You seem to be assuming that IBM will use the PowerPC 450 chips that BG/P uses. Sequoia will instead use some not-quite-yet-disclosed 45 nm part with a much higher clock rate.
Cray ran HPL only on the XT5 for Top500. Unlike the earlier press release about the 1.64 petaflop machine, which is a combination of XT4 and XT5 cabinets, the peak listed at Top500 is 1.38 petaflops. This is accounted for solely by the 200 cabinets of XT5.
The PDE that you took as an undergrad is indeed intermediate level calculus. That's not the PDE the OP is talking about. Graduate level is an entirely different creature. Full of scary things like Sobolev spaces, weak derivatives, semigroups, and the myriad types of existence and uniqueness proofs, I'd bet you would not recognize the majority of the questions on the OP's exams.
Are you trying to imply that Cray the company is "in name only?" Because that's not at all the case.
It's true that Cray was a shadow of its former self after Tera bought it, but many of the Tera executives have left, and some of what Cray Research used to be has re-emerged.
Now, the CX1 really is Cray in name only. Don't make the mistake of thinking of Cray as a maker of itty bitty clusters. Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4, NERSC has an almost 20,000-core XT4, and of course Red Storm has over 26,000 cores.
Blue Waters will be the first to deliver a sustained petaflop on "real-world" applications, meaning various scientific simulations. Specifically, the program solicitation required prospective vendors to explain how their proposed systems would sustain a petaflop on three types specific types of simulations, one each in turbulence, lattice-guage quantum chromodynamics, and molecular dynamics.
Granted, Roadrunner was the first machine to deliver a petaflop on the Linpack benchmark (though certainly IBM's own implementation of it). The benchmark does nothing more than set up and solve a system of linear equations. Roadrunner solved a system of 2,236,927 equations (in other words, it had a 2,236,927-by-2,236,927 coefficient matrix) in 2 hours.
But Blue Waters is planned to deliver a petaflop on applications that normally don't sustain >80% of theoretical peak; these applications are lucky to get near 20%.
HPL, the code that is run for the Top500 number (or an equivalent implementation, optimized for the target architecture), is double precision. This is perhaps the most important rule of the benchmark: the calculation must be carried out in full double precision. The 1.026 Pflop/s number does represent a double-precision workload.
In fact, a lattice QCD problem was one of the model problems for the Track 1 proposals. Proposers had to "provide a detailed analysis of the anticipated performance of the proposed system on the following set of model problems...A lattice-gauge QCD calculation in which 50 gauge configurations are generated on an 84^3*144 lattice with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fermi, the strange quark mass m_s set to its physical value, and the light quark mass m_l = 0.05*m_s. The target wall-clock time for this calculation is 30 hours." Full details here.
This is a Big F-ing Problem that does in fact require Big F-ing Computers to solve. To meet the target time would require at least a petaflop of sustained performance; hence the inclusion of this problem in the call for proposals. The other model problems came from CFD and molecular dynamics, and there was a wide range of smaller required problems as well.
Now, none of this explains how these machines will really be used, or to what end. Nevertheless, I can vouch for such large machines being used under heavy load to solve very large problems. Poke around any of the national supercomputing labs' websites, and you should be able to find at least plenty of news releases, if not papers.
It looks to me like this site offers such information only for California and Ohio. Voters in other states should try The League of Women Voters' Voter Information pages, though there's not as much information there; mostly links elsewhere. YMMV.
This is called the Look and Say Sequence. John H. Conway, creator of the Game of Life (the cellular automaton, not the board game), has studied this sequence extensively, including the sequences resulting from starting with digits besides 1.
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You seem to be assuming that IBM will use the PowerPC 450 chips that BG/P uses. Sequoia will instead use some not-quite-yet-disclosed 45 nm part with a much higher clock rate.
Cray ran HPL only on the XT5 for Top500. Unlike the earlier press release about the 1.64 petaflop machine, which is a combination of XT4 and XT5 cabinets, the peak listed at Top500 is 1.38 petaflops. This is accounted for solely by the 200 cabinets of XT5.
The PDE that you took as an undergrad is indeed intermediate level calculus. That's not the PDE the OP is talking about. Graduate level is an entirely different creature. Full of scary things like Sobolev spaces, weak derivatives, semigroups, and the myriad types of existence and uniqueness proofs, I'd bet you would not recognize the majority of the questions on the OP's exams.
Are you trying to imply that Cray the company is "in name only?" Because that's not at all the case.
It's true that Cray was a shadow of its former self after Tera bought it, but many of the Tera executives have left, and some of what Cray Research used to be has re-emerged.
Now, the CX1 really is Cray in name only. Don't make the mistake of thinking of Cray as a maker of itty bitty clusters. Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4, NERSC has an almost 20,000-core XT4, and of course Red Storm has over 26,000 cores.
Blue Waters will be the first to deliver a sustained petaflop on "real-world" applications, meaning various scientific simulations. Specifically, the program solicitation required prospective vendors to explain how their proposed systems would sustain a petaflop on three types specific types of simulations, one each in turbulence, lattice-guage quantum chromodynamics, and molecular dynamics.
Granted, Roadrunner was the first machine to deliver a petaflop on the Linpack benchmark (though certainly IBM's own implementation of it). The benchmark does nothing more than set up and solve a system of linear equations. Roadrunner solved a system of 2,236,927 equations (in other words, it had a 2,236,927-by-2,236,927 coefficient matrix) in 2 hours.
But Blue Waters is planned to deliver a petaflop on applications that normally don't sustain >80% of theoretical peak; these applications are lucky to get near 20%.
HPL, the code that is run for the Top500 number (or an equivalent implementation, optimized for the target architecture), is double precision. This is perhaps the most important rule of the benchmark: the calculation must be carried out in full double precision. The 1.026 Pflop/s number does represent a double-precision workload.
NERSC's primary resource is another Cray XT4.
In fact, a lattice QCD problem was one of the model problems for the Track 1 proposals. Proposers had to "provide a detailed analysis of the anticipated performance of the proposed system on the following set of model problems...A lattice-gauge QCD calculation in which 50 gauge configurations are generated on an 84^3*144 lattice with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fermi, the strange quark mass m_s set to its physical value, and the light quark mass m_l = 0.05*m_s. The target wall-clock time for this calculation is 30 hours." Full details here.
This is a Big F-ing Problem that does in fact require Big F-ing Computers to solve. To meet the target time would require at least a petaflop of sustained performance; hence the inclusion of this problem in the call for proposals. The other model problems came from CFD and molecular dynamics, and there was a wide range of smaller required problems as well.
Now, none of this explains how these machines will really be used, or to what end. Nevertheless, I can vouch for such large machines being used under heavy load to solve very large problems. Poke around any of the national supercomputing labs' websites, and you should be able to find at least plenty of news releases, if not papers.
Here are some quick samples:
It looks to me like this site offers such information only for California and Ohio. Voters in other states should try The League of Women Voters' Voter Information pages, though there's not as much information there; mostly links elsewhere. YMMV.
This is called the Look and Say Sequence. John H. Conway, creator of the Game of Life (the cellular automaton, not the board game), has studied this sequence extensively, including the sequences resulting from starting with digits besides 1.