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Installation of Blue Waters Petaflop Supercomputer Begins

Posted by Unknown on from the too-many-flops-to-fail dept.

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."

7 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re:When can I get one on my desktop? by gentryx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  2. Re:When can I get one on my desktop? by dak664 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. Um, me by jimhill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

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    1. Re:Um, me by TheSunborn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  4. Depends... by Junta · · Score: 4, Funny

    How big is your desk?

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  5. Typo by reking2 · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  6. Re:When can I get one on my desktop? by SrLnclt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.