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First Petaflop Supercomputer To Shut Down
An anonymous reader writes "In 2008 Roadrunner was the world's fastest supercomputer. Now that the first system to break the petaflop barrier has lost a step on today's leaders it will be shut down and dismantled. In its five years of operation, the Roadrunner was the 'workhorse' behind the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program, providing key computer simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program."
RR must've spent too much time pecking on that Acme birdseed.
"Sound barrier" was and remains OK because there is a physical difference between flying slower than and faster than the speed of sound. But the word "barrier" is now (over)used to make things sound more dramatic. Raising a number from below to above some arbitrary (usually number base-dependent) threshold does not imply crossing a barrier, unless by barrier is meant "barrier to entry of another over-hyped tech piece".
I think that thing could host a kick-ass DOOM session!
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
At today's prices, I'd have it farming Bitcoins.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It used a combo of cell CPUs and AMD Opterons so if they want to recoup some of the cost i doubt selling those chips would be hard.
Of course this is one more reason i don't like the "game console" way the industry is being pushed, with Intel talking about soldering boards to chips and companies pushing more "black box" computing because if it were not for bog standard yet powerful COTS parts things like Roadrunner would be either impossible or insanely expensive. Yet to hear the industry pundits tell it all we need is a tablet and an iPhone...sheesh. Give me a system I can upgrade any day of the week, the laptops and tablet are fine for service calls or as PMPs but they will always be more about style and battery life than performance.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've worked for the DOE for quite a few years now writing software for these supercomputers... and I can guarantee you that we use the hell out of them. There is usually quite a wait to just run a job on them.
They are used for national security, energy, environment, biology and a lot more.
If you want to see some of what we do with them see this video (it's me talking):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-2VfET8SNw
It costs a _lot_ to keep these computers running (read Millions with a really big M). The power bill alone is an enormous amount of money.
It literally gets to the point where it is cheaper to tear it down and build a new one that is better in flops / Watt than to keep the current one running.
I don't get it are you looking for a Funny mod? You linked to a 2D heat transfer simulation done by Matlab. Did you even watch the video?
The second simulation (of a full nuclear fuel rod in 3D) was nearly 300 million degrees of freedom and the output alone was nearly 400GB to postprocess. It involves around 15 fully coupled, nonlinear PDEs all being solved simultaneously and fully implicitly (to model multiple years of a complex process you have to be able to take big timesteps) on ~12,000 processors.
Matlab isn't even close.
The manufacturers give themselves a lot of headroom. The last thing they want is for you to start whining at them because the PSU you've bought isn't powerful enough.
Keep in mind that unlike laptops, the motherboard manufacturer's got no idea of what you'll be pairing the board with. A low-end, cheap PSU at terrible efficiency may be "rated" at 200W but only give out 100W before crapping out. They also give themselves headroom for people who think the motherboard's rated power requirements also include everything else (ie. RAM, CPU, hard drives, etc.).
Actual power usage is far, far below the recommended power output. My computer's sitting idle at a little above 200W, and that's an i5-2500K overclocked with 16GB of RAM, two Radeon HD6950 2GB GPUs, two 7500RPM 3.5" HDDs plus a Vertex 3 SSD, an optical drive, a mouse, a mechanical keyboard requiring double USB ports, a phone recharging, an external eSATA HDD, all running on a full ATX motherboard geared towards power and not efficiency. Oh, and the reading includes two 23" IPS screens with non-LED backlighting (so much more power hungry).
If I remember well, full load (prime95 torture test and furmark running at the same time) topped at around 550W, again with a bunch of peripherals plugged in, a 1GHz overclock above normal, and 2 screens counted in the total. I'd say that that kind of power is very much in line with your laptop, considering just how ridiculously more powerful it is.
Are you somehow under the impression that these supercomputers are used to count nukes and keep track of their addresses?
Nuclear weapons have things like plutonium and uranium in them. The essential part of those is that they're radioactive. That means they decay. So yes, they do change over time. Since the US has agreed not to go firing the things off to see if they still work, the supercomputers are used to simulate the decay process and firing to see if they still work, what the yield is, and how long they're likely to keep working.
It's kind of embarrassing when the president says "turn them into a radioactive parking lot!" after North Korea nukes San Francisco, and the retaliatory strike is a bunch of duds.
The problem is energy efficiency. In the past 5 years since it was first built, supercomputers have become far more energy-efficient. Roadrunner falls at 444 MFLOPS per Watt, while the current fastest supercomputer (and also a DOE project), Titan, is 2,143 MFLOPS per Watt. Roadrunner uses 2345 kW, and supporting equipment (cooling, backup power adds (on average) 80% more. Assume they get relatively cheap electricity (The Internets tell me the average price charged to industrial customers is 7/kWh), and that means that their electric bill is at least $295.50 PER HOUR. A computer with the same performance but Titan's efficiency would cost $61 per hour. That's the difference between your electric bill being $2.6 million per year and $500,000.
Assuming Titan's cost also scales ($60 million for 17 Petaflops -> ~$3.5 million for 1 Petaflop), then the payback for scrapping it and building a new computer is under 2 years. So yes, it IS saving money to scrap this one. They're not even replacing it with a new one (yet, anyway) - they're using one that was built in 2010.
And also, yes, you CAN use a computer to calculate how your nuclear arsenal is deteriorating. What makes you think they can't?
They rely on the resonant frequency of atoms in metal vapors (Cesium or Rubidium), or the output of a hydrogen maser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock
Radioactive decay is a chaotic process. So chaotic that it can be used as the basis for a random number generator. Just what you DON'T want in a precise time/frequency reference.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
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Atomic clocks have absolutely nothing to do with radioactive decay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock