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DOE Asks For 30-Petaflop Supercomputer
Nerval's Lobster writes "The U.S. Department of Science has presented a difficult challenge to vendors: deliver a supercomputer with roughly 10 to 30 petaflops of performance, yet filled with energy-efficient multi-core architecture. The draft copy (.DOC) of the DOE's requirements provide for two systems: 'Trinity,' which will offer computing resources to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), during the 2016-2020 timeframe; and NERSC-8, the replacement for the current NERSC-6 'Hopper' supercomputer first deployed in 2010 for the DOE facilities. Hopper debuted at number five in the list of Top500 supercomputers, and can crunch numbers at the petaflop level. The DOE wants a machine with performance at between 10 to 30 times Hopper's capabilities, with the ability to support one compute job that could take up over half of the available compute resources at any one time."
...on 30-Petaflop Supercomputers!
What are they going to use this machine for? Hopefully it's not Skyrim.
bitcoins? :)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Oh, if only science were elevated to Department status, with a cabinet-level secretary!
I think you mean Department of Energy, Office of Science.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
It also needs to make a good cup of coffee.
Ha......Not even enough to run windows.
So how many GPU for a Peta Flop ?
Well if you need to use my E7500+5570 you can but you're going to have to pay me in better hardware.
Large cluster of Raspberry Pis
... I've heard rumors that Microsoft will participate in the tender and propose their "HPC" solution based on Windows 8 (well, it's for all computer platforms, they say)
Do they want it to run that Icky Linux (again!) or do they want it to run windows? We are all very eager to find out about this one!
DOD: We would like to place an order of a few trillion dollars jets...
COMPANY: How many would you like ?
DOD: Oh, not sure... Say, 10-30 should do us fine... Do you have them in bright blue ? We like bright blue.
27 Petaflops at Oak Ridge
20 Petaflops at Lawrence Livermore
http://top500.org/lists/2012/11/
If their bottom line is 10 Petaflops, they have a 10 Petaflop one at Argonne too.
Maybe the DOE should bid on that supercomputer being liquidated by the US state of New Mexico.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
What's the problem? They can buy one that fits their need today. There are a variety of designs that will deliver this kind of performance available today from the likes of Cray and IBM.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
and we won't learn about it until James Bamford writes another book. . .
10 petaflops is the minimum to run Windows 8 smoothly.
They ask for 30 petaflops, probably to run at least 3 other processes.
say no
Fastest on earth, "yet filled with energy-efficient multi-core architecture." :rolleyes
These are at cross-purposes. Do they want fastest on Earth, or pretty fast, but efficient, which is already driven by market mechanisms?
"Hey! Multi-core and multi-cultural both have 'multi' in it! Can we have multi-cultural architecture, too? How much extra is that?"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Are you really claiming that a computer being run by Los Alamos and called Trinity is primarily going to be used for alternative energy?
Note that one of the possible contenders is ARM with an integrated GPU. Slashdot readers are generally hostile to the idea of ARM for servers or HPC, but it is going to happen. Making the Top 100 list in the future will require more and more attention to FLOP/Watt, and ARM has a basic advantage over legacy oriented x86 architectures. Being dismissive of ARM is just as much of a fanboy attitude as being rabidly for any other architecture.
Why is Snark Required?
Am I wrong thinking that this is not dramatically faster than Titan (27 TF peak)
http://www.top500.org/system/177975
The specifications in the doc are interesting nonetheless!
Little Red Blogger from the Hood asks:
"What a deep budget you have," ("The better to educate you with"),
"Goodness, what big networks you have," ("The better to save you taxes by networking with)
"And what big transformers you have!" ("The faster to compute for you with"),
"What a big results you have," ("The better to nuke you with!")
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Really ?
What in the fuck would DoE do with such a machine:
1) arrive at the Blue Screen Of Death in a nanosecond
2) be able to upgrade to Windows 7 from Windows XP (their fabled draft is .DOC)
3) perhaps they would be able to do some service to the DoD and provide
Pentascale Toilet Internet Services on the new Dreadnoughts of which DoD had originally planned for 34 but now can only afford 3.
XD
Sad But True
A question I wonder about---I guess "10-30 petaflop" of a standard multi-core architecture would require > 1M computational cores. Suppose you're running a code on 500,000 cores.
What is the mean time to failure of a core or some other piece of hardware required for that core to work? With 500k cores, I'd expect one to die every few hours or even minutes. Either that, or a random bit-flip from a cosmic ray.
Given that, how do you finish a computation that takes more than an hour or so? And how do you guarantee the integrity of that computation?
D'you have three cores working every piece of the problem, and have them "vote" on the result, taking the majority opinion in the INEVITABLE case of disagreement? That sort of implies that to have 10 petaflop of effective computing power, you need 30 petaflop of actual computing power, + all the overhead/hardware required for voting.
Integrity of the results for such large computations just seems like a very difficult problem!
--PM
Liquid Fluoride THORIUM Reactors (LFTRs) could get a leg up
for -earlier- construction approvals, ie, if DoE puts some super-
computers to the task of modeling them mathematically, eg, to
help bring them on-line sooner.
Or... we can let India and/or China do all that... and buy the com-
pleted technology from them, after they've done that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You assume that they spend all this money to run a computer program that does something useful, and the accuracy is actually important to anyone.
The U.S. Department of Science issues a public document in an obsolete, closed, propietary document format? Come on. Even the most clueless consultant in business uses at least .docx. It's even the default, ffs.
Go sell them a darned coffee machine with a "100peta!" sticker on it, they won't tell the difference.
It's pretty cynical that western governments want to tax harmless carbon dioxide (eg. in Australia) and limit our energy consumption through constantly jacking up the rates yet build extremely power-hungry installations in order to crunch all the data needed to surveil the citizens and build a profile of them.
If it's less than that of a human hair, they will need more processing power.
Another good thing is that by having these more "friendly" reactors, you can power more supercomputers! It's a win-win situation