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Japanese Supercomputer K Hits 10.51 Petaflops
coondoggie writes "The Japanese supercomputer ranked #1 on the Top 500 fastest supercomputers broke its own record this week by hitting 10 quadrillion calculations per second (10.51 petaflops), according to its operators, Fujitsu and Riken.
The supercomputer 'K' consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said."
The supercomputer 'K' consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said."
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if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
Fully boots Windows in under three minutes!
You can play a wicked game of Space Invaders on it !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Finally enough power to render 3D tentacle porn in real-time!
consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs
Where goes the border between a supercomputer and a cluster?
Whats so big in this ? Sounds like every now and then someone adds another 10,000 new chips and they have a new world record holding super computer.
Spock: "Computer. This is a class one priority directive. Compute, to the last digit, the value of Pi."
Japan's very high (currently something like 200%) debt-to-gdp ratio has been sustainable because they invest in innovation. USA, take note!!
What does it get on SunSpider?
... a Beowulf cluster of those!
Crysis, can it play it?
I wonder how that would compare to the combined computational power of every smartphone, laptop, and desktop computer around the world.
A car analogy? Or how may libraries of congress / football fields?
Seriously I doubt 10.51 petaflops means anything to anyone except a small coterie of supercomputer nerds.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
It would probably need it's own power plant, as well.
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
Computers don't scale linearly. Amdahl's Law. The reason home computers don't go beyond 16 cores is that even getting a 16-way SMP is a horrifically difficult problem. If you built a 32-core machine it would run SLOWER than a 16-core one because of all the overheads (locking on the bus, scheduling, interprocessor communications, stuff like that). You can't just add cores and expect a faster machine. You have to put in an enormous amount of time and effort to engineer the design and you really have to do so almost from scratch each time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Gotta love Japanese names, they have/come up with so many cool ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
IBM has the Sequoia system coming on line in 2012 and it is also targeted at the 20 Petaflop range. It will be significantly more power efficient at 3000 Mflops/watt, three times lower then the K system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sequoia
Why is Snark Required?
We need some inputs from all the conspicuous by their silence quantum computing nerds.
Do you think it could handle a game of freecell? That takes an awful lot of cpu power...
Relatively speaking 48 cores on a single board has been "affordable" since Magny Cours launched a bit around a year ago. And the new G34 Bulldozers, can give you 64 cores using the same motherboards. Even if you discount the huge 4 socket boards, the 2 socket G34 boards will give you 24-32 cores.
So 16 cores is certainly not some sort of upper bound at the moment. The only thing keeping it out of sub 1k desktop computers is price. And that'll come down in a die shrink or 2. No fundamental new design required.
Almost all of the hardware going into the Top500 clusters these days is standard off the shelf components. So, I'd tend to agree with the OP, it is kind of ho hum to add 10k new cores to an existing cluster, or to build yet another cluster with a nearly identical architecture to 100 others that came before it. It just requires money, and the will to spend it.
Whats so big in this ? Sounds like every now and then someone adds another 10,000 new chips and they have a new world record holding super computer.
Interconnect. Adding more nodes has a linear cost increase, but connecting them all with low-latency links is difficult. It is easy enough to buy a 48-port switch, but a 1000 port switch with low latency is a completely different story, and if you need 10000 ports you are in fully custom territory - it can easily cost a lot more than all the nodes combined.
...rendering HQ tentacle rape porn.
How many bitcoins per hour is that?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
..don't invent things. Rather, it is smart people using them as Fast Slide Rules. We computer people tend to overestimate what we can achieve with our contraptions. The Russians proved that symbolic solutions by human brains could achieve similar things as the numerical solutions here in the west. Too often, computers are just complex heat generators.
Actual specs : 68500 Sparc64s, each with 8 cores. So every core can put away between 5 and 10 double-precision calculations every single cycle?
IBM's PowerPC A2; 16 64-bit cores and 64 threads all using less then 80 watts manufactured at 45nm running at 1.4Ghz. IBM's PowerPC has future performance growth at 32nm, 28nm and 22nm. Intel's has already reached there limit 22nm will bring more slow cores; 8 cores each running at 800Mhz, performance increase none, new factor gotta have it!
This one's more powerful than the next three on the list combined. the leap is HUGE. they went from 1 pflop, to 2, to 10. What's impressive is that its output is nearly 5 times that of Jaguar, on just a little less than half the cores and about 25% less clock. It's just a shame they haven't gotten it fully optimized yet, JAXA was a lot more efficient on the previous incarnation of the same processor, but maybe that can be attributed to Solaris on Sparc (JAXA) vs Linux on Sparc (RIKEN).
I've always wondered how supercomputer time is rationed. How much does computer time on these things cost? How is the cost calculated? Is time divided up something like how it's done on a large telescope, where the controlling organization get proposals from scientists, then divvies up the computer's available time according to what's been accepted? Do they multi-task (run more than one scientists' program at one time)? Does the computer run at top power (10pf) at all times, or does the resource usage go up and down? And lastly, how hard is it to write programs to run on these things? Do the scientists do it themselves, and if so, do the people who run the supercomputer audit the code before it runs?
Do the programs that run on supercomputers ever crash the system?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I get petaflops sometimes when I eat at Super Taco Burrito down on Jackson at Halsted. Man, the mega-super is really tasty but you suffer later.
With Super Taco Burrito and all the gyros places on the corner, that's ground zero for intestinal distress. But something keeps pulling me back there.
Now what were we talking about?
Oh yeah, is it Spring Back and Fall Forward or the other way around? Damn, now I got a taste for one a those mega-super burritos and an order of guac. I think they're open til midnight. Oh boy, it's gonna be one a those days tomorrow...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Cray Inc. is working on updating its Jaguar supercomputer and that will enable 20-petaflop peak performance. ;) Therefore, we could soon see Jaguar as the fastest supercomputer in the world
Who has any code that can take advantage of this? Someone ought to see if Ray Kurzweil thinks he can program the singularity into this beast. Or else set up a plausible holodeck.
Now the Japanese will miniaturise the monster, make it the size of a cell phone that uses very little power, market to people in the US and Microsoft will sue just because Microsoft always sues people.
What have we discovered recently that we couldn't, if we didn't have a supercomputer?
The Japanese supercomputer ranked #1 on the Top 500 fastest supercomputers
Rumor has it that it's also #1 in the top 2,342 fastest supercomputers.
Property is theft.
What have we discovered recently that we couldn't, if we didn't have a supercomputer?
Weather forecasts are now 0.002% more accurate