for the architecture are there already, and are very mature in development.
But then what we now call an average desktop is what twenty years ago was a supercomputer. And what's now capable of running Vista that was ten years ago called a supercomputer. Or at the very least a very powerful and specialised workstation.
I thought the Intrepid main computer used neuro-gel packs?
It says, "... for open science."
Here's the actual Fasted Computer in the World.
Yeah, like IBM would use Intel chips in their top of the line supercomputers! They use Power chips, and not even very fast ones at that.
What? No! I go for porn to AVOID women. Damn you and you fancy-schmanzy ideas!
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In 1988, Cray Research introduced the Cray Y-MP®, the world's first supercomputer to sustain over 1 gigaflop on many applications. Multiple 333 MFLOPS processors powered the system to a record sustained speed of 2.3 gigaflops. --
The difference today is that almost all supercomputers use commodity chips, instead of custom designed cores.
Ohh - and the IBM one is almost a million times faster than the 20 years old '88 cray model.
I see what you did there....
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Does anyone know why Purdue's 'Steele' system isn't on the list?
No, it really cannot. Since it isn't x86 based, it doesn't meet the minimum requirements for Vista.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's made of tri-blade clusters, the opteron to do IO and various other mundane things, and then two Cell PowerX 8 (I think I have that right) blades to do the heavy lifting.
This year the top 500 also tracks how much power is used by each system. Systems under development at Oak Ridge National Lab will reportedly have annual power bills of more than $30 million when they debut in 2012. See ComputerWorld and Data Center Knowledge for more.
Well, the real measure of fastest computer has a lot to do with what software you want to run on it. In the example of the top500 list, linpack scales almost perfectly as you add processor cores, and makes very limited demands of network speed, memory bandwidth, or single-processor performance. Other codes really can't scale past 16 processors, so these massive processor jumbles don't amount to a hill of beans.
Most codes are somewhere between. As the machine gets larger, the more effort has to be put in designing the software to actually use all the hardware.
The PS3's RSX video chip from nVidia does 1.8TFLOPS on specialized graphics instructions. If you're rendering, you get close to that performance. The PS3's CPU, the Cell, gets theoretical 204GFLOPS on its more general purpose (than the RSX) onchip DSP-type SPEs, and some more on its onchip 3.4GHz PPC. A higher end Cell with 8 (instead of 7 - less one for "chip utilities" - in the PS3's Cell) delivers about 100GFLOPS on Linpack 4096x4096. Overall a PS3 has about 2TFLOPS, so 278 PS3s have a theoretical peak equal to this supercomputer. But they'd cost only $11,200. YMMV.
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make install -not war
When the Mac G5 came out, Apple trumpeted the "new super computer". I think there were even a couple of project that put together a Mac super computer out of a cluster of G5 servers--perhaps it even made the list for a while. In looking at the list, I didn't even see one Apple machine listed (you'd think there would be someone who clustered a bunch of Apple/Intel servers).
Another example of the reality distortion field...remember the "first 64-bit desktop" and "the thinnest laptop*"?
*Ports and DVD drive not included.
The L in Blue Gene/L stands for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the site for the first installment.
The P in Blue Gene/P stands for "Petaflops", the target performace
The Q in Blue Gene/Q is probably just the letter after P
The C in Blue Gene/C stands for "cellular computing", now renamed Cyclops64.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
..or more correctly: 1 Petalops. Can't leave the trailing "s" out, it stands for "second". "Floating point operations per" doesn't mean much.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
That's a misleading headline. It's the fastest "open science" supercomputer. Roadrunner has it beat.
It's not Intel chips that have 74.8% share, it's x86 chips. Those are produced by both AMD and Intel. In fact, there are 7 systems with x86 hardware in the top 10, and the 4 faster ones use AMD Opterons (Crays are also Opterons) while the 3 slower use Xeons.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Does Sarah Connor know about this?
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They made a supercomputer out of a Beowulf fluster of Dodge Intrepids? I knew I shouldn't have settled for the Stratus!
These expensive behemoths are a thing of the past in terms of raw computing power. I believe the SETI@home network to have the most power at its fingertips. Of course, there are still tasks that can't be distributed easily so there is still justification for the existence of these sauroids. Let's hope the john DOEs put it to good use and don't just run nukulah bomba osama simulations on it...
I defined a supercomputer as the top order of magnitude of speed. That would 100 to 1000 teraflops in mid-2008 or 12 computers.
Many problems simply can't be parallelized. 95% of the time, throwing more cores at the problem doesn't help me. I hope per-core performance picks up a little pretty soon.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Really? I would say his sig implies he's a sockpuppet since a UID > 1.2e6 wouldn't have been around in 1999 (not as a moderator anyways).
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Fair enough. I was referring to the Inciteful/Insightful pun, however.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Because they simulate nuclear bombs, now that actual testing is forbidden by international treaty.
"It's [google's data center] good at what it does, and what it does is very important commercially, but that doesn't earn it a space on this list."
This is the only false statement in your posting. Google's data centers are, in fact, a huge pile of intel/AMD processors connected with a couple lanes of gigabig ethernet. True, they are not designed for HPC, and therefore cannot compete with real supercomputers on REAL hpc applications. However, the top500 list is generated using linpack. Linpack is a terrible representation of performance on real HPC applications. Linpack almost exclusively rewards FP ALU throughput, scales almost perfectly on multicores, and requires very little of the interconnect, and has very modest memory bandwidth needs. Linpack is about the only HPC application that would work on google's data center. I bet they couple put together some pretty goood scores if they wanted to, but those machines are too busy making money to run silly benchmarks.
Otherwise, you're spot on, though it would help if you'd take the chip off your shoulder.
Good point Marc, I hadn't noticed, there's so much terrible spelling on /. puns can fade into the background.
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
folding@home beats this with just the GPU cards.
* The IBM Power processors passed the AMD Opteron family and are now (again) the second most common processor family with 68 systems (13.6 percent), up from 61 systems (12.2 percent) six months ago. Fifty-six systems (11 percent) are using AMD Opteron processors, down from 78 systems (15.6 percent) six months ago.
...waiting for a processor that can execute its code as designed?
Joking of DNF aside, can anyone name a title that is yet to run?
Now it's just how much money can you afford to put a lot of processors in a single place.
My assumption is that embarrassingly parallel problems aren't the hardest ones to solve, so if throwing money at buying more cores gets you a good score on a benchmark, then perhaps the benchmark is where the problem lies.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've lost more /. accounts than I can remember. I've had at least ten over the years. Half of them I don't even remember the username, let alone any of their passwords. Never really cared about having a low uid, sorry if that offends you.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I'm pretty sure the fastest computer in the world must be the one on the space shuttle. At least when it is launched.
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