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Japan's 8-petaflop K Computer Is Fastest On Earth
Stoobalou writes "An eight-petaflop Japanese supercomputer has grabbed the title of fastest computer on earth in the new Top 500 Supercomputing List to be officially unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg today. The K Computer is based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and smashes the previous supercomputing records with a processing power of more than 8 petaflop/s (quadrillion calculations per second) — three times that of its nearest rival."
So it's faster than the Crays on the list, the nearest competitors?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
the NSA has it's own chip fab
640K cores is enough for anyone.
Anyone here who find that 'quadrillion' is more descriptive than peta? (or 1e15, for that matter?).
The Chinese Tianhe-1A is nearest with 2.6 petaflops
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... wait. Are we still doing that? OK, now I feel old. In Slashdot years.
For supercomputers, it seems at least once a year something doubles. For desktop computers... Mine is 4 years old and still similar in specs to PCs that are being sold today.
Bigger news than a new fastest supercomputer on the planet would be one that had as its primary mission peaceful uses. The Roadrunner (fastest computer in the USA) is for H-bomb simulations ("stockpile stewardship") and gives some of its time to climate change and magnetically-confined plasma (for fusion power) simulations. (Possibly just for PR.) Hopefully since Japan doesn't have a nuclear weapons program this machine will be used 100% for peaceful purposes!
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
The article misses out who built it... Fujitsu did, and it's nice to be proud of the company you work for and that my colleagues in Japan achieved something rather cool :)
Oh, and it's not finished yet :)
Did you post that just to be able to use the word that is in your sig?
Can it run Crysis?
A birdie says a supercomputer exists with a 2000-8000 petaFLOP performance rating.
Not fair. Theirs runs on radiation.
I wonder if Oracle (nee Sun) will use this as a PR tool given that it uses SPARC CPUs (though it does run Linux, and not Solaris).
In general though, the CPUs are generally the least interesting parts of these types of machines. I'm personally often more interested in how the cooling and power distribution systems have been designed to run efficiently and have low PUE numbers than any of the raw compute stats. Things like water / glycol / non-air cooling and UPS / generator / power distribution architectures can become challenging when you start talking about megwatts of energy. Also data management and backups too.
CPU and memory is less interesting than how to tie it all together IMHO.
until the software retards bring that thing to a crawl for reading a website? Or a 10 gigabyte "hello world"?
Sure the Singularity and Computer Sentience cannot be far-off now. Yay. A faster computer. I guess this is news for today but this is 'dog bites man' stuff. Tomorrow the sun will rise again and there will be a faster computer than this one. Yawn
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Here are some images of the system, which currently uses 672 cabinets and uses about 10 megawatts of power. The K system is more powerful than the next 5 systems combined. It's a big-ass system.
Can anyone tell us the most recent accepted figure for human brain emulation in petaflops and terrabytes of memory?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Eh? We already know what causes disease. The body has these four 'humors', and when they get out of balance bad things happen. All of these bad things can be cured by magically tapping, twisting, and massaging the spine. Don't they teach kids anything these days?
According to wikipedia, K Computer (or Kobe Computer) refers to cuts of computer from the Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu semiconductors, raised according to strict tradition in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. The output from such computers is generally considered to be a delicacy, renowned for its flavour, tenderness, and fatty, well-marbled texture.
what else was sony going to do with the PS3s they bricked for an "upgrade"?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It is using Sparc CPUs and no GPUs. I wonder if Oracle is watching? It will be interesting to see since they now own the Zombie formally known as Sun.
So when are we going to see nVidia get into this game with ARM+GPU based super computer?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So there are faster computers on some other planet somewhere?
I might think about ordering one of those instead, except shipping cost (and time ) would be a problem, and my credit card would expire before they got the order (the speed of light is a bitch)
"fastest computer on earth".
Lately, the phrase ' in the world' has given way to ' on earth'. Things that used to fastest in the world are now fastest on earth. Factually both are correct but their implications are slightly different. When you use the word 'world' you are mostly concerned with what's happening on earth and you are not at all concerned with other heavenly bodies, however the moment you use the word 'earth' it implies that you are talking in a broader context with encompasses at least our other solar system bodies if not the entire universe. 'Fastest on earth' seems to imply that there are other computers on other planets and that you have knowledge of their existence and that you know that this supercomputer is fastest on earth, though it may not be fastest in the solar system. Of course there can be computers on other planets too (there probably are and this one is indeed fastest on earth) but the incorrect part is that 'on earth' implies that you have knowledge of existence of super computers elsewhere outside the earth too. I think 'in the world' is more appropriate.
so that's approx. 100 Gflop per sparc cpu. (double precision?)
what can a high end xeon do ?
the top 500 is based upon the Linpack benchmark and it is not really a good reflection on 'how fast' a super computer really is. Newer benchmarks, such as graph500 and NAS parallel benchmarks try to make the benchmark more real world. But if all you plan to do is solve linear equations then I guess Linpack is your thing.
I wonder how many bitcoins this monster can mine per hour lol?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
What I don't quite get - and maybe someone can enlighten me - is how they keep 80K compute nodes going. Even with very reliable hardware, several of these nodes will fail each day. The massively parallel codes I work with (MD) can't deal with a compute node going out. Do other massively parallel codes have a way to deal with this sort of thing? This seems to be a big challenge for parallel computing. When you have a code and problem that can use several thousand nodes, hardware failure will be a daily occurrence. Incidentally, I've had the opportunity to use several thousand cpus in one go. Before New Mexico's Encanto was released for general use I was one of several people that had access to the machine. There really wasn't a problem running million or billion atom systems over several thousand cpus. But this was just brief benchmarking runs. Not data production.
46 & 2
"And the President responded to the incident by saying 'Screw those commie bastards, and screw their little wussy supercomputer."
But does it run BSD?
I8-D
That is, you want the unrankable Tianhe-1 GPU "show computer".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But will it blend?
Of course it's running Linux. Apparently Linux can scale from the smallest devices (even much more than the cellphone market well Linux also reigns king) to the biggest computers on the planet.
All computer from the Top 500's top 10 are running Linux.
penismeasuringcontest
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Hah - I just started a ~10000 proc job on the machine sitting in position 99....
I also regularly run jobs on Jaguar (#3)....
The advances in supercomputing in the last year have been simply astounding. GPUs are changing the game of course.... but the density of CPUs is getting insane. Being able to plug 4x12 core processors into a 1U mobo is getting crazy. Can't wait to see where it goes in the next year!
If they mean the fastest computer we've ever made to date, why don't they just say that instead of using a qualifier like "on earth" which implicates a specifically limited scope on account of an awareness of something faster elsewhere?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Even the story seems to think that you're cheating if you use a GPU - when in fact, depending on the problems you're trying to solve, use of GPUs can make your computer more power-efficient, less expensive, and faster. OK, sure, if you want to argue that not every algorithm will map efficiently to a GPU, I'll accept that argument. But then you have to grant me the reverse argument; not every algorithm maps efficiently to CPUs. The problem in thinking here is just that the CPU is the "correct" way to do things, and sometimes you can "cheat" and use a GPU to do it faster. In reality, some problems just need parallel horsepower, and that's what the GPU excels at. Don't believe me? Well, here are some examples: Graphics (duh - why do you think they make GPUs?), n-body simulations (just need lots of number crunching here), and LINPACK (if you believe the people that complain that the GPU gets an unfair advantage - when really, the CPU is just at a disadvantage because of its architecture).
There can be a hurdle in learning how to rewrite your code to take advantage of the GPU, some of which might still be hanging around from the 1970s. But if you're going to spend millions of dollars on a new computer, you probably also have millions of dollars to spend on the research that you'll be doing on it. And if you've saved some of those millions of dollars by choosing GPUs over, say, 10x as many CPUs, then you can spend some of what you've saved (and will continue to save in lower power bills) on a programmer or two.
I don't intend this to attack the K Computer itself - hopefully, its architects listened closely to what the researchers wanted when designing it, and chose CPUs because they were the right choice for the programs that will be running on the computer. But the article (and some observers) seem rather biased, rather than recognizing that both CPUs and GPUs have strengths, and a supercomputer that includes both will likely be better at many problems than a computer that doesn't.
Of course, there's also the argument that *everything* on the Top500 list is biased, and not just the systems with GPUs, because not everybody's problem looks anything like LINPACK. So sometimes, something that's neither a CPU nor a GPU is the best choice (and whatever that something is might not run LINPACK well) - which is a very valid observation as well.
Wasn't there an article recently about China's world's fastest supercomputer, and no competition in site for the next several years? Or did I fall asleep at my seak for several years?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
costa rica's famous nonmilitary has to with the unpopularity of a costa rican military dictator who was overthrown in the 1940s. the military was hated as a source of the dictator's support. so the military was "disbanded" to much fanfare (and little substance): you see, of course, costa rica DOES have a military: law enforcement, foreign peacekeeping troops, etc. the famous propaganda that you believe is just an entertaining narrative of the reaction of the people and politicians of costa rica to the military in the 1940s, due the hated deposed dictator. the myth has no reflection in reality
and you forgot another great myth: the amish. it's easy to preach nonviolence when one in embedded in the middle of a militaristic country: your peace is provided for, so you don't have to provide for it. your peaceful philosophy is therefore a parasitical arrangement with your host country, not a whole, genuine philosophy that can stand on its own. for example, if you were to transport the amish to say, the caucasus mountains, one or two things would happen:
1. the extinction of the amish
2. the all-new improved well-armed amish
likewise, costa rica benefits from the usa's umbrella interest in keeping the status quo in latin america. it's easy to have a lackadaisical military if your peace is guaranteed by someone else. for example, if nicaragua or panama went nuts and started making inroads into costa rica, costa rica would beg the usa for military aid, and/ or bulk up it's existing military
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The supercomputer I'm using is no longer in the Top 100 ;-(
The fastest computers are 100,000x faster in 25 years. But the typical problem in my discipline (seismic) is a 4D grid. If you increase the side of a grid 18x to the fourth power, then you reach 100,000. I was at a conference earlier month where people are still talking about tricks like custom hardware (GPUs) and data compression to squeeze ever larger problems into supercomputers. This aspect has not changed since I went to grad school a quarter century ago.
although it should give SkyNet a run for its money.
The K computer is able to do work more efficiently than GPUs because it uses a very power-efficient core, the Sun VIIIfx. If you peel the onion, it seems like the real reason for energy efficiency is special purpose units and the HPC-ACE instructions. I did a quick investigation of what this core has (and what it doesn't) to make it so energy efficient. It may be an interesting read for some of you guys so leaving a link here: http://bit.ly/kTvvDE
someone above is talking about a Cray being the fastest
A few decades back, Cray was kept in business solely because the NSA funded him. He had no other customer to support his stuff.
These 'private companies' with their 'general purpose computers' are often linked to secret government projects in ways we will not understand or know about for decades.
the NSA has been on the forefront of computer technology for it's whole existence practically.
almost nobody had ever heard of it before the mid 1970s.
there was no book about it until circa 1980, and only a handful of books since then
and yet, it singlehandedly is responsible for a large amount of supercomputer development in the US.
and it is part of the Department of Defense
i mean, people keep saying there could be 'peace' between those states, but it was only a short time ago, 150 years, that those to 'peaceful' states were killing each other.
every nation practically has a peace movement sooner or later.
it's endemic to the human species to have anti-war movements.
so which is really the 'steady state'... the desire for war or the desire for peace, which is behind just about every major religion?
i mean in the world. sorry.
These numbers are getting stupid. It's time to switch to calculations per nanosecond.
Where you were caught trolling others as ac replies and telling others to do so with you :
"Wait until he starts on another kick, then reply to him as an AC. It's the new meme". - by tomhudson (43916) on Sunday May 09 2010, @08:29PM (#32150544) Homepage Journal
QUOTED FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1646272&cid=32150544
And for what?
Just because you were shown as technically weak in computing so many times here after you did things like the above to the wrong person:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2230966&cid=36418796
That all you have is your geek angst & tricks like ac stalker trolling proven above, and also downmodding unjustly after doing so, shown by your fellow troll friends here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2245866&cid=36491652
* Some "ethics" tomhudson... you don't know the meaning of the word!
Wtf? That machine is a year from operation and they're already claiming "fastest"?
TFA reads: currently in the configuration stage
News from other sources say it'll take them a year before the system is fully built.
Anyone can claim they have something "100x faster" by simply saying they have some magical machine "in configuration stage".
Generally, countries without armies have official defense treaties with other countries that do have armies. The US, would defend Costa Rica and other countries in the Americas and Pacific, France would defend Monaco, and Australia would defend many Pacific countries. Others are unofficial, such as everybody knows the Italian Army would defend the Vatican were it attacked.
Bhutan, having a small standing army, is not one of them, although India would protect them should the Chinese decide to invade.
I wonder if you could have a machine like this pay for itself by mining bitcoins for the first year or so?
then why did hitler kill all of them?
why waste the time?
I'm not so impressed with the "world's fastest computer" schtick. Take a CPU/GPU with more cores, add a couple of cabinets, and there you go - world's fastest computer (with all due respect to the hardware engineers who put these things together).
The tricky part is figuring out how to divide your particular problem up so you can actually keep those 100,000-odd cores working, not waiting for intermediate results from other cores.
And if you thin it's difficult now, in ten years from now the world's fastest supercomputer will probably have something in the order of a billion (thousand million) cores.
But then again, your average PC (or smartphone) may well have hundreds of CPU cores on it, and today's average CS student won't have a clue how to take advantage of that architecture.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Theres an IBM Blue Gene thats 10 petaflops and of course Cray's 50 petaflop supercomputer
I think that this is far more important than the comparison with the chinese machine, since this means that there is serious competition again in the high end market.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
With a tsunami cooling their data centers, one should expect their computers are the fastest in the world!
The aspirations of these supercomputer builders knows no bounds. They build an 8 petaflop system, and think the computer is just K. 80 petaflops will probably just be OK, and 800 might be A-OK.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I would like (and hope) to think that the "K" represents "Kunle" ...
It would be nice (if not appropriate) if those in Nihon acknowledged and perhaps even kindly extended an invitation to the man who behind the corporations, is responsible for this. Having created the "Hydra" chip, sold to Sun and renamed SPARC - professor Kunle Olukotun. Still very much holding office at Stanford (Gates/room 408, which coincidentally or not happens to be the area code for San Jose, California - Silicon Valley) and often appearing at conferences, here is his page:
http://www-hydra.stanford.edu/~kunle/
That was the real work, this computer is an assembly of it. Just imagine the ideas he has floating right now. People should be acknowledged for their efforts and contributions, let's not forget and give credit where credit at the core is due.
Re: the comment of no people in the images, perhaps a cardboard cut-out of Mr. K. Olukotun at minimum, I'm sure he wouldn't mind.