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China Bumps US Out of First Place For Fastest Supercomptuer
An anonymous reader writes "China's Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the latest semiannual Top 500 list of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world. Developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, the system appeared two years ahead of schedule and will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, before the end of the year."
I'd normally expect this type of feat to be one of those clueless 1upsman type of scenarios except for the fact that every other lab has probably been hacked/infiltrated to copy all other research available.
But the story comes from China so you have to imagine at least some of it is B.S. and since it's made in China, it will probably crash at least three times a week.
It's dick-waving, nothing more.
http://i.imgur.com/XH0CoHU.gif
Quickly before they sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!
Someone bumped up their schedule to put some pressure on the US. These machines, in the US and China and other nations, typically perform one news-worthy article of empathy-worthy "Science!" like modeling the beating of a human heart (awww) or predicting climate change, then spend the rest of their lives breaking codes for the national spy agencies. Several of the top computers, like Kraken, Jaguar, and Titan, were/are NSA cryptography machines.
There's never enough computing power for the amount of encrypted data that any first-world spy agency collects. Rumor had it a few years back that the NSA even had a deal with Pixar to use their rendering farm when not actively engaged in movie-making.
Super Computer so they can hack all computers on the planet at one time. The design was probably stolen to.
Our aircraft carriers are longer then yours! On a more serious note the largest calculation that I can find (in terms of # of cores utilized) was a fluid dynamics calculation with a million cores on Sequoia. From my own experience we usually utilize 4-100 cores for throughput over the speed of a single job- if it takes a month to do then so be it.
Your information is out of date. Most supercomputers in the last decade have been distributed memory machines, so 'distributed computing' is what this is already. Also, as someone that's using a machine somewhat further down the list (in the 30s), if you have a big supercomputer that you feel is a waste, can you give me an account? Because my job (in fluid dynamics simulations) is basically dependent on their existence, and I've got applications for the biggest machine I can get my hands on.
Out of curiosity how many cores do you use on a typical job?
My Samsung Chromebook. I can have Twitter and Facebook open all at once.
I love being pounded by not one, but two autoplaying video streams that evade my Adblock Plus. Doesn't help that the rest of the site is a nightmare to look at. At least present us with a site with far less elements to deal with.
I'll bite. You seem to think that distributed computing, however you are defining that, is a better solution. I am going to assume your primary objection then is using infiniband (or some other low latency interconnect such as Numalink or Gemini). What then, would you propose to do with the class of problems that are rely on extremely low latency transmission of data between nodes?
The only things supercomputer save on, that regular distributed computing may not, is the cost of expensive network switches. Logically, supercomputers are inherently distributed in a torus configuration. Nobody uses a full fledged shared RAM model but rely on talking to spatially nearby notes (as connected). Please read before you make these useless comments yourself.
Because that is what Chinese do !!
Have the Chinese done anything of interest with their supercomputers yet?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
there are some things supercomputers can do well, but the same effect can be reached with distributed computing, which, in addition, makes the individual CPUs useful for a range of other things. Basically, building supercomputers is pretty stupid and a waste of money, time and effort.
That's a bit of an overstatement. There are plenty of simulations that really do benefit from a monolithic supercomputer rather than a distributed system, such as protein dynamics, global climate, etc. And the level of detail which can be attained (without approximations which diminish accuracy) increases with the size of computer.
I do think however that it's reasonable to question what the real-world impact of such systems is, and whether there are better approaches. My field is life sciences, where the applications are indeed limited. In the molecular dynamics field, for instance, specialized hardware is potentially superior for both performance and efficiency (although this has some tradeoffs too). For genomics a supercomputer is completely unnecessary, and cloud computing is quite adequate. Ditto for most other analyses of experimental data, protein design, and so on.
Furthermore, the economic impact of supercomputer simulations tends to be greatly overstated. A common example is studies of drug binding to proteins - supercomputer centers love to put out press releases about how "new simulations tell us how to cure cancer/AIDS/Alzheimer's". But anyone familiar with pharmaceutical development will tell you that lack of supercomputers is by far the least of the problems faced by the field. Simulations aren't a magical substitute for actual benchwork, unfortunately - and clinical studies are vastly more expensive than supercomputers.
The main reason why having the biggest supercomputer is a status symbol is that it's traditionally tied to nuclear weapons research, and therefore the importance to the country in general is inflated by the politicians, the media, and of course the people who build and use supercomputers. A secondary reason is that it indicates the overall level of technical competence of a country, although as noted China is still using Intel CPUs. (This is not a trend specific to supercomputing; the Beijing Genomics Institute famously uses equipment entirely designed and built in the US and UK for sequencing.)
It's interesting to browse this website:
http://www.top500.org/
And look at the Statistics section, such as Operating System Family
http://www.top500.org/statistics/list/
Operating system Familyâf Countâf System Share (%)âf Rmax (GFlops)âf Rpeak (GFlops)âf Coresâf
Linux 476 95.2 217,913,963 318,748,391 18,700,112
Unix 16 3.2 3,949,373 4,923,380 181,120
Mixed 4 0.8 1,184,521 1,420,492 417,792
Windows 3 0.6 465,600 628,129 46,092
BSD Based 1 0.2 122,400 131,072 1,280
People don't build supercomputers for no reason, especially when HPC eats up a large part of their budget.
The main application of supercomputers is numerically solving partial differential equations on large meshes. If you try that with a distributed setup, the latency will kill you: the processors have to talk constantly to exchange information across the domain.
As someone pointed out, modern supercomputers are like distributed computing, often with commodity processors. They look like (and are) giant racks of processors. But they have very fast, low-latency interconnects.
firstfirst frist
China Bumps US Out of First Place For Fastest Supercomptuer. Posted samzenpus on Monday June 17, 2013 @02:42PM 20 minutes after: Book Review: The Chinese Information War Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 17, 2013 @02:22PM You do the math....
Logically, supercomputers are inherently distributed in a torus configuration.
Why a torus? Why not a hypercube or a fat tree?
Ezekiel 23:20
"China Bumps US Out of First Place For Fastest Supercomptuer"
Fastest supercomputer, that 1) Runs Linpack and 2) is publicly-acknowledged. There are plenty of similar supercomputers that don't meet one or both of those criteria, and are therefore omitted. The Top500 is FAR from a comprehensive list of supercomputers, but twice a year we see a flurry of stories presuming that it is.
Fluid dynamics is one of those "as many as you'll give me" kinds of problems. So if he's currently on a machine around #30 on the list, it'll be a number near 80,000.
Other AC from the fluid dynamics field, but in academia I typically see up to 32 nodes for 'normal' PhD's working on small local clusters, and up to around 512, 1024 for groups that do more fundamental research. The cluster is then usually in some centralized location and you have to get funding to use it. In Industry, I see most (R&D) groups working with small clusters of up to 32-64 nodes.
That's almost enough to run Vista
I suppose that once AMD finally complete their converged CPU/GPU/Memory strategy we'll see a couple of these pop up with devastating effect.
After PS4XBONE they need to go through another 2 generations before it could be considered mature and they will have the ecosystem to add incremental enhancements to the platform that would take others ages. The slowest part of the whole equation will be Windows.
This mostly agrees with my experience. Here's some data: This is a breakdown of the codes used on HECToR, the main UK academic cluster. It is dominated by chemistry; generally in chemistry the main computational challenge is in performing very large matrix diagonalisations to solve approximations of quantum mechanical systems. Clearly generous allocation and effective sharing of memory is critical for this kind of task.
You seem to think
Aha, I've identified the error in your logic!
That is amazing. And 2 years ahead of schedule! The Chinese are at the absolute forefront of technological innovation this decade.
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Unfortunately the commercial fluid dynamics codes often have quite restrictive licenses where you pay for a certain number of cores. I've seen academic HPC queues full of 8-core jobs with hundreds of cores available, because that was all they could justify a license for. It's an absurdly artificial restriction (a bit like limiting numbers of tracks in cut-down music software), but >Ansys are fairly unrepentant at the moment.
USA ! , USA! - number 2 - sore loser
Yeah, the NSA surely has a better one. Which starts to analyse this post in just ten seconds.
"CThe Top500 is FAR from a comprehensive list of supercomputers, but twice a year we see a flurry of stories presuming that it is.
Can you cite a better list?
You get stuck in a five hour meeting and see if you can visualize anything other than a doughnut afterward.
Get over it. American companies use this all the time. Stop crying about it and build something better. Oh wait, you're a little dweeb, you don't actually build anything yourself and get your kicks out of thinking you're part of other peoples' efforts. Loooooser, loooooser!
you might want to change the spelling of "computer" if we will ever get it right!!!
If you use a hyper-cube, then the processors on the outside edges have no one to talk to. For a single dimension example, imagine a series of processors where every processor in a line has two communication links, one to talk to its neighbour on the left, and one to talk to its neighbour on the right. This is great for all the processors in the middle of the arrangement. However, in a one-dimensional straight-line arrangement, the processors on the end are either missing a left (or a right) neighbour. The solution to this problem is to connect the processors on the ends to each other, making the line a circle or ring.
A one-dimensional hypercube is a line. In supercomputing, it is often desirable to avoid any topology where the there is a flat (non-connected surface) on the side of the cube. Connecting the opposite edges of the cube to each other results in the torus topology in higher dimensions, and the ring topology in 1-D. For a picture of this effect, see the torus interconnect article on wikipedia.
While it is theoretically possible preferable to have really high-order interconnects, in practice wiring considerations limit the maximum number of interconnects. As such, most practical torus architectures are limited in the number of neighbours they can support.
FYI: The tree architecture is avoided in supercomputing for a different reason. Typically, each node has the fastest interconnect that can be provided, as interconnect speed affects system speed for many algorithms. Imagine if each leaf at the bottom of the tree needs 1X bandwidth. Then the parent node one-element up needs 2X bandwidth. The next parent node up requires 4X bandwidth, and so on. With tens of thousands of nodes in the supercomputer, it quickly becomes impossible to make fabricate interconnects fast enough for the parent nodes of the tree.
A practical application of the tree problem occurs on small Ethernet clusters. It is easy to make a 16-node 10Gb Ethernet cluster, because standard switches are readily available. As the system approaches hundreds of nodes, it becomes difficult to find fast enough switches. Even if the data communication speed to each node is reduced to 1Gb, for sufficiently large numbers of nodes, the backplane switches will be overwhelmed.
You're referring to a "mesh" network. (Using the standard supercomputing lingo.) Typically, a "hypercube" refers to a network with 2^n nodes for some n (the dimension of the hypercube). There are no edges in the hypercube because the topology is vertex (and edge) symmetric.
The tree problem you're talking about has been solved ... enter "fat trees".
Here is a list of the top 5 supercomputers run by the NSA (partially redacted):
1- XXXXX_XXXXXXX_XXXXXX_XXXX
2- XXXXXXXXXXXXXinator
3- XXXXXXXXOfTheXXXXX
4- PinkiePie15
5- XXX_XXXXXX_XXXXXXX
Is that better?
Well, China would have it easy when the article submitter misspells COMPUTER...
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
A mesh requires more dense interconnects. A torus does not, and is meant to connect nodes spatially (data wise). Fat trees (or in general trees) have more hops to go when tackling spatial data. On the other hand, you can certainly assign a hierarchy on a Torus interconnect. :-) That's the reason people stick to Torus when building supercomputers. The fancier recent ones I've seen have 5 dimensional torus interconnects.
"CThe Top500 is FAR from a comprehensive list of supercomputers, but twice a year we see a flurry of stories presuming that it is.
Can you cite a better list?
We could just list off sites drawing the most power, and probably stand a better chance at pegging most of the private/secret data centers used for supercomputing. The very nature of what they are doing really defies attempts to list, because the power of a system that big exists in more dimensions than the *FLOPS that the almighty Linpack measures. I have nothing against the orgs on the Top500 list or even Top500 itself, but to anyone interested in such things, Top500 is *not* all-encompassing and you would do well to understand what else is out there (on a project by project basis).
There are packages such as OpenFoam - http://www.openfoam.org/docs/user/damBreak.php#x7-610002.3.11 which are free... I haven't used it, but one should be able to distribute/map jobs off a large grid and collate/reduce their results together. If done correctly, a large enough supercomputer can definitely yield perfect results. The point with these kind of systems is the tail end in these computers is larger - diminishing returns on the more computers you put in.
Like the subject says - is this something the Chinese government might be able to use to break TOR or SSL or any other encryption which is commonly used by political dissidents, freedom fighters, or even foreign military contractors etc.?
I'm curious e.g. how long it would take to break a standard 128-bit SSL session that they find potentially interesting?
Can you cite a better list?
We could just list off sites drawing the most power, and probably stand a better chance at pegging most of the private/secret data centers used for supercomputing.
So your short answer is no then?
Top500 is *not* all-encompassing and you would do well to understand what else is out there (on a project by project basis).
So, can you cite a better list?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It will take forever, no supercomputer can break modern cryptography. Quantum computing will stand the best chance, but not because its "fast" but because it can calculate math differently.
Not the poster upthread, but as someone else who runs fluids codes on big machines, I will chime in:
A lot of the guys on the big NICS machines aren't using ANSYS. They're using their own research codes that are tailored for parallel performance and/or to solve specific and difficult problems that commercial codes don't do well, like fluid-structure interaction. I know there are guys that depend on licensing somehow or another and this is artificially limiting. But I never really understood it. If all you want is a basic, parallel fluids solver, there are some open-source options. Probably won't scale well, but it sure beats spending half your lab budget to get only 8 processors.
Even if you have your own in-house solver, you will of course run into problems with latency as you scale up. I usually run on around 100-200 processors, depending on the problem. I would love use more, but the communication costs start to take over. Some guys can run on 10-100,000 processors. Not sure what they are doing, but I am guess whatever they are computing requires very little communication between nodes, or has been optimized to an extreme degree. Hard to imagine those guys are running a normal fluids solver with an unstructured grid. That'd be a huge waste.
And I agree to whomever said that if someone know of a big wasted supercomputer with idle time on it, please advertise it here! All the ones I've ever seen are more-or-less utilized to their full extent.
"Developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, the system appeared two years ahead of schedule and will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, before the end of the year."
In a suckers words more like. In reality, it's probably launching DDOS on American interests right now:
more here
"It's a dense, well-researched overview of China's cold-war like cyberwar tactics against the US to regain its past historical glory and world dominance."
& why they need to be f*&%ed in the ass yesterday if they keep it up.
Yes, the one who posted about supercomputers being useless, is clueless. I have a piddling 4 core processor with two threads per core, so 8 threads of execution. There are hundreds of jobs I can toss at it that will leave me wishing I had something faster. I have software that will easily utilize 64 cores (and it probes my cpu and re-adjusts to 8 threads). That same software can be used to run simulations, including CFD using Navier-Stokes algorithms. Time. It is able to do it all in time. But not real time! Give me a supercomputer, or at least 100 more cores, and then maybe.
It's spelled Guangzhou, and Tianhe also happens to be name to one of the central districts in the city, though I'm not sure if the computer is actually located in that district.
Also from the list .
All of the top 10 supercomputers are running Linux. Overwhelming dominance indeed.
Instead of just using distcc by itself, also run at least one instance of ccache?
*ducks* *runs*
Kid-proof tablet..
If you're going to write about China, at least get your pinyin right.
-- Jimtown Kelly
"Basically, building supercomputers is pretty stupid and a waste of money, time and effort."
The same might be said about continuing to allow you to exist.
Hi. I run two of the machines in the top fifth of this list; they both use fat-tree topo. You make very convincing arguments, but they're not correct.
What part of "The very nature of what they are doing really defies attempts to list" is so fucking hard to understand?
That's funny, as the scientist modelling the behaviour of nuclear weaponry are perfectly happy to have their supercomputers listed on the top-500 list.
What "very nature" did you have in mind? Are there some enormous furryporn ftp sites that require enourmous supercomputing power that the rest of the world doesn't know about? (Apart from you, that is, obviously.)
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
If we had to loose first place, at least it went to a country that keeps a smaller percentage of its population in prison and who performs fewer wiretaps.
Yea, communism!
Fairly straightforward to calculate that. 128-bit encryption requires testing 2^127 keys on average to break. Assuming they can check 1 key per flop, so a total of 2^127 flop. They have a 33.86 petaflop per second machine. 2^127/(33.86 peta) seconds will be needed. I come up with a mere 3,821,463,977,988,063 years (remember years have 365.25 days on average). I'm unconcerned.