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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).
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
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.
My bet is that this is a typo.
1.6 PB seems more reasonable.
A group of computer scientists build the world's most powerful computer. Let us call it "HyperThought." HyperThought is massively parallel, it contains neural networks, it has teraflop speed., etc. The computer scientists give HyperThought a shakedown run. It easily computes Pi to 10000 places, and factors a 100 digit number. The scientists try find a difficult question that may stump it. Finally, one scientist exclaims: "I know!" "HyperThought," she asks "is there a God?" "There is now," replies the computer.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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).
At 6:18 pm EST IBM's super computer went online At 6:19 pm EST IBM's super computer declared nuclear war on humans At 6:20 pm EST there was a SEG FAULT and skynet must reboot to continue genocide
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
it is indeed 1.6 petabytes: http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489
Primarily to keep track of nuclear waste
And this can't be done with say, Excel?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
- 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......
You don't need 20 petaflops to do that, you need a few tens of teraflops and a really really huge memory and really really fast IO. You'd do much better with some of the 1/4TB memory systems from Sun or IBM + spending a huge pile of money on SSDs than a real supercomputer.
The cost of the IO interconnect is a huge chunk of cash to sink into a supercomputer that you just don't need for that sort of tin foil hat application.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Another reference article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489 Mentions "up to" 4,096 processors per rack. So, at maximum, this would be 393,216 processors. Perhaps they are quad cores and someone took the liberty of multiplying the 393,216x4=1.6M (rounded). A more reasonable assumption may be 100,000 quad-core CPUs (400,000 cores). That would make the summarization of by only 16 times, lol.
And this can't be done with say, Excel?
Ahh, Excel... the first choice in corporate database management systems.
How many other slashdotters work at fortune XXX firms where on paper some executive bean counter says "we use oracle" but on the ground all databases are done in Excel (along with a smattering of everything else?)
It is a step up from three jobs ago, where at another fortune XXX the database management system of choice was what boiled down to an administrative assistant and Lotus's word processing solution. Yes we used plain english to request that Patti make changes instead of sql update statements. Also our sql select statements always began with "hey Patti, could you look up...". Any yes, all "ORDER BY" stanzas were in fact powered by swear words and performed by cut and paste.
Sadly I am not making any of this up.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yes, nuclear weapons have a shelf life due to the components included in them - explosives, chemicals etc.
New designs are used to maximise yield per mass, enabling you to throw a smaller warhead at a target, which means less chance of interception. It also means a smaller package to maintain, and cheaper to build, along with more warheads per unit of material.
The parent said that the computer will be used for "mapping every reaction" between molecules. Presumably, since reactions tend to require quantum mechanical descriptions, I guessed the parent meant that the new computer would allow doing such calculations for all reactions in a rather large area.
I don't get what you are saying when you ask a question, relate it to the parent's post, and then say it is irrelavent.
Just a gedanken experiment to amuse myself, while noting that it actually has nothing do with simulating nuclear weapons. Don't get too worked up about it.
And, do you realize how much processing power 20 petaflops is?
Yes, it's about 2 orders of magnitude more than the supercomputer I'm using at the moment. A lot for sure, but still limited to very small system sizes for quantum mechanical calculations. At the moment, even the best methods in practice scale as N^3 or so. With my current 100 TFlops I might do a DFT calculation with O(10000) atoms or so. Two orders of magnitude more CPU power with N^3 scaling gives me roughly a factor of 5 more atoms. 50000 atoms fit into a box of roughly 10x10x10 nm (depending on the material etc., of course). Still a way to go until I'm able to do "square miles"..
If you want to go into classical molecular dynamics, then you're obviously in much better shape. With the current supercomputer that's maybe around 1E9 atoms, and since MD scales linearly, with two orders of magnitude more flops it means around 1E11 atoms. Now these fit into a box on the order of 1 um**3. Again, still quite a way to go to square miles..
In conclusion, atoms are really really tiny, and in 3 dimensions you can pack a lot of them into a very tiny volume.
Also, they so far have not needed to calculate what a nuclear bomb does for each atom (obviously, since it has been nigh impossible), and they probably won't ever need to really. You can study waves and energy effects in great detail, and simulate them accurately, without needing to know where each and every atom goes. This will simply let them be more precise and accurate, as well as speedy.
Yes, that was sort of implied in my previous post. The US nuke labs have been at the forefront in research on numerical methods in topics such as shock propagation (PPM and methods like that) and really really large FEM simulations. Obviously, the actual nuclear reactions are taken into account probabilistically rather than the full quantum mechanical treatment (as my above monologue shows, such a treatment for the primary is far beyond any computer in sight). AFAIK they use Monte Carlo neutron diffusion rather than the classical multigroup diffusion methods that AFAIK are still largely used for civilian reactor design. That being said, I'm sure they are doing a lot of atomic and quantum level simulations as well for small model systems designed to e.g. extract parameters for continuum simulations and such.