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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."
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)
Yeah, Jaguar might look cool with its advanced capabilities, but there's no games for it and the controller design is lame.
I always knew you could pull it off!!
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.
There is a queueing system. If you want to run a job on a machine like this, you log into the control node (which is just a linux box) and submit your job to the queue, including how many CPU's you need for it and how much time you need on them.
A scheduling algorithm then determines when the various jobs waiting in the queue get to run, and sends mail to their owners when they start and stop.
On many machines there is a debug queue with low limits for number of CPU's and runtime, and thus fast turnover; this is used to run little jobs to ensure everything is working right before you submit the big job to the main queue.
Each project has an al
There is already a wealth of political will for global warming, whats lacking is evidence ..
There, fixed that for you.
\u262D = \u5350
Assume every single person on earth can do a 16-digit operation on a calculator in one second.
It would take them roughly a quarter million years with no breaks of any kind to do what this machine can do in one second.
I would say more than lack of evidence is lack of causation rather than correlation. Scientists appear to agree that at least in the short term the earth is a little warmer. What they can't say with any certainty is why. Anthropogenic warming is the desired cause as that is the only one we can do a damn thing about.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
You, sir, are an idiot.
LANL, LLNL, and SNL are all weapons labs. ORNL is primarily a science lab.
I myself have worked at three of these labs and held an account on an earlier iteration of Jaguar as well as some of LANL's other supercomputing clusters, so I ought to know.
ORNL's Jaguar cluster, although parts of it are I think "controlled" rather than open so that it can run export-controlled code, is not at all classified. It's used for biology, astronomy, physics, CFD, etc.
Also, if you knew the first thing about classified security you would realize that disallowing FTP access on a *classified* (Red network) machine to the outside internet is a necessity. To my knowledge, they don't allow *any* interconnection between classified systems and unclassified.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Who says the climate modeling they are doing is related to global warming?
Even if it is, however, if the modeling increases our knowledge of the subject, it is not a waste of resources for scientists to seek the answers they are looking for.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Why do climate modelling?
Obviously climate modelling has to be carried to out to find out what impact running energy-hungry supercomputers has on the environment.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Having done my graduate work in fluid dynamics, only half your statement is possibly correct. There is historical evidence for global climate change, both warming and cooling. If is our interest to maintain the current status quo, the climate as we know it, it is not at all clear what interventions we need to take, or what effect they might have. Without simulations, that correctly model the real world. We have no way of knowing what our interventions might do. If anyone is interested, I can elaborate. The short (and scary)answer is - resonance.
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.
Hahah, eat it, 3DO.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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".
Wait, shit, astronomical fail!
It's not nearly that bad... more like 3 days. I failed to realize that my 270000 figure was seconds not years.
No. Jaguar. 1995 XK12, Six-Litre.
I'd rather doubt the 1995 XK12, as cool as it was, was any competitor to the Jaguar XJ220.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Climate change is gradual, but the emissions we put into the atmosphere today will last for centuries. Even if we switched over to all fusion power tomorrow, we'd still see more climate change, and the longer we wait to replace fossil fuels, the more we will see. Realistically, it takes a long time to widely deploy a new energy technology. Fusion isn't even feasible in the lab, let alone ready for deployment, let alone widely deployed.
Also, even if fusion were widely deployed, that doesn't mean we'd necessarily have less fossil fuel emissions. Coal plants are cheap because they're already built, so we might just keep running them instead of shutting them down and having to build a new fusion plant, even a cheap one. They typically have operating lifetimes of over 50 years.
That is a lot of SETI@home power!
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
I believe Cray made its partnership with AMD quite a while ago while they were still ahead of Intel in the performance/power ratio. In addition, these machines have a very fast interconnect (SeaStar) that is based on HyperTransport links. I believe it was recently announced that Cray has formed a partnership with Intel, and I imagine they will port the technology to QuickPath for future machines, but QPI was not available at the time this machine was commissioned. One does not simply order a machine like this at the drop of a hat. Vendor decisions are typically made years ahead of time.
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.
creating better algorithms? Or at least educating a little bit all non-CS scientists about performance and optimization?
The guys who work on the the dynamic cores for the biggest climate models (NCAR, GFDL, NASA, etc.) do world class numerical hydrodynamics. Maybe not quite on par with the nuke guys at, say, Sandia, but pretty good. And they do hire programmers and numerical methods people to do algorithm design, optimization, and parallelization. They're cutting edge in terms of grid solver algorithms for these sorts of problems. There are lots of complications from irregular topography, coupling between atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere, etc.
If you go over the climate-prediction loop many many times, you should consider some caching..
Caching does little good, because none of the grid cells have the same value after each time step. Some things just require a supercomputer. There's a reason why people use supercomputers for big 3D fluid dynamics simulations (nuclear explosions, virtual wind tunnels for aerospace, climate/weather models, etc.)