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IBM Building 20 Petaflop Computer For the US Gov't
eldavojohn writes "When it's built, 'Sequoia' will outshine every super computer on the top 500 list today. The specs on this 96 rack beast are a bit hard to comprehend as it consists of 1.6 million processors and some 1.6TB of memory. That's 1.6 million processors — not cores. Its purpose? Primarily to keep track of nuclear waste & simulate explosions of nuclear munitions, but also for research into astronomy, energy, the human genome, and climate change. Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012."
Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of those?
Nice rack(s).
2012! Supercomputer! It's Skynet! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
And also to find the question that "42" answers.
There are many theories as to what this question might be, and now IBM is building a system that will solve this issue once and for all.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Is this the real reason the world ends in 2012?
I've heard about predictions of the end of the World in 2012, now I know the answaer - this machine will become a Singularity.
Damn! So close. If only I had less of a life...
"The system will also act as a giant weather cock,"
Each processor gets its own megabyte of memory? Are these a bunch of refurb pcs from the late 80's?
Do you have ESP?
No Crysis comments yet? None? Ok.... But does it run Crysis?
ECHELON
Keep track of nuclear waste, my ass!
Because, when you put two processors on a single piece of silicon, it magically becomes one "processor" with two "cores".
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...see here.
I would have expected it to have a bit more memory with that many processors.
Besides managing stockpiles of rusty old nukes, Sequoia will also be used for research into astronomy, energy, the human genome and climate change, according to IBM.
It could also be used to search for "suspicious behaviour" by searching Government databases, Credit card companies' databases, credit bureau databases, Choicepoint's, telecommunication companies' databases, airlines, and any other firm that the Government bullies into giving access. Own a gun, buy some grow lights for your reef tank, and fertilizer for your spinach fields and that'lll be a searching and detainment because of the "War on Drugs", "War on Terror", and "War on [insert here]".
Will we be allowed any sort of control over our own information? I think not!
Since it has become evident that the moon is haunted, hence the presence of such a computer on the moon would be a disaster for all mankind; ghosts do not understand technology, even those that haunt the moon, and if one where to find this computer, it could type in the wrong commands and cause terrible things to happen.
flops = floating point operation per second
flop = Gigli
The article got it mostly right. It mentioned 500-teraflop once, but every other time it spelled flops correctly. Slashdot, on the other hand, fucked up the title, despite the fact that it pretty much just copied it from the article (poorly).
Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012.
Sounds like they are going to port the quake mods to the raytrace q4 engine.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Arent these the specs require by Windows 7 for home use ?
Echo Sexy Nerd
It still does not reach the power of the worldwide google cluster.
Why always nuclear explosions simulation is the primary use for this type of computer? They do not have better uses like climate simulation, folding proteins or play crysis at full?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
sorry eldavojohn, you got it completely wrong in your summary. From eweak article:
"98,304 compute nodes and 1.6 million processing cores."
1000 CPU's per rack makes alot more sense.
There are no missiles mentioned anywhere. Does anybody check these simple blurbs before submitting them?
With almost 1 billion transistors per microprocessor these days, this super computer with over 1 million microprocessors is exceeding the 100 trillion synaptic connections in an average human brain.
"...allowing forecasters to create local weather "events" less than one kilometer across, compared with 10 kilometers today and at speeds up to 40 times faster than current systems."
How else will the government keep track of the prisoners housed in their interment camps for the new menace directly threatening not only America, but the entire human population! There are people amongst us, who are an imminent threat to the stability and safety of everything we hold dear. If it weren't for the efforts of my boss, the new junior Senator from New York, we would be facing a disaster which you can't even begin to comprehend! I've seen the reports of what these people can do, and their numbers are growing every day. Without this computer, and its ability to analyze massive amounts of data and scanning millions of DNA records, it will be impossible for us to track them down and detain them before they rise up and destroy everything which we hold dear.
China? IBM is laying off all the Americans and Europeans.
"The system will also act as a giant weather cock, allowing forecasters to predict local weather "events" less than one kilometer across,..." Hehe.
- IBM is building a computer that will be functional in about 3.5 years.
- The power of this computer, in 3.5 years, will outshine every other supercomputer currently running today.
I should hope so! What's the point of taking 3.5 years to build the thing, if it's going to be 3.5 years out of date by the time they build it?
Heck, in 3.5 years, your desktop computer will be 4 times more powerful than anything currently running today, too.
Duuh.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
nuclear explosions whereas climate simulations don't have all the variables.
Actually I think they model the effects on decay in current nuclear weapons. Besides its not something I want them to physically test.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Do the math
1.6 million core * 850 MHZ * 4 flops/cycle is only 5.44 PetaFlops , not 20 PetaFlops. How/why does the article say 20 PetaFlop, what else is going on?
Why can't we let private industry own the computer and the government just purchase time on it? I for one would love to have CGI movies rendered in better-than-real time. This way, us the taxpayers don't have to pay for idle time.
Also, I can design a database using SQLite with a web front end for keeping track of uranium or anything else for that matter. As long as it is not measured in individual atoms, it'll run fine on my spare 2.4 Single core celeron. There is no need to update the database 100M times a second.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Dan Brown told me so.
typing in top -> 1 would be funny
...will it run Vista?
Nice supercomputer and all. But drugs and a 5$ wrench would've worked better.
Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely...
Just like they do everything else...
So the real question in an immense cluster like this, is whats the MTBF?
Simon claims that the Eniac MTBF was 8 hours, although I've seen all kinds of claims on the web from minutes to days.
http://zzsimonb.blogspot.com/2006/06/mtbf-mean-time-between-failure.html
I would guess this beast will never be 100% operational at any moment of its existence.
I'm guessing the "cool" part of this won't be the bottomless pile of hardware in one room, but how they maintain this beast. Just working around one of the million CPU fans burning out is no big deal, but how do you deal with a higher level problem like one of the hundreds of network switches failing, etc?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Maybe Biden will resume the new tradition of VP as weather-manipulator.
Blar.
Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012
Yup, they will be the first people able to play Crysis.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Investigate climate change....
I bet this thing itself will cause climate change. Think it will get an energy star rating?
"The system will also act as a giant weather cock"
I for one welcome our giant weather cock overlords.
"Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012."
The machine will ONLY be used for communications intercepts of EVERYTHING.
I hope this helps your encryption program.
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012.
SCENE: The Pentagon, 2012
Science Advisor: "President Whoever-You'll-Be, IBM has completed our 20 petaflop computer. It is awaiting your command."
President Whoever-You'll-Be: "Thank you, Advisor. We can use it to compute the long-term effects of nuclear waste disposal, weather fronts, and... just... just how much processing power is in this?"
SA: *deep sigh* "Over 1.6 million processors and a total of 1.6TB of RAM, sir."
PWYB: "My GOD, Advisor. Do you know what that much power could do? It... it could..."
SA: *another deep sigh* "It could, in theory, calculate the entire state of Wisconson to rubble. Or process the irrelevance of humanity down to a variance of 10^-24. Or, and this is what we were hoping not to worry you about, refactor..."
PWYB: (interrupting) "Refactor the planet into a singularity, yes, I know. This is a grave situation. We can only hope this much processing power doesn't fall into the hands of someone with fixed-polarity Reed-Muller expressions for incompletely specified Boolean equations and a vendetta."
SA: (long pause) "Shall I turn it on, sir?"
PWYB: "Yes, turn it on. And may God have mercy on our souls if we never need an fsck..."
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
U.S. government: Any amount of the taxpayer's money to research how to kill other people and destroy their property.
And IBM can be relied upon to take any government's money to do exactly that.
"IBM reckons its 20-petaflops capable Sequoia system will outshine every single current system in the Top500 supercomputer rankings"
So the computer will be ready in 2012, and it will outperform computers from 2009?
These multi-year computer construction projects seem very problematic given the pace of change in technology. Memory changes, CPUs change, and the socket specs change — if it takes 3 years to build, it will be obsolete before it's ready. 2012 could be the year that ATI releases 10-petaflop GPUs, and they ship in iMacs.
The feds have been needed a computer that can balance a budget...think this monster is up to the task? Somehow I doubt it.
And go pick one up off the Dell refurb site.
When it is complete, it will be yet another amazing accomplishment of computer science, answering a call for a problem created by people who we elected or selected to help guard the citizens of the united states and the world.
The problem of course isn't the focus of article. Nor are the resources this new answer will require made totally clear but at least it gives us a glimps of how much we're willing to spend to maintain the national vision of 'Safe'.
The Hoover dam produces 2.8 Million kilowatts, this consumes about 0.11% of Hoover's capacity, now with the power conversion and distance to source you can expect that to pretty much quadruple in real energy terms. So let's say 0.44%, no mention of how much power the entire facility will need to operate it. (cooling, lighting, communications etc.) but I bet it's at least another 0.1% when properly tallied in.
I think it's great that the government can spend this much money on a machine to help ensure the readiness of our amazing nuclear arsenal. But since this is an enhancment to another machine not long ago built to do the same thing. You have to wonder how much power, money, heat, carbon and whatever else we worry about will be used to build the next machine for the same purpose.
The stockpile of our arsenal should be dwindling till we end up with a nice comfy number of weapons that can only wipe us out 2 or 3 times over.
Does it make you wonder what could happen if this tool was used to help solve some of 'it's own problems?' the one that will ensure come 2012 there's enough power to power it?
Let's hope the DOE has plans to use spare cpu power to find better materials for power production, conduction and storage. The quickest way to ensure prosperity is to have enough power to do all you need and some of your wants.
There is not a single future world utopia that does not demonstrate a ubiquitous availibility of energy. Not Star Trek, Star Wars, Back to the Future II etc etc etc.
While it's reasonable to consider lowering our energy needs in all things, the less we consume, the more, there should be for the future. It is no guarentee. Energy is one thing I do not think anyone can argue, life can exist without in some form or another.
Fusion I prophetically believe is a blind alley that will never produce a sustainable energy credit. At least not in the way it's described currently.
It's not just a question of being able to generate power either, we have to have cheap, economical and plentiful ways to convey the power and store it. We've done great things to increase the efficiency of the things that use the power we currently produce. But no matter how much better we make them eventually it will not outpace our current propensity to consume the power we make.
Turn the problem on it's head and see if any change falls out.
Have a nice day.
<1 kiloflops
not much memory for that sized machine. Our M9000 machines have 2 TB of ram per node.
The eetimes article states a slightly more realistic 4096 processors per rack, or roughly 400,000 processors...
Still, can you imagine the maintenance plan on this beast?
Can you imagine the power and cooling involved?
Even at only 25W per processor, we are talking nearly 10MW of power for the processors alone.
Much more interesting than the machine itself would be an article on how they plan to keep it up and running.
another obligatory post
I recall this is some sort of named ad-hoc "law". When the amount core memory falls significantly below speeds, the kinds of computing you can do is severely limited. I believe they mainly plan simulations, where gigaflops per output point is typical and memory needs not as much. Data processing certainly desires balanced memory.
So 1.6M processors with 1.6TB RAM means just 1 MB RAM(1.6e+12/1.6e+6) per processor. That sounds bogus!
Also roughly 12 GFLOPS of processing power per processor. WTF kind of cluster/super computer architecture is that ?? Sounds more like 1.6M Cell "stream" processors or something like that, definitely not something made from AMD/Intel parts. Of course, assuming numbers reported are correct.
- mritunjai
Keep track of nuclear waste?
A freakin pencil and paper wouldn't work for that?
The rest of the duties are cool, more simulation and research and less underground testing...that's fine.
But that initial reason is bogus!
WTF? Over?
1.6 petabytes of memory
quote
"The Sequoia system will use 45nm processors with as many as 16 cores per chip running at a significantly faster data rate.
Both BlueGene/P and Sequoia consist of clusters built up from 96 racks of systems. Sequoia will have 1.6 petabytes of memory feeding its 1.6 million cores, but many details of its design have not yet been disclosed. "
I know I shouldn't be surprised at mistakes on slashdot, but the article is explicit about the details.
And determine the correct response to the question: "Does this dress make me look fat?"
[Though it may need more processing power for that.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This puppy is probably going to find extraterrestrial life (seti) cure every disease known to man (f@h, rosetta etc) and still have an hour to spare before lunch.
Hmm... Sounds perfect for processing heaps of telecommunications data.
Is it just me or does petaflop sound like an impotent pervert?
Well in any event, I'm sure with 1.6TB of memory it will be able to cache lots of petafiles.
Or were you saying that 'TB' is the new acronym for 'petabytes'?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
At one company I worked at, Excel was almost designated the company's standard word processor. You can write text in Excel. You can do tables and charts in Excel. You can do databases in Excel. Why use the other packages for anything else?
The scary thing is, the proposal kind of makes sense ...
Is the identical model IBM are building in a secret bunker underneath the NSA headquarters so the NSA can read everyones encrypted communications.
So they'll be running BOINC as a screen saver then?
Aren't you the guy that replies to his own posts? Why do you do that?
I can't help but notice completion of our "deep thought" coincides with the predicted (again) demise of our globe.
On 2012 October IBM's supercomputer was launched. On 2012 November LHC was plugged into IBM's supercomputer. On 2012 December Black Hole destroyed Earth and its orbiting Moon.
You know what this will be used for, right? 1. Decrypt all email for surveillance. 2. Pattern match the internet for child porn. 3. Pattern match all the feeds from all cameras across the US for suspected terrorist activity. 4. Track down music piracy. etc. After all, these are all more important than tracking nuclear waste.
Why the hell are we wasting all this power on nukes? How about some advanced drugs? General AI? Complete simulation of human brain? I mean, Jesus H Christ, our nukes are already GOOD ENOUGH.
Does it run COBOL?
As I have said in the past on this site... these huge computer clusters are jobs programs for politically connected IT corporations. These cluster projects keep assembly lines going for months. Look at pictures and words just a few days ago of a meeting between the CEO of IBM and Obama.
The stated use for this computer system is absurd on it's face. One does not need a computer of this nature to perform the stated function.
IBM does not deserve US government contracts. IBM has been enthusiastically engaged in economic sabotage by sending high paying technology jobs overseas. IBM is what it is because of the United States; and for the last decade IBM has been pissing on the United States and it's workers in the United States. Even if I hadn't witnessed IBM's treasonous behavior, I wouldn't want the US government to purchase an expensive computer it did not need.
With a speed of 20 petaflops Sequoia is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world and will be approximately over 10 times faster than todayâ(TM)s most powerful system. To put this into perspective, if each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.
https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2009/NR-09-02-01p.html
It's called "cracking encrypted Internet messages concerning acquired nuclear waste for potentially nefarious activities". Seriously, it's a big encryption cracker. Give each CPU a series of keys to try and let her rip.
I highly doubt anything related to science will grace this machine.
1.6 million processors divided by 96 cabinets gives me 16,666 physical processors per cabinet. 16,666 processors / 42 rack mount units per rack gives me 396 processors per RMU.
Either I'm missing something or they can fit 400 processors in 1U. Someone help me out here.
To put it as simply as possible: so we don't have to actually detonate the nukes to test them.
Why would you NEED to test them? They work already.
Because they break down over time and we have to make sure they still work and will continue to work when we need them. They have components with half lifes that have to be monitored and replaced before they expire.