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Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer
Protoclown writes "The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."
I thought it was Leopard!
How about economic modeling?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
But I really got it to play Tempest 2000.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
So, like, how do so many people use the computer effectively? Do they have a sign-in sheet? I bet there's a long line. :p~
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
probably not, its not designed for that sort of thing so its a stupid question to ask, nd probably uses linux anyway
well that got that one out the way
Yeah, Jaguar might look cool with its advanced capabilities, but there's no games for it and the controller design is lame.
Why do climate modelling?
We know global warming happens, we know how to reduce it. WTF. There is already a wealth of evidence for global warming, whats lacking is political will .. which wasting resources on climate modelling won't bring about .. simple education will.
Bigger payoffs are drug discovery and fusion energy research.
Go Team Jaguar!
Boosh!
-=Bang Bang=-
I always knew you could pull it off!!
Some people doubted the Jaguar, but I kept the faith. It's 64 bit - do the math on that!
The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system.
That sounds like Cray engineered this to aggregate components across product generations. For short product life cycles that seems like a great idea, not throwing out the old system when you get the new one but combining the two systems instead. Though obviously for long product life cycles it would be a losing proposition; The space and power requirements of inefficient older components would be greater than the space and power savings of upgrading to the latest model + the expense of the upgrade.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Can someone please translate the performance into people/hand held calculator/time and space into number of libraries of congress? I am not sure what the numbers they're talking about mean.
Thanks.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Will environmentalists ever stop trying to reverse the second law of thermodynamics?
"Insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Damn.
I hear that she prefer's it in the ass.
There are much bigger computers around in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore that are used to model thermonuclear weapons sitting around in storage to see if they'll still go pop when we push the Big Red Button.
The scientific community would like to use these machines for something useful, and in fact the scientists at Los Alamos have allowed some folks from my lattice QCD group to use a bit of spare time on it. Unfortunately the UNIX security features aren't enough; they weren't allowed to ftp our data out, and instead had to send the guy with the security clearance in with a pencil and paper to write down a page full of numbers. This is because of the ludicrous security procedures surrounding this Classified Machine. As you might imagine, this isn't a terribly efficient way to do things in a field where tens of gigabytes are sftp'd across the country without blinking.
If we are ever in a situation where we're genuinely concerned with whether or not a given one of our nukes will still go pop, we are Already Fucked (tm). That's like modelling exactly what happens if a 10-km-radius asteroid hits the earth: at that point, we don't really care.
This isn't to say that the nation's resources should be used for building giant computers for scientific research. The discussion about how to allocate our research funding is a difficult one. But if we're going to invest so much in computational power, it seems prudent to use it for something other than checking to see whether our e-peen is still hard.
It says something depressing about our country that the top of the supercomputer list is used predominantly for military purposes.
He said girlfriend, not mother.
...but it can find Sarah Connor in under 6 parsecs.
Meh. The most powerful supercomputer and the site still takes forever to open.
They should really upgrade, Jaguar is ancient!
remember that its not a true 64-bit multimedia system its two 32-bit systems connected together XD
po-tay-to po-tah-to?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
It would be nice on these sorts of systems to have recurring, perhaps low priority, jobs issued by worthy outside distributed computing projects. Depending upon how busy the system is with other jobs it could make regular contributions to drug research and especially to AIDS research. To have complete and accurate pre-computed models of all steps in the protein folding process for all possible mutations of the AIDS virus, for example, would be a technological triumph and of potentially great benefit to humanity in the development of new drugs and possibly even an effective vaccine.
And I downloaded the summary and all the comments too! wtf?
The Admin and the Engineer
"1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion." Oh comon, do you think that there going to use ALL of this storage for science? I bet there's a few hundred TB worth of pron on there...
"Mama always said life was like a box a chocolates, never know what you're gonna get" - Forest Gump
Check out the gallery if you haven't.
I've always wanted to get some custom graphics like that on my server racks. Maybe a penguin, a butterfly, and a can of Raid. :)
Supercomputers definitely don't look as exciting as they did in the "old days".
It's been offline a lot this month...
42
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
I wonder how much they paid for all those Opterons. I wonder what kind of volume discount is typical for these kinds of supercomputers.
If we can get fusion energy working cheap, we won't need the climate modeling. Not only that we can build a hundred of these things cheaper with the technology advances.
Climate change is gradual .. the need for new drugs and fusion energy is more pressing.
These systems are not so tightly integrated as you may imagine. True, many size a full-speed fabric just-right, each little bit costs a ton. However, commonly at scale, you only have full-speed fabric in large subsections anyway, and oversubscribe between the subsections. Jobs tend to be scheduled within subsections as they fit, though the subsection interconnects are no slouch.
This is particularly popular as the authortitative Top500 benchmark is not too badly impacted by such a network topology, and real life workloads tend to not be so large as not to fit in a subsection (just all the subsections would be independently at work).
It's kind of akin to saying you designed a couple of desktops well, because you could 'expand' them to host a lan party by hooking more to switches. Not quite so trivial, but the supercomputers aren't that especially exotic either.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I noticed this a short time ago, but have yet to see the 'Rmax' performance. They speak to Rpeak, which does beat out the current Rpeak by 23%, though the Rpeak by itself is even more uninformative than Rmax, which is already quite synthetic. Assuming the current #1 hasn't managed tuning or upgrades, this will have to beat 65% efficiency to technically win. 65% is likely an acheiveable goal, though the larger the run, the more difficult to extract a reasonable efficiency number, so it's not certain. I wouldn't expect them to be so loud about it unless they knew the score already though...
I will be interested to see the power consumption figures if offered. For that 25% increase in flops, they are requiring well over twice as many processor packages than RoadRunner (about 18,000 sockets vs 45,000 sockets here).
I do wonder if Cray will be migrating to Intel in the next year given the QPI situation. AMD hasn't kept up compute leadership, and now HT will be lagging performance wise QPI.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Hmmm...the ORNL web site lists the phone number for the Help Line. I think someone should call them up and ask them to reboot the server because the Internet is running slow.
That is a lot of SETI@home power!
I think I'll wait for Leopard.
Someone care to explain why this uses Opterons instead of something Xeony? What does an AMD chip do for supercomputers that it can't seem to do for games and desktop machines?
Lucas Electronics are crap for Jaguar and MG electrical systems. /Jaguar XJ owner
Who run Barter Town?
Los Alamos are jealous since they just got a 1.026 petaflop supercomputer installed earlier this year by IBM called RoadRunner. It was featured in last month's Linux Journal.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Ouch
I hate to even ask, but ...
What operating system does this thing run?
I find myself hoping that's it's Linux with a Beowulf cluster, but ...
-- thanks,
David Small
We burn stuff and [generally] use that HEAT to make steam to turn turbines, push pistons, &c.
With the number of frickin' FIRES that we are constantly BURNING don't you think that things might warm up a little bit?
Screw the talk about greenhouse gasses, &c. WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE GAWDS DAMNED FIRES THAT WE'RE BURNING??????
In June the Jaguar had 30,000 Quad Core Opterons, and now it has 45,000. The previous machine was an XT4, but the most recent update shows that 200 XT5 cabinets have been added to it. I have been unable to find how many cabinets the Jaguar has in total, but it seems that in June it had 313 (30,000 Opterons and 96 Opterons per cabinet). To me, the Jaguar seems to be two machines: the Cray XT4, and the Cray XT5. I'm also wary how increasing the number of processors by 50% yeilds an 800% performance increase. I'm going to wait until the official figures have been released on the 18th, when the next Top500 list comes out.
If the Jaguar has had a performance increase, then I'd say the IBM machine would have had one too. It seems Cray are just fighting a war of attrition, trying to win back the supercomputing crown they held for so long (in the company's previous incarnations). They seem to be throwing processors at the problem. Yes there is more to supercomputers than processors (interconnects, switching, and memory management design are also vital ), but a 45,000 processor beast taking up 500+ cabinets is not a very elegant solution compared to a machine with 18,800 processors taking up only 278 cabinets (and arguably using far less power).
In the not too distant future, we shall see a new Top 500 list. It just seems like yesterday that RoadRunner cracked the Petaflops barrier, and the whole world seems to have fallen on its ass in the interim. Banking failures, government bailouts, people losing their retirement portfolios. The irony is too much. Even as the computers get better, the answers that people need don't come fast enough.
Then the light turned on for me. People in general, the people you see on the street going on their busy way to whatever, are mostly relying on "someone else" to come up with the answers. Most people have little confidence in their own ability to answer hard questions.
Well, maybe things will turn around because of the power of supercomputers. It would be about time, wouldn't it? Here's how it may play out. Supercomputers so far, good as they are, serve up expensive results, so they are applied to difficult problems that are useful but far removed from everyday life.
As supercomputer clock cycles become more abundant, researchers can apply them to do more mundane things that the unwashed can relate to. The result could be revolutionary. People who have always aspired to some inconsequential achievement that requires some expertise or training may suddenly have access to highly instructive supercomputer-generated procedures that explain both how and why. Not only will people become more expert do-it-yourselfers, but robots will become far versatile, with amazing repertoires.
Crossing the petaflops barrier may be sufficient psychological incentive for people to request that governments begin to make supercomputing infrastructure available for public consumption, like roads and other services. Certainly, exciting times are comiing.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Will it run Cybermorph?
creating better algorithms? Or at least educating a little bit all non-CS scientists about performance and optimization? If you go over the climate-prediction loop many many times, you should consider some caching..
It runs Linux, whee!
Heh. Worlds fastest computer runs Linux.
Cause they have Arnold!
Yeah, but can it run Duke Nukem?
Just five months after IBM's hybrid Roadrunner became the first supercomputer to break the lofty petaflop barrier, a second, more traditional machine has made the same leap .And at least one industry watcher said the move of Cray's XT Jaguar supercomputer -- with the help of a $100 million upgrade -- into the petaflop realm is swinging the doors wide open for other systems that are on the verge of following it to a new level of power and speed.
---------------
Tonnywilliams
Your DUI News
I'm amazed.. I mean this is Slashdot, How could an article about some kind of computer get posted without the obligatory: Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these things.. :)
That would be my program if I had a chance to run something on it. I would make sure it ran on every core too.