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."

Comments

100 Million?

[Itninja]

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".

Re:100 Million?

[Yvan256]

Let's just make sure it's 1 000 000 cores and not 1 048 576 cores... let's not make that mistake again.

Re:100 Million?

[_KiTA_]

Let's just make sure it's 1 048 576 cores and not 1 000 000 cores... let's not make that mistake again.

Re:100 Million?

[Yvan256]

Just because CS has been abusing a system for over four decades doesn't make it right.

Re:100 Million?

[Thud457]

Can you translate that in "Library of Congress's"?

yes. It generates the same amount of heat as burning 37 Libraries of Congress.

Re:100 Million?

[JesseMcDonald]

You use SI prefixes with SI units. The 'byte' is not an SI unit; it's not even the most basic representation, being a group of eight bits. If you insist on using base-ten units in combination with bytes then you're essentially arguing for layering a base-ten system on top of a base-two one.

So far as I know there is no designated SI unit for information. Following the pattern of the other SI units, however, the best choice would be the bit. If you want base-ten measurements, then, you should use "kilobit", "megabit", etc., which unambiguously use the SI prefixes, official unit or not. The non-SI term "megabyte" will never unambiguously mean "10^6 bytes", and trying to make it so just renders the term useless for any purpose requiring precision.

Re:100 Million?

[sexconker]

CS abused nothing.
KB means 1024 bytes, and it always will.

KB is not K.
KB is not stepping on the toes of any SI units.
SI units are not sacred.
SI units are not enforceable by law.
SI units step on their own toes and are ambiguous themselves.

Anytime you see a b or a B after a K, M, etc. scalar multiplier, you are talking about bits or bytes and are using 1024 instead of 1000. It is not confusing. It is not ambiguous.

It's the fault of storage device marketers and idiot "engineers" who didn't check their work, made a mistake on some project, and refuse to admit it that the "confusion" exists.

Furthermore, classical SI scalars are used for measuring - bits are discrete finite quanta - we COUNT them. Would you like a centibyte? TOO FUCKING BAD.

The scalar of 1000 was chosen out of pure convenience. The scalar 1024 was chosen out of convenience, and was made a power of 2 because of the inherent nature of storage with respect to permutations (how many bits do I need to contain this space at this resolution? how much resolution and space can I get from this many bits?) and because of physical aspects relating to the manufacturing and design of the actual circuits.

CS has a fucking REASON to use 1024.
SI does not have a fucking reason to use 1000.

There is more validity in claiming that all SI units should be switched to 1024 than there is in suggesting KB mean 1024 bytes.

"But everything written before the change will be ambiguous!!!" yet you SI proponents tried to shove that ibi shit into CS (and failed miserably, thank you) despite the fact that it would cause the same fucking problem ("Does he mean KB or KiB?" "When was it published?" "Uh, Copyright 1999-2009" "Uh...").

In short, 1024 is correct, 1000 is wrong.

Re:100 Million?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, numbers in computers go from 1, 2, 4, ..., 1024, 2048, 4096, ..., 1048576, ..., etc. Nobody is arguing against that.

Nobody is debating wether or not computers work in base 2 for some areas (such as RAM, addressing, etc), so stop bringing that up, it's not a valid argument for making a kilo being equal to 1024. Not everything in a computer is base 2, such as the ethernet port being 10/100/1000.

The problem is exactly that "1024 was chosen out of convenience". A kilo means 1000 and that's all there is to it, you cannot change facts.

As for "causing the same fucking problem", we're already there. Fixing it now would mean that at least from this point forward we'd know for sure what people meant, that's why the new units were proposed. If I say "1 kibibyte" you know it's 1024. If I say "1 kilobyte" you can't be sure I mean 1000 or 1024.

CS always have such stupid problems. If I give you the date "10/11/12", what the hell does it mean? First of all there's the Y2K problem with old data, second you have the MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY vs YY/MM/DD problem (and ISO 8601 fixes this problem beautifully, YYYY-MM-DD).

Just because there is old, set ways to do something doesn't mean it's the right way.

Who's President, Future-boy?

[pete-classic]

As amazing as today's supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive

Wait, what? You lost me. Are you from the future? How can you describe the state of the art as "primitive"?

-Peter

Re:Who's President, Future-boy?

[mcgrew]

My cell phone is a supercomputer. At least, it would have been if I'd had it in 1972. Rather then being from the future, he, like me, is from the past and living in this science fiction future when all that fantasy stuff like doors that open by themselves, rockets to space, phones that need no wires and fit in your pocket, computers on your desk, ovens that bake a potato in three minutes without the oven getting hot, flat screen TVs that aren't round at the corners, eye implants that cure nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism and cataracts all at once, etc.

Back when I was young it didn't seem primitive at all. Looking back, GEES. When you went to the hospital they knocked you out with automotive starting fluid and left scars eight inches wide. These days they say "you're going to sleep now" and you blink and find yourself in the recovery room, feeling no pain or nausea with a tiny scar.

We are indeed living in primitive times. Back in the 1870s a man quit the Patent office on the grounds that everything useful had already been invented. If you're young enough you're going to see things that you couldn't imagine, or at least couldn't believe possible.

Sickness, pain, and death. And Star Trek.

Re:Who's President, Future-boy?

[David Greene]

Wait, what? You lost me. Are you from the future? How can you describe the state of the art as "primitive"?

Pretty easily, actually. There are lots of problems to solve, not the least of which is programming model. We're still basically using MPI to drive these machines. That will not cut it on a 100-million core machine where each socket has on the order of 100 cores. MPI can very easily be described as "primitive," as well as "clunky," "tedious" and "a pain in the ***."

How do we checkpoint a million-core program? How do we debug a million-core program? We are in the infancy of computing.

Limits on simulation.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The programming techniques and mathematical formulations needed to take advantage of such very large number of processors continue to be the main stumbling blocks. Some kind of simulations parallelize naturally. Time accurate fulid flow simulation for example is very easy to parallelize and technically you can devote a processor for each element and do time marching nicely. But not all physics problems are amenable to parallelization. Further even in the nice cases like fluid flow, if one tries to do solution adaptive meshing, no uniform grids etc, the time step slows down so much the simulation takes too long even on a 100 million processor machine.

The CFL condition that limits the maximum time step one can take shows no sign of relenting. Score has been Courant (the C in CFL) 1, Moore 0 for the last three decades.

How many problems can these systems really solve?

[wondi]

All this effort at creating parallel computing ends up solving very few problems. HPC has been struggling with parallelism for decades, and no easy solutions found yet. Note that these computers are aimed at solving a particular problem (e.g. modeling weather) and not at being a vehicle to quickly solve any problem. When the comparable multi-processing capacity is in your cell phone, what are you going to do with it?

Why 100 million processors?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Technically, shouldn't 640K processors be enough for every one?

Re:Why 100 million processors?

[Yvan256]

It is, if we're talking about cloud processors for running vaporware.

Why build this monstrosity?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

We know what answer it is going to give. 42. Save the money.

Re:Sorry - I can't help myself

[sherpajohn]

Only if they run Linux and can render Natalie Portman covered in hot grits faster than my imagination already does....woohoo!

human brain

[simoncpu was here]

How many cores do we need to simulate a human brain?

Re:AMD vs Intel

[Eharley]

I believe AMD was the first mass market CPU to include an on-board memory controller.

Speaking of heat

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

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?)

Re:How many problems can these systems really solv

[Again]

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.

Re:AMD vs Intel

[confused one]

I'd be guessing but here are three possible reasons AMD might be in that place:
1.) Value, ie. lower cost per processor
2.) Opteron has built in straight forward 4-way and 8-way multiprocessor connectivity, Xeon was limited to 2-way connectivity without extra bridge hardware, until recently.
3.) Opteron has higher memory bandwidth than P4 or Core 2 arch.