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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.
"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?
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.
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!
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.
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
"...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."
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.
Interesting. There's still the matter of the software. Currently, these machines are running straightforward simulation software. I don't see weather prediction resulting in sentience any time soon. The machines will probably have to grow considerably before the more flexible software subsystems like say the load-balancing code, achieves sentience, and destroys us all.
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.
Quad Cores?
typing in top -> 1 would be funny
...will it run Vista?
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
You seem to be assuming that IBM will use the PowerPC 450 chips that BG/P uses. Sequoia will instead use some not-quite-yet-disclosed 45 nm part with a much higher clock rate.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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. . . .
Right, that's the classified new menace, the one they're not allowed to talk about but need a few trillion bucks to combat.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
The article may be wrong. Per http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000842&subSection=News it's 1.6 PB of memory
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?
OK, now I am confused. The article that is currently in the summary is not the one I recall reading. And I specifically remember reading petabytes, not the abbreviation PB which I see in the informationweek article referenced in another comment.
Color me confused, but not intentionally karma whoring, and not normally dyslexic.
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.
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?
The human brain isn't actually that complex to implement since a lot of it is self generated, IBMs Blue Brain project have already simulated a mouses neo cortex (the part of the brain that makes conscious thought). They have been claiming to scale it up to a human one by 2010 for a while now...
cat
OK, my apologies. In my defense, the article linked in the summary said TB, as I noted...I've since read several others that say PB. (As a side note the others also said the number of CPUs listed actually refers to cores [which makes much more sense given the rack space noted]). Now I have no idea which article is correct, sorry for calling you out like that - it did seem clear cut at the time. ;)
If it makes you feel any better, your previous comment is still 'informative', while mine is 'redundant'.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Still sounds like a big stretch. Having said that, I think we have enough hardware for sentient computers, we just don't have the software.
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.