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16-Teraflops, £97m Cray To Replace IBM At UK Meteorological Office
Memetic writes: The UK weather forecasting service is replacing its IBM supercomputer with a Cray XC40 containing 17 petabytes of storage and capable of 16 TeraFLOPS. This is Cray's biggest contract outside the U.S. With 480,000 CPUs, it should be 13 times faster than the current system. It will weigh 140 tons. The aim is to enable more accurate modeling of the unstable UK climate, with UK-wide forecasts at a resolution of 1.5km run hourly, rather than every three hours, as currently happens. (Here's a similar system from the U.S.)
It's a mistake in the header
16 peta not tera FLOPS
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Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
It will spend its days predicting it's own global warming impact
Each CPU is linked to a frog-in-a-bottle.
16 TFlops ain't much to write home about. 480,000 CPUS? What are they? 6502s?
Turns out it's 16PFlops according to the BBC.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
What, are you suggesting they fucking read the articles they're going to post? Or more absurdly yet, be broadly informed about the general goings on in technology?
One might even imagine that this headline, the weekly articles about the latest multi-teraflop figures from single GPUs, and some working synapses might have raised a SIGREDFLAG or something.
Slashdot is getting worse by the minute.
Those guys are still around? I thought they were all eaten by dinosaurs. How many times have they gone bankrupt now?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I miss the days when supercomputers looked super. This one looks like a row of drinks machines.
Computer says: rain.
Do they think that by buying this computer, they will make UK as sunny as Mediterranean islands? Oh, maybe by producing carbon dioxide.
As a British nerd my 2 favourite topics of conversation are the weather and super computers, so this is exciting news.
I was interested in what the change-over was, which was causing the performance increase, and how old the existing system is. This information seems to be missing.
What is included actually sounds a little disappointing:
13x faster
12x as many CPUs
4x mass (3x "heavier")
I would have thought that there would be either a process win (more transistors per unit area and all that fun) or a technology win (switching to GPUs or other vector processors, for example) but it sounds like they are building something only marginally better per computational resource. I suppose that the biggest win is just in density (12x CPUs in 4x mass is pretty substantial) but I was hoping for a little more detail. Or, given the shift in focus toward power and cooling costs, what impact this change will have on the energy consumption over the old machine.
Then again, I suppose this isn't a technical publication so the headline is the closest we will get and it is more there to dazzle than explain.
There's been times were the forecast for 30mins away was wrong. Half a million chips cant be cheap, I thought we were in a time of austerity, this clearly doesn't benefit the UK economy. Money would have been better spent in researching better methods of forecasting rather than trying and failing to brute force weather forecasting.
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Gaah! This means that they know something we don't! They know that the deluge is coming! They keep that to themselves to be the only ones to use that ark! We are all doomed!
As the old joke says - Britain does have a climate it only has weather
According to the BBC broadcasts yesterday, the system is £67 million worth of iron. Good deal if you can play Doom on it.
Fuck-all good that's going to do, if they can't predict the weather with any accuracy on this planet - how the fuck did NASA do it in the 80's to predict the weather TWO WEEKS in advance for NEPTUNE so they knew where to point the cameras?? I'm pretty fucking sure my current LAPTOP has even more grunt than their entire server farm had...!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
To tell which of the UK's three weather conditions (rainy, cloudy, or foggy) it's gonna be?
Now dat just Cray.
Better than 2000's ASCI White, but worse than 2002's Earth Simulator. 13 years back to the past!
Or maybe the actual performance is 16 PetaFLOPs, as the linked article states.
You forgot to tick the "Post Anonymously" checkbox.
Yeah...what the fuck are you even talking about?
Good thing you forgot to check the anonymous posting box, makes it a lot easier to filter out the trolls when they're also flicking stupid AND crazy.
...I could predict the weather for the same price.
Rain, rain and more rain.
And neither mentions the CPU architecture, but if you go to the product brochure then you learn that they're Intel Xeon E5s (which doesn't narrow it down much). Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s, but perhaps most of the compute is supposed to be done on the (unnamed, vaguely referenced) accelerators.
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Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s
Probably something to do with yields and availability - buying 480,000 CPUs in one go is going to cause consternation, regardless of who your supplier is :) Getting 480,000 E5s in half the time it would take to get 480,000 E7s means you have less liability on the books for the duration (you have to hold delivered stock and down payments as liabilities), and a better cash flow.
Seriously, all the useless stats... weighs as much as 11 double decker buses... I've asked the metoffice on twitter but they ignore more. How much electricity is this gonna need?
[FUCK BETA]
It is partly yields (Intel simply don't bin enough high-end parts) and partly a problem of power & cooling; less power hungry CPUs in a larger space is easier to power and cool than a bunch of hotter parts in a smaller area.
Don't tell the UK meteorlogical Office this. The trick to getting those TFLOPs on those 480,000 6502 CPUs is that Cray benchmarked them all with nothing but NOP instructions.
Trolling is a art,
Does it run Linux?
Not mentioned in TFA, and I haven't seen anyone talk about it yet in the comments here. Or maybe the answer is so obviously 'yes' that nobody even talks about it anymore.
I am not really here right now.
predicting the weather will be a breeze ....
I would have hoped that they would have a cluster of Raspberry Pis to do this instead.
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England will be covered in Cray skies. No Sun.
Now, they will be able to forecast what the weather was 10 minutes ago. Wow.
97 million pounds is a pittance in a 731 billion budget. An Eurofighter Typhoon costs 110 million (marginal cost, not factoring R&D in).
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In the original version of the BBC article they also said it was 16 TFlops, later they fixed it to Peta.
Rather than buying these monsters and maintaining them on their own could they use an IaaS provider? So... use the cloud to model the clouds?
One could think that, and one could be hilariously wrong.
...or, 1000, depending how you count.
The proposed systems is supposed to be 16 PetaFLOPS.
There is a reason that organizations by supercomputers. There is no cloud in the world that can do what this computer does. None. Nada.
Cloud computing can run multiple copies of Office and host a website but when you need real horsepower, you get a supercomputer.
E7 is useful for areas where extremely large memory per core is mandatory (some parts of HPC)
In general, E5 strikes the balance between having adequate amounts of cache and SMP interconnect, compute capability (Haswell E5 is available, E7 is still Ivy bridge, AVX2 being a big thing there), and per-unit cost (E7 carries a huge premium for its benefits, most of which are generally not needed in HPC of this scale).
Even in places where you do see E7, it's usually in a special portion of the cluster for big-memory jobs that can't be split into multiple nodes as easily as most HPC workload, with the majority of the clusters employing something more like E5.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It might also be that Intel has a bit too much capacity for E5s, and needs to utilize it. Unused semiconductor capacity is costly. Now don't get me wrong: this might simply be a case of more efficient capacity being available. E5s and E7s may be all made on the same equipment, but if said equipment makes E5s at half the cost of E7s, and you can sell them for more than half the cost of E7s, you really have more capacity in terms of what's sensible to use for ROI.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Of course the mention of 6502 was a joke, but let's see how close one could get. Let's say that you could get one FLOP in 1000 cycles on a legacy 6502. With 2MHz clock, we're talking 2kFLOPs per chip. With half a million of them, we get 1GFLOP. That's still 7 orders of magnitude away from where one needs to be... This tells us, indirectly, that the desktop processors we currently have are essentially the realm of 1980s science fiction :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The current NWS computer is only capable of 0.21 petaflops. There is an upgrade to bring it up to 0.8 petaflops, After Sandy (1.5 years ago) Congress gave money for a new computer but nothing seems to be happening with that money. Sandy's forecast was good not because of the American forecasts but because of the European forecast. I believe American forecasts were wrong in predicting Sandy's direction because America lacks of a decent supercomputer for forecasting.
The old 6502s in the Apple ][+ ran at 1.024 MHz. Imagine over a million NOPs a second!
"Software for Cray® XC Series Supercomputers"
...and will generate that much heat making the climate in Exeter pretty predictable.
Can it run Crysis?
Exactly, The Cray Y-MP that I was drooling over in 1988 has processors with a 167 MHz clock and 512MB of main memory. Now you can fit a faster CPU in your shirt pocket.
A NOP on the 6502 takes two cycles, so it was only half a million.
The article states that it is 16,000 trillion calculations/sec. That would be 16 Petaflops not 16 Teraflops.
Flawed assumption: everyone is a feckless whiny turd like you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You checked it but we still know it's you, skid.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's not just a simple mistake that anyone could have made. If you know anything about computers at all, the error in the title, when you read it, is about as subtle as someone smacking you across the face.
If Soulskill doesn't know the difference between TFLOP and PFLOP, what is he doing posting articles here?
Interesting how ALL these articles never mention the software environment, or the tools or who developed them.
One assumes it is Linux and Open Source but would't it be nice if the public were clued in to this occasionally?
pgmer6809