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US Regains Supercomputing Crown, Besting China and Japan
dcblogs writes "The U.S., once again, is home to the world's most powerful supercomputer after being knocked off the list by China two years ago and Japan last year. The top computer, an IBM system at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is capable of 16.32 sustained petaflops, according to the Top 500 list, a global, twice a year ranking, released Monday. Despite the continuing strength of U.S. vendors globally, when China's supercomputer took the top position in June, 2010, it seemed to hit a national nerve. President Barack Obama mentioned China's top ranked supercomputer in two separate speeches, including his State of the Union address last year."
Each time I read a story like this I can't help think there are a bunch of faster machines that they don't tell us about.
At least in the *specific* performance characteristic of 64bit precision linear algebra, it's perfectly likely that the biggest player is reported.
In the cases where secrecy is probably preventing you from knowing about it, it probably is optimized for 32-bit precision floating point and/or large storage throughput to fuel data mining.
Of course, then there are collections of systems that could probably easily place in the list that are at least moderately well-known but not submitted, if it wouldn't be a financial catastrophe to take it down for a few days to dedicate to an xhpl run. An EC2 datacenter comes to mind.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'd rather have a big fraction of our workforce be highly competent in mathematics, than have a computer that's marginally faster than any other.
One wins a pointless pissing match, the other provides a much more solid basis for real strength and prosperity.
Besides, all this really shows is that China will lend us enough money for us to buy computer components built an assembled throughout the world.
Way to go !!
If the head of supercomputing at IBM can't even get Moore's Law right, what the hell is he doing there? He seems to think that processor speed not increasing means Moore's Law is dying when in reality, Moore's Law has been doing pretty well for itself. Transistor density has been increasing and new breakthroughs I seem to see on /. every other day don't show it slowing down anytime soon... Turek sounds like an idiot or the journalist who wrote the article made him sound like one at least.
-SaNo
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What do you suppose are the top 5 practical applications for a 16 petaflop computer?
Actually, the top 500 "competition/list" has been moderately useful for transitioning the world from big iron supercomputers sold by single corporations into the modern commodity/cluster (beowulf) model that costs far less and scales (as one can see) almost indefinitely large/fast for a certain class of linear or embarrassingly parallel problems. It is also the case that some of the problems that are solved using the larger of the computers built (which with the exception of corporate entries aren't really built "just for bragging rights") are both interesting and potentially of some value, either intellectual or monetary, to society. So it isn't, really, just a matter of bigger dicks (although the top ten does have a certain amount of that going on, where for decades some companies were conspicuous by their absence, and only got there eventually by basically building a machine with winning capacity and then giving it to somebody so that they could enter). Sometimes it is a matter of solving problems in nuclear physics or cosmology or cryptography or fluid dynamics that are NP complete or otherwise scale poorly enough that one is always hungry for cycles if one works in the field.
The question of whether or not the answers to those problems are worth the cost is a separate one, and by all means debate it, but be sure to do so in the context of all Big Instrumentation used in science. The LHC is a lot of money to -- maybe -- find the Higgs. Or not, again, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. NASA routinely spends/spent tens of billions of dollars to lift humans and e.g. the Hubble into orbit -- the Hubble gives us enormous amounts of wonderful science but very little of that science is of direct (as opposed to indirect) benefit to (say) automobile mechanics, lawyers, owners of restaurants, farmers. The cost of a top 500 machine is in comparison cheap, and in some cases may even work on problems with a measurable expectation value that trickles back to the society that ultimately pays for it (outside of the noble cause of supporting the education and research system that has created a truly enormous amount of very concrete wealth by providing work for otherwise unemployed physicists and computer scientists and mathematicians and funding for the many science and math departments that trained them and whose faculty participate). Personally, I think it is well worth it, but I've spent a good fraction of my life attached to that particular teat (although I'm not, currently) and don't pretend to be completely objective here.
I am, OTOH, pretty well informed about cluster computing, while having absolutely no dog in the top 500 race.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
It's too bad these computers are in the hands of governments instead of people who could do something productive with them other than delegating processes to espionage, war, etc. Even if the computers did major calculations that could point to policy change in government, there are still politicians with motives and bureaucrats within agencies that have to protect their jobs...and hence would never use it productively. So, what's the point?
The fastest computer in the world is useless if it's not being used for a productive purpose.
This was a BlueGene, meaning in all likelihood the processors and circuit boards were manufactured in New York. There were probably memory,storage, and other components sourced from southeast asia, but the most expensive bits probably were actually fabricated domestic.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
and to meet peta meta-requirements, no cute kittens or bunnies were flopped or otherwise harmed in the building of this superb computer.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Just a little interesting thing I noticed while reading up on this.
Most American media refers to it as an "American" supercomputer first and foremost, and an "IBM" supercomputer second.
Most non-American media refers to it as an "IBM" supercomputer first, and an "American" supercomputer second.
Not really wrong either way - it's a big win for both the US and for IBM - but it's interesting to see the little differences.
Seriously, if they are migrating to new supercomputers, what, each year or two, what are they doing with the "scraps"? Do they refurbish them to be used elsewhere? do they sell them as "used goods" to other companies?
I can imagine taking quite a bit of time to install/uninstall such installations, so if its going to stay 2 years and it takes 3 months to setup/remove, are the installation/uninstallation crews constantly on site? or maybe it takes much less time to do so?
does anyone has any idea on this? I mean, that's a lot of stuff to "just" throw away when upgrading. Something useful must be done with the "obsolete" equipment, no?
Slashdot. Unreadable news to annoy nerds. - wonkey_monkey
I just now learned that Sequoia is based on POWER CPUs. And #2 I already knew is based on SPARC.
This doesn't mean much for RISC, perhaps, but at least some bragging rights.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
in 6 months another country will take the crown
I think there's also something else that's noteworthy: only three US based supercomputers in the top 10. Is it an all time low?
Was this supercomputer based on either Xeons or Itaniums, or was it based on POWER7? Does IBM fab POWER7 in China? I thought that it was all in fabs in the US, since they don't make too many of those.
On a separate note, since Intel hardly sells many Itaniums, it could take all the chips it could get out of 1 lot, and make a supercomputer based on that. Something like SGI's Altix.
Am I the only one who sees some irony here? The agency whose job is to be a front-runner in energy efficiency builds a massive power-consuming supercomputer.
Supercomputing is currently based on having the most cheap chips with a faster and faster network between them. While USA is developing these faster networks, China simply 'borrows' the tech and then have access to the REAL CHEAP chips. Why? Because they put an export tariff on EVERYTHING that is exported, while manipulating their money against western money. Basically, they will shortly have the larger systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Currently material scientists are building computational models of these processes. To check whether a new models works out we need to simulate it. This takes Terabytes of RAM and Petabytes of disk space. That's what such a machine is good for.
Here is a list of other flagship applications. Most of them are simulation codes that replace experiments which would either be too costly, happen under too extreme physical stress/forces, or simply could not be carried out at all in practice because of scale.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Here is one example our chair is working on: simulation of dendritic growth. Ever heard of that? Doesn't sound particularly relevant to your everyday life? Well, it is. Material scientist are interested in understanding how crystalline structures form in cooling metal alloys, The crytal structure is ke to building stronger, lighter metal work pieces. Ultimately a solid understanding of this will lead to e.g. higher fuel efficiency in jet planes and lighter cars.
Currently material scientists are building computational models of these processes. To check whether a new models works out we need to simulate it. This takes Terabytes of RAM and Petabytes of disk space. That's what such a machine is good for.
Here is a list of other flagship applications. Most of them are simulation codes that replace experiments which would either be too costly, happen under too extreme physical stress/forces, or simply could not be carried out at all in practice because of scale.
Yeah, I worry about dendritic growth all the time, and tin-finger growth. That's a big concern too; much more so now that there's no lead in most of my electronics and they've changed my fluxes and cleaning processes. (Effing ROHS!) But dendritic and tin-finger growth are easily tested with real world models as opposed to simulations and I always trust real world models more than simulations. It's too easy for a tiny error in a mathematical model to cause big errors in results. Numerical simulations are for conditions that aren't easy or cheap (or allowed) to test in physical reality.
So nuke-degradation sim makes sense. So do weather sims (always wrong but getting better), climate (always more wrong but also getting better). It may be possible to do biological sims of drug effects eventually.
The trouble with all of them is that because of the high cost of the machines that can run them, the class of problems that can be cost-effectively simulated is limited. A more useful metric might be million-floatinng-point-operations-per-dollar. (MegaFLOpD).