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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."
Nice rack(s).
Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of those?
No. No I can't. I can't imagine a beowolf cluster of one those. Even if Natalie Portman (covered in grits) was in my base killing my overlords like an insensitive clod. Even if netcraft confirmed it, then it confirmed netcraft in soviet russia. Especially if Cowboy Neal gave me a three step plan leading to profit I could not imagine it.
Enough with the meme. Or not, because I must be new here.
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
While you are joking about games (like Quake and Crysis), this computer does sound like a giant graphics card.
It can do 20 Pflops with 1.6 million processors, so 12.5Gflops per processor, but with 1.6TB of memory, it means its only got 1Mb per processor.
So it sounds like some kind of giant specialised GPU with local memory.
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......
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.
damn you AC, this post deserves a +50 "beowulf cluster of memes"
!sig
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