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Sequoia Supercomputer Sets Record With 'Time Warp'

Posted by Soulskill on from the let's-do-the-timewarp-again dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "The 'Sequoia' Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has topped a new HPC record, helped along by a new 'Time Warp' protocol and benchmark that detects parallelism and automatically improves performance as the system scales out to more cores. Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and LLNL said Sequoia topped 504 billion events per second, breaking the previous record of 12.2 billion events per second set in 2009. The scientists believe that such performance enables them to reach so-called "planetary"-scale calculations, enough to factor in all 7 billion people in the world, or the billions of hosts found on the Internet. 'We are reaching an interesting transition point where our simulation capability is limited more by our ability to develop, maintain, and validate models of complex systems than by our ability to execute them in a timely manner,' Chris Carothers, director of the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at RPI, wrote in a statement."

9 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Planetary scale computing? by RandomFactor · · Score: 4, Funny

    "enough to factor in all 7 billion people in the world, or the billions of hosts found on the Internet."

    It's all fun and games until someone puts in a hyperspace bypass...

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    --- Mercutio was right.
  2. This sounds familiar... by NoImNotNineVolt · · Score: 4, Informative

    I could've swore I heard about this less than 23 hours ago somewhere...
    http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/05/02/2119214/llnlrpi-supercomputer-smashes-simulation-speed-record
    Yup.

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    Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
    1. Re:This sounds familiar... by deains · · Score: 2

      The system's so efficient it managed to travel back in time by 23 hours.

    2. Re:This sounds familiar... by wolfgang.groiss · · Score: 2

      It's just a JMPLFT and then a STPRGT

  3. Spoiler by DarthVain · · Score: 3, Funny

    You live in a computer simulation.

  4. Really? by Dripdry · · Score: 2

    The time warp? Again?

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    1. Re:Really? by deains · · Score: 2

      10 LET JUMP = "to the left"

  5. so.. how much power does it draw? by wierd_w · · Score: 2

    Other factors: based on the parallelism model used, and the current state of electronics, what is the maximum number of cores that can be included before performance degrades from additional nodes?

    (Eg, it takes x time to transmit data over a bus (any bus). How may cores, before the time penalty for transmitting the data over the bus to the allocated processor becomes greater than the penalty for just waiting for a processor to become free?)

    There *must* be an upper bound on parallel computing potential before we need pure unobtanium semiconductors.

    I am curious what that limit is, and how close we are to it.

  6. I for one... by arfonrg · · Score: 2

    I for one welcome our Matrix overlord... (or MCP... or Skynet, which ever achieves sentience first...)

    --
    Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll