Titan Supercomputer Debuts for Open Scientific Research

hypnosec writes "The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unveiled a new supercomputer – Titan, which it claims is the world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of 20 petaflops of performance. The Cray XK7 supercomputer contains a total of 18,688 nodes and each node is based on a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and a Nvidia Tesla K20 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). To be used for researching climate change and other data-intensive tasks, the supercomputer is equipped with more than 700 terabytes of memory."

Comments

Re:Police officer charged with plan to cook,eat wo

[Big Hairy Ian]

Damn if I'd just been a petaflop faster I'd have had 1st post!

Instead of distracting it with 'climate change'

[fustakrakich]

Why not have it figure a way of helping us build clean energy sources and reduce contamination? The climate changes all the time. We should learn to live with it.

Re:Instead of distracting it with 'climate change'

[mcgrew]

I see that the guy who moderated you insightful is as ignorant of computers' workings as you are. Computers don't figure things out. There is no such thing as an "electronic brain" or a "thinking machine." Computers are nothing more than huge electronic abacuses. They don't figure things out, the scientists figure things out (theorize) and then test their theories using computerized models when they can't do direct testing.

700TB not as exciting as it sounds

[HappyHead]

The memory they list as an exciting "700+TB" is not actually all that exciting - if you divide that by the number of nodes, and then the number of CPU cores, that leaves only 2GB of ram per CPU core, which is pretty much standard for HPC cluster memory. The only thing impressive about this really, is the number of compute nodes involved, which any single submitted job will _not_ have access to all of. I manage similar, though smaller, research clusters myself, and frankly, the only clusters we had that had less than 2GB per CPU core were retired long ago. Essentially, this means they're running the cluster with the minimum amount of memory that is considered acceptable for the application.

Re:700TB not as exciting as it sounds

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Would it be actually useful? Yes, you'd gave more memory in total, but any given amount of memory for a computational job would have constrained bandwidth. As far as I understand it, this is the Achilles' heel of modern machines: What use is a large memory to you when you can barely keep the execution units busy, even with caches? Especially in HPC, whenever the coherence of accesses just isn't there.

Re:700TB not as exciting as it sounds

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that's not quite true: it is possible to submit a job request for all 18,688 compute nodes and in fact the scheduling policy gives preference to such large jobs. It's true that there aren't very many applications that can effectively use all that many nodes, but there are a few (such as the global climate simulations). You're correct about the amount of ram per CPU core, though.

Re:700TB not as exciting as it sounds

[gentryx]

Titan is a capability machine which distinguishes it from capacity machines. As such it designed for large/extreme scale jobs (which includes full system runs). I expect the techs are just now prepping Linpack for the next Top500 at SC12.

The ratio of 2 GB/core isn't going away anytime soon. The reason is: a) the speed per core is stagnating, thus adding more memory per core just means that one would end up with more memory per core that it could process in a timely manner and b) if you need more memory, you'll just allocate more nodes, the additional cores you get by that don't exactly hurt.

Is the K20 really a GPU?

[CajunArson]

GPU means graphical processing unit. Now consumer GPUs are pressed into service for compute tasks like BOINC & folding, but they are still GPUs (they can still do graphics).

Does Nvidia even bother to put in the graphics-specific silicon and output hardware on the K20, or should these things really be called.. I dunno.. "compute accelerators" or something like that?

On a more serious note

[WOOFYGOOFY]

It's a great and important tool for policy makers to be able to crunch this magnitude of data, but not being able to do this is not the problem wrt climate change.

The problem is purely political, specifically, American conservatives are denying this science the same way they deny the science of evolution, the same way they deny the overwhelming proof that smoking causes cancer and second hand smoke does the same, the same way they denied CFCs caused a hole in the ozone layer and risked all our lives on that occasion also.

On the one hand you have hard working, selfless scientists who at this point are sacrificing their personal lives, financial security, their sanity and risking literal criminal prosecution from out-of-control attorneys generals who are drunk blind on power and dieology to continue to speak the truth, Cassandra-fashion, to a heedless and reckless nation.

On the other you have people who have never worked a day in their lives to earn the just authority to advise and inform Congress on this topic nevertheless holding forth, just stealing the authority the other group has worked to earn and effectively screaming "NO FIRE" in a burning theater, inducing people to do nothing when in reality they must do something in order to survive.

The first group fits perfectly my definition of hero .

The second fits perfectly my definition of murderer.

Re:On a more serious note

[WOOFYGOOFY]

You've got to be kidding.

Climate scientists are routinely subjected to death threats t themselves and their families by the people you now claim just want a rational debate. They are subject to politically motivated FOIA searches, public ridicule and accusations that they are lying, corrupt, faking data. They have their emails stolen and their personal lives wrecked through constant harassment. All that is now SOP for the right wing lunatic deniers. The Glenn Becks. The Koch brothers. Murdoch. The Cucinellis. FoxNews employees. Lord Monckton. The Heritage Foundation the religious right Ayn Rand amphetamine addicts et al. ...

So you've got to be kidding.

The rational debate you want has been happening for the past 30 years, in scientific journals and at symposiums and conferences where rational debate on technical matters occurs. Did they join it? Can they understand it, or do they just tell themselves they can? If you can't understand the arguments then you need to listen to experts who can. That's the nature of modern society; that's reality. And when 97% of all qualified experts agree , then that is a bright clear line on the other side of which lies willful and deliberate manslaughter and murder. Just ask any court how it works.

Just because someone can't accept reality doesn't mean they are exempt from the morality that applies to their judgement and actions which issue as a consequence of their reality denial.

If I am thoroughly convinced I can perform brain surgery and fake my way into an operation, I can expect to be prosecuted when I am outed. Ditto Lord Monckton and the Koch Brothers and all the wretched animals at the Heritage Foundation.

It's not about rational debate, it's not about convincing anyone through data or studies or the application scientific method . We know that because, as human society defines that process,- and it is human society that gets to define that process and not the right wing- that has already taken place .

Don't like the outcome? Tough shit.

Here's the game they're playing.: "You can't prove it. " . You can't prove I was lying. You can't prove I didn't believe my own horseshit. You can't prove that I was not perfectly conscious of the fact that the position I was espousing was contrary to reality. I'm safe inside my own brain where only I know the truth. So you can't prosecute me, because I 'm entitled to my opinion.

But you know what ? People make laws. They make laws with the directed and specific purpose of punishing anti-social behavior that harms other innocent humans. We call that behavior "criminal". and it's criminals- through their actions- who ultimately decide what laws we write into existence for the sole purpose of stopping and punishing them.

What these people believe is that law is something which will not pursue them wherever they go, whatever they do irrespective of the real world consequences their actions have on humanity.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

In Nuremberg we hung Germans for breaking laws we made up after the fact - ex post facto lawmaking- specifically to address their crimes. They also thought they were in some sort of legal safe harbor, since what they had done they had done to their own citizens acting as agents of a sovereign nation. And they were right. That is until the day we decided they were wrong. On that day, we made up a new crime -Crimes Against Humanity. Then we tried them for it. Then we hung them for breaking it.

It's criminals who decide what behavior comes to be seen as criminal. The delusion that the law will not, cannot for some reason follow you THERE is just that- a delusion.

Re:Oak Ridge

[jbeaupre]

Don't worry. Any intruder will be scanned and sent to the gaming grid.

Re:Miss the Days

[timeOday]

On the other hand, the modern GPU is much closer to the vector units of "classical" supercomputers than anything minis/PCs of that era had.

Re:Which OS? iOS6 or Windows 8?

[fa2k]

You are absolutely wrong. 75% of super computers run on Linux. Go and see.

I thought that sounded low, so I went and checked at http://i.top500.org/stats . Linux has 92.4 % of the top 500. Then you have "Unix" at 4.8 and Mixed at 2.2.

My visualizations

[SeanAhern]

My favorite part of the article is the photo that accompanies it. Two of my scientific visualizations are on there, the red/yellow picture of an Alzheimer's plaque being attacked by drugs (behind the N of TITAN) and the silver structure of a proposed ultra-capacitor made from nanotubes (to the right of the N).