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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 !
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consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs
Where goes the border between a supercomputer and a cluster?
Spock: "Computer. This is a class one priority directive. Compute, to the last digit, the value of Pi."
Computer: "The answer is 10, base Pi."
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... a Beowulf cluster of those!
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.
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Screw crysis. Let's load dwarf fortress up on this bitch.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
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.
Shouldn't that be "1, base Pi"?
1 base Pi == 1 base 10 == 1 base 2 == 1 base N
Real artificial intelligence - "No. I'm not falling for that one."
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)
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
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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.
How many bitcoins per hour is that?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
Actual specs : 68500 Sparc64s, each with 8 cores. So every core can put away between 5 and 10 double-precision calculations every single cycle?
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.
Maybe this system can finally process The Great Adamantine Space Elevator...
Which abuses cave in mechanisms to pump magma to space where it falls down and boils away the oceans. At *pinky to lip* one million frames per second.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
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
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