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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."
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.
This machines are most likely goign to be the replacement of the ones we already have. NERSC is presenting the projects that are run on its computing infrastructure on its web site [1]. You can see on the first page the project that are currently running jobs and what they are doing. For instance this project [2] is about designing artifical photosynthetic cells. If you are interested just check the project they are funding.
[1] https://www.nersc.gov/
[2] https://www.nersc.gov/science/energy-science/artificial-photosynthesis-i-design-principles-for-light-harvesting/
This is Slashdot - I believe the meme you're looking for is "Beowulf cluster", and such a cluster of these things would probably even meet the recommended specs for Crysis.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Back when I worked for Supercomputing group at Los Alamos, the supercomputers were categorized into 'capacity' machines (the workhorses where they did most of the work, which typically run at near full utilization) and capability machines (the really big / cutting-edge / highly unstable machines that exist in order to push the edge of what is possible in software and hardware. One example of such an application would be high energy physics simulation) . It sounds like these machines fall into the latter category.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
27 Petaflops at Oak Ridge
20 Petaflops at Lawrence Livermore
http://top500.org/lists/2012/11/
Yeah -- but that is only spec'd at 172 TFlops, a long way away from 30 PFlops.
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?
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?
No, it's not. Today's supercomputers are thousands upon thousands times faster than those of decades past but are NOT taking up thousands of times more space or electricity.
Hopper is 16,000 nodes and two Pflops. Cray can't just make 10 of them, put 'em together, and consider the order filled. Efficiency is a LOT of the challenge in making the world's fastest computers.
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"
I am an early user on the Blue Waters petaflop machine (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/). Mean time to failure for such a huge machine becomes a real issue when you have about 700,000 cores and who knows how many spinning hard drives and all that network infrastructure. However I and my research collaborators have managed to get jobs through that take on the order of 12 hours of wallclock time without a hardware fault, which is amazing IMO. I do wonder whether we can simply continue to expand the same basic computing infrastructure to a 10-20 PFLOP machine. There will have to be redundancy built into the hardware of any such machine such that if a compute node goes offline it seamlessly offloads it to another. Writing fault tolerant massively parallel code is possible but very challenging and most scientists won't or can't do it.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?