Installation of Blue Waters Petaflop Supercomputer Begins

An anonymous reader writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is finally getting the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer installed. After IBM walked away from the project after 3 years of planning, Cray stepped in to pick up the $188 million contract. Now, in around 9 months time, Blue Waters should be fully operational and achieve performance of 1 petaflop or more. As for the hardware... who wouldn't want access to 235 Cray XE6 cabinets using AMD 16 core Opteron 2600 processors with access to 1.5 petabytes of memory (4GB per chip) and 500 petabytes of local storage."

Comments

When can I get one on my desktop?

[sehlat]

That's the real question.

Re:When can I get one on my desktop?

[gentryx]

Let's look this up. 7 years ago #1 on the Top500 was an IBM BlueGene/L at 70 TFLOPS. I can't see that performance anywhere close on the desktop or even on the notebook market.

Assuming you're running a good SLI systems and that your GPUs actually deliver the performance the manufacturer is claiming them to have, you'd get in the best case something around 1.5 TFLOPS which corresponds roughly to a 1998 ASCI Red.

Re:When can I get one on my desktop?

[dak664]

At a gigaflop per watt that's 24 MWh a day, $1.3 million a year in power bills at $0.15/kWh.

Re:When can I get one on my desktop?

[SrLnclt]

The University of Illinois generates much of their own power, and has relatively low electric rates because of this. This year the rates are posted as $0.0754/KWh. Its also doubtful they will be operating continuously at peak capacity.

And on a related note, the building housing Blue Waters has been certified LEED Gold by the USGBC in an effort to minimize the energy and cost impact of operating the new facility.

Re:When can I get one on my desktop?

[WhiteSpade]

UIUC runs their own power plant, and I used to live in an apartment on campus not too far from it. That thing put off so much steam that every morning fog was rolling across the street in front of where I lived. If I remember correctly, they also use the steam to heat a lot of the buildings on campus as well, via steam tunnels under the streets. They leak a lot, so there were always a few places you could stop on the sidewalk to warm yourself up before walking the rest of the way to class. Most of this was on the older side of campus. I'm sure most UIUC Slashdot readers spent more of their time north of Green street in the engineering quad where everything is a lot newer ;-).

---Alex

Re:That number ... 2600

[Zakabog]

Very likely there is a subconscious connection as it's really an Opteron 6200, the 2600 is a typo.

Um, me

[jimhill]

If the Cray architecture selected for Blue Waters is akin to that of Cielo then UIUC is going to rue -- RUE! -- the day they got in bed with these Cray con-men. The uptime and filesystem stability of Cielo is an absolute dog (as in, at least 2 FS rebuilds per week with data loss accompanying 2 in 5).

Re:Um, me

[Anonymous Coward]

Different file systems - Cielo is running Panasas (pfs) and Blue Waters will be running Lustre...

Ironic CAPTA: painless

Re:Um, me

[TheSunborn]

No they have not. Take a look at multicore spec test at http://electronicsnexus.com/articles/Opteron-Xeon-Benchmarks-2012-01.aspx where the 4x6282SE Opteron is the fastes 4 processor system testet. Or to quote

"For example, note that the top-end 16-core 6282SE Opteron is a match for the top-end 10-core Xeon on floating point, and is not far behind it on integer either"

Oh and the opteron cost less then half the price of the 10-core Xeon chip. So I think that slightly better floatingpoint performance, for less then half the price, make opteron the obvious choice, assuming you can split the workload so you can really use all the cores. Something I assume they master, since they are going to run their code on more then 1000 cores at a time.

Re:Um, me

[gmhowell]

You raise an interesting point. The usual level of Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers usually isn't much above the level of jokes about Crysis and pissing matches between AMD ARM and Intel fanboys.

Back in my day, the Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers was about Beowulf clusters and Natalie Portman and hot grits.

Damned kids running around on my lawn again...

Depends...

[Junta]

How big is your desk?

Typo

[reking2]

Please correct "Opteron 2600" to "Opteron 6200". There are no 2600 series chips from AMD.

Ahem, NVIDIA?

[Mike_K]

It is very nice that AMD Opterons are mentioned and petaflops are celebrated, but aren't those petaflops mostly delivered by NVIDIA's Kepler Tesa cards?

From the TFA:

Cray XK6 blades with NVIDIA(R) Tesla(TM) GPUs, based on NVIDIA
(NASDAQ: NVDA) next-generation 'Kepler' architecture, which is
expected to more than double the performance of the Fermi GPU on
double-precision arithmetic.

Re:Hardware Moves Ahead, Software...not so much...

[LeDopore]

Dear afabbro,

You are largely correct. Most software has not sped up much since the 1970s, and it could even be argued that developers write such sloppy code these days that even our improved compilers can't compensate, especially in applications where performance is no longer critical.

On the other hand, since about 2006 there have been some tremendous advances in algorithms. One optimization problem I work on, Basis Pursuit Denoising http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_pursuit_denoising, has had on the order of a 10-fold increase in real-world speed on constant hardware every year for the past 5 years (see http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5940245 for my contribution).

These advances are not just academic games; they are actually worth doing. They could eventually lead to computers with sensory processing routines that have a mote of common sense to them, able to perform some real-world tasks we currently need humans for.

While I agree that by and large, most software is getting fat and lazy, there are a few problems where today's algorithms on 2002 hardware mop the floor with 2002 algorithms on today's hardware.

Best,

LeDopore