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100 Million-Core Supercomputers Coming By 2018
CWmike writes "As amazing as today's supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive and current designs soak up too much power, space and money. And as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough — a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system. Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The US Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful — an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The latter project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the US is co-developing. They're expected to arrive in 2018 — in line with Moore's Law — which helps to explain the roughly 10-year development period. But the problems involved in reaching exaflop scale go well beyond Moore's Law."
Can't we just start calling this a 'supercore' or something? When the numbers get that high it kind of goes beyond what most people can visualize. Like describing how hot the Sun is....let's just says it's "exactly 1 Sun hot".
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Technically, shouldn't 640K processors be enough for every one?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We know what answer it is going to give. 42. Save the money.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Only if they run Linux and can render Natalie Portman covered in hot grits faster than my imagination already does....woohoo!
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I am currently accepting investors to help build a one billion core supercomputer to create high resolution climate models that take into account the waste heat from a 100 million core supercomputer making a high resolution climate model.
(Seriously, how much heat is that thing going to put out?)
That's not entirely accurate. HPC systems are designed to solve a class of problems. That's not the same thing as a "particular" problem. Jaguar has, in fact, solved many different problems, including fluid flow, weather, nuclear fusion and supernova modeling. It's not going to run Word any faster than your PC but that's not what you buy a supercomputer to do.
So you're saying that OpenOffice would still take forever to start.