Inside Tsubame, Japan's GPU-Based Supercomputer

Startled Hippo writes "Japan's Tsubame supercomputer was ranked 29th-fastest in the world in the latest Top 500 ranking with a speed of 77.48T Flops (floating point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark. Why is it so special? It uses NVIDIA GPUs. Tsubame includes hundreds of graphics processors of the same type used in consumer PCs, working alongside CPUs in a mixed environment that some say is a model for future supercomputers serving disciplines like material chemistry." Unlike the GPU-based Tesla, Tsubame definitely won't be mistaken for a personal computer.

Comments

Wow! [Obligatory]

[cashman73]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of one of these could do! Oh, wait! ;-)

Clever name

[subStance]

Ironic name: tsubame means sparrow in japanese, and also has the slang usage of toy-boy (as in a cougar's toy-boy).

Not sure what to read into that ...

Re:Ofcourse

[dgatwood]

Indeed, that's the whole idea behind the recently ratified OpenCL specification. Design a C-like language that provides a standard abstraction layer for the ability to perform complex computations on a CPU, GPU, or conceivably on any number of other devices lying around (e.g. idle I/O Processors, the DSP core in your WinModem, your printer's raster engine...).

Re:Hold the hyperbole - Read again

[raftpeople]

On reading the article, the box has 30 thousand cores, of much the vast majority are AMD Opterons in Sun boxes. No mention of how/in what you'd program this to actually put the GPUs to good use

You may want to read the article again, if not here's a recap:
655 Sun Boxes each with 16 AMD cores=10,480 CPU cores
680 Tesla Cards each with 240 processors=163,2000 GPU processors

As for how to use the GPU's, I use my GTX280 (almost same thing as Tesla) to crunch through lots of numeric calculations in parallel. I'm sure these guys are doing the same thing as that is the strength of the GPU. NVIDIA has made it easier to access the processing power of the GPU with CUDA. You create a program in C that gets loaded on the GPU and when you launch it you can tell it how many copies to run at one time, each one typically operates on a different portion of the data. Because you can launch more threads than there are processors, the GPU can be reading data in from global vid mem while other threads are performing calculations.

Supercomputer or many not-so-super computers?

[marciot]

What makes a supercomputer *a* supercomputer, as opposed to a network of not-necessarily-super computers which all happen to be in the same building and connected to the same high-speed network? By the way this is described, it certainly seems to be a network of many computers working together, rather than one single almighty computer.