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The Supercomputer Race
CWmike writes "Every June and November a new list of the world's fastest supercomputers is revealed. The latest Top 500 list marked the scaling of computing's Mount Everest — the petaflops barrier. IBM's 'Roadrunner' topped the list, burning up the bytes at 1.026 petaflops. A computer to die for if you are a supercomputer user for whom no machine ever seems fast enough? Maybe not, says Richard Loft, director of supercomputing research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The Top 500 list is only useful in telling you the absolute upper bound of the capabilities of the computers ... It's not useful in terms of telling you their utility in real scientific calculations. The problem with the rankings: a decades-old benchmark called Linpack, which is Fortran code that measures the speed of processors on floating-point math operations. One possible fix: Invoking specialization. Loft says of petaflops, peak performance, benchmark results, positions on a list — 'it's a little shell game that everybody plays. ... All we care about is the number of years of climate we can simulate in one day of wall-clock computer time. That tells you what kinds of experiments you can do.' State-of-the-art systems today can simulate about five years per day of computer time, he says, but some climatologists yearn to simulate 100 years in a day."
Is how many libraries of congress it can read in a fortnight.
Don't hold your breath; it'll disrupt the predictions.
Simulate 100 years of climate in a day? Here's my code:
echo -e "sunny\nrainy\ncloudy" | rl -rc 36525
Ask me about repetitive DNA
But, in a roundabout way the financial market simulator will ultimately help the weather simulator's performance. Everyone knows that business apps are written in VB. That means the financial simulator folks need MUCH more powerful supercomputers to run their code at anything close to appreciable speed. That same machine will run well coded weather apps blazingly fast!
The mondo-flop race,
As the hair on your face,
You yearn to displace,
So do it with grace.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My "day-to-day" supercomputer is a 2048 processor machine made up of generic Intel cores all running a slightly modified version of Suse Linux.
We all envy you.
No sig for the moment.
If they'd finished the Berlin GUI, you could have played one hell of a game of Quake.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
you're making a mountain of a metaphor
rewriting history since 2109
But.. The whole point is to test the model, and the models change, don't they?
Alas, no. It's suspected that the closer your computer climbs to the top of this list, the larger your penis becomes.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.