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All Systems Go For Highest Altitude Supercomputer

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-for-the-high-score dept.

An anonymous reader writes "One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world has now been fully installed and tested at its remote, high altitude site in the Andes of northern Chile. It's a critical part of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most elaborate ground-based astronomical telescope in history. The special-purpose ALMA correlator has over 134 million processors and performs up to 17 quadrillion operations per second, a speed comparable to the fastest general-purpose supercomputer in operation today."

11 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. and by ozduo · · Score: 2, Funny

    was it running windows 8 ?

    --
    I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
    1. Re:and by earlzdotnet · · Score: 3, Funny

      Better question: Why doesn't it have a touch screen? A computer isn't "modern" without a touch screen

    2. Re:and by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2

      Better question: Why doesn't it have a touch screen? A computer isn't "modern" without a touch screen

      WTF is wrong with you?

      Everybody knows touchscreens don't want to be vertical!

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  2. Put it to use by Sparticus789 · · Score: 2

    It's so fast, we could point it at Tau Ceti and count all the Vulcan pointy ears in 8.56 seconds!

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    sudo make me a sandwich
  3. Cosmic Rays by Ragzouken · · Score: 2

    How does that bode for cosmic rays?

  4. Name that hardware by timeOday · · Score: 2

    Any of you familiar enough with this kind of thing to identify what sort of hardware they used? This seems like a really neat application of special-purpose hardware. Please, no complaining about how bad it would probably score on Linpack - this is a purpose-built computer for a specific job. Custom boards are so seldom justified these days, I envy the engineers who got to do this.

    1. Re:Name that hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://www.haystack.mit.edu/ast/uvlbi/mm/talks/RLacasse_NRAO-ALMA2.pdf

      Bit of details about it. The comment that this is as fast as a general purpose supercomputer is totally out of context. This is doing fast sums and correlations (DSP) using FPGA technology. When a general purpose system is measured in the PetaFlops (ie: Linpack) it is doing much more sophisticated calculations and this really isn't comparing apples to apples at all. A lot of hyperbole in the comment about "performance." No question this is a spectacular piece of engineering and the custom board & FPGA work is very cool, but the LHC has filters and realtime compute facilities that are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than this. (I'm not putting this down, just trying to relate it to something else out there).

  5. Supplementary O2 by Dan+East · · Score: 2

    I noticed in the pictures that the techs have to wear O2 backpacks with nasal cannulas because the air is so thin at that altitude. I wonder how that affects hardware cooling, since the air is less dense and thus cannot remove as much heat from the hardware.

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    Better known as 318230.
  6. Ray Kurzweil was right... by msauve · · Score: 2

    Computers are getting more like people. Now they're even getting high.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    1. Re:Ray Kurzweil was right... by VortexCortex · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why did you climb the mountain oh Super Computer?
      Because I can, man... Well, that and latency is a bitch, or I'd have telecommuted to work.

  7. RTFA by msauve · · Score: 4, Informative

    "At 5000 metres, the air is thin, so twice the normal airflow is necessary to cool the machine, which draws some 140 kilowatts of power."

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law