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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."
"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".
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
Yeah, just like the OP who was too busy "pecking" and forgot to include the link to the actual article on the decommissioning: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417271,00.asp
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 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?