Worlds Fastest Computer

[bcgood]

Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.

"The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems," said Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile.

But officials said the computer also could have a wide range of other applications in civilian engineering, medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.

To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world's 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

The IBM and Los Alamos engineers worked six years on the computer technology.

Some elements of the Roadrunner can be traced back to popular video games, said David Turek, vice president of IBM's supercomputing programs. In some ways, he said, it's "a very souped-up Sony PlayStation 3."

"We took the basic chip design (of a PlayStation) and advanced its capability," said Turek.

But the Roadrunner supercomputer, named after the New Mexico state bird, is nothing like a video game.

The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.

The cost: $100 million.

Turek said the computer in a two-hour test on May 25 achieved a "petaflop" speed of sustained performance, something no other computer had ever done. It did so again in several real applications involving classified nuclear weapons work this past weekend.

"This is a huge and remarkable achievement," said Turek in a conference call with reporters.

A "flop" is an acronym meaning floating-point-operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. Only two years ago, there were no actual applications where a computer achieved 100 teraflops — a tenth of Roadrunner's speed — said Turek, noting that the tenfold advancement came over a relatively short time.

The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., will be moved next month to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Along with other supercomputers, it will be key "to assure the safety and security of our (weapons) stockpile," said D'Agostino. With its extraordinary speed it will be able to simulate the performances of a warhead and help weapons scientists track warhead aging, he said.

But the computer — and more so the technology that it represents — marks a future for a wide range of other research and uses. "The technology will be pronounced in its employment across industry in the years to come," predicted Turek, the IBM executive.

Michael Anastasio, director of the Los Alamos lab, said that for the first six months the computer will be used in unclassified work including activities not related to the weapons program. After that, about three-fourths of the work will involve weapons and other classified government activities.

Anastasio said the computer, in its unclassified applications, is expected to be used not only by Los Alamos scientists but others as well. He said there can be broad applications such as helping to develop a vaccine for the HIV virus, examine the chemistry in the production of cellulosic ethanol, or to understand the origins of the universe.

Turek said the computer represents still another breakthrough, particularly important in these days of expensive energy: It is an energy miser compared with other supercomputers, performing 376 million calculations for every watt of electricity used.

[PettyCash]

Thanks for the post, that was a great read. thumbsup

[Blast9]

My god its full of stars!

[sonicdefault]

That looks like the red eye of Terminator. I didn't used to think super computers were scary. Now I just don't know.

A super computer involved in classified nuclear testing?

Don't these guys watch the movies?


-SD

[softwareguy]

Sure it's fast, but I'll bet a vintage IBM 360 sounds "warmer."

[feck]

Oh joy. Say goodbye to an exponential number of our freedoms.

[waltermusik]

Sounds like a decent spec for the UAD2

Turek said the computer represents still another breakthrough, particularly important in these days of expensive energy: It is an energy miser compared with other supercomputers, performing 376 million calculations for every watt of electricity used.

Who wrote this originally? This is nonsense. Watt is a unit for power, while a calculation consumes energy, not power.

Anyway: a Q6600 does ca. 20 billion calculations per second, using ca. 100 watts of power. This is 200 million calculations per wattsecond, so I'd guess the OP means the new supercomputer performs 376 million calculations per wattsecond, which is ca. twice as efficient as a Q6600.

Cheers, Thomas

[bcgood]

[Chaellus]

computers are evil , Pro Analog

[MrHope]

I bet one use of this new computer will be brute force attacks on encrypted data. The time taken to crack may now be in "reasonable" reach. beware the military industrial complex.

[Tui]

I want to know: How many Platinum verbs can I run with this?

[Blast9]

No sweat, everyone knows my password anyway

In any case what with the fuel crisis, we'll all be back to abacus soon enough !

[aussie_techie]

$100 million and it only does a single petaflop. with all that processing power they are bound to need more than 80TB of memory aswell
Ranger at TACC only cost about 30million and currently does half a petaflop.


on the raw numbers this thing looks like a waste of time, money, space and power. it must be able to do something special they arnt telling us about.

[aussie_techie]

Originally Posted by MrHope

I bet one use of this new computer will be brute force attacks on encrypted data. The time taken to crack may now be in "reasonable" reach. beware the military industrial complex.

Do you really think that the NSA and CIA cant already break everything that is allowed to be used? they would have more computing power than any of the facilities that are actually publicised. that said encryption isnt done with general purpose processors its done with specialised processors and FPGAs.

anything they cant easily break dont allow to be used. strong encryption is classed as a munition, if you try to importing/exporting it from the US you will be stopped very quickly and usually quietly.

ever wonder why so much public work on encryption is done in Canda?

[bcgood]

Originally Posted by aussie_techie

Do you really think that the NSA and CIA cant already break everything that is allowed to be used?

Well, think small. You know, like nano small...

[little-dreamer]

Originally Posted by bcgood

To put the computer's speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM.

Talk about lazy journalism. Taking figures straight from a press release and turning them into something that makes no sense. Why do the laptops need to be stacked 1.5 miles high?

[bcgood]

Originally Posted by little-dreamer

Talk about lazy journalism. Taking figures straight from a press release and turning them into something that makes no sense. Why do the laptops need to be stacked 1.5 miles high?

Well in all fairness that was according to HAL.

[jsflint]

Wonder how many tracks it can play fully loaded with plugins?

[waltermusik]

wonder how many houses in my neighborhood its cooling system may keep warm ...

[AnAverageJoe]

Ley's See PTHD Top that much power with it's DSP Cards. I AM NOT KNOCKING ON DIGIDESIGN BY THE WAY. SO STAY OF MY CASE.

[Whitecat]

And Pro Tools LE STILL threw up a 'you are running out of CPU power' error when more than 1 of its' god-knows-how-many-cores were enabled for RTAS processing!

[noiseflaw]

Use it to Power OSX Leopard with Logic Pro 8 and I bet you will still get 'Core Overload' messages.

But wtf - 3G iPhone is here to solve all our problems.

[LewisWu]

xlnt post.. enjoyable read.. i like the idea of performance is measured in petaflops, and that it has a multiprocessor scheme utilizing more than one kind of processor. or perhaps the notion that if 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

[Teo Macero]

I just ordered mine.....according to a coughing man in a rain coat at Digidesign HQ's they're Beta testing it with their new PT....

[Sounds Great]

Must be a bitch to reboot when it crashes.

[DaveC]

Must be a bitch to reboot when it crashes.

When this one crashes, there will be a lot more to reboot,
besides the 3.4 billion human casualties.
Nuclear testing, sounds indeed like the Terminator!

[matt thomas]

to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions

its sad that warfare is what pushes technology forward the most.

narco

ps. yes I know there are side effects, I just wish that the side effects listed were the reasons for its creation:

medicine and science, from developing biofuels and designing more fuel-efficient cars to finding drug therapies and providing services to the financial industry.

[Francis Vaughan]

It is a seriously big beasty.

The prime use won't be code breaking - NSA have their own machines for that - and they don't get press releases when they get installed. The prime use is interesting in a sort of grimly fascinating way. Nuclear armaments degrade over time. The simplistic idea that all you need to do is blast a couple of lumps of appropriate weapons grade metal together doesn't actually work. It is vastly harder. You have to ignite the lump of compressed metal with a blast of neutrons from an external source. The whole shebang is seriously difficult to do - and involves systems that have a limited shelf life. Gasses diffuse out of containers, short half life triggers degrade to the point the weapon won't fire.

Before the testing ban treaties weapons would be taken from storage - or even randomly from the top of missiles - and detonated in the bottom of very deep holes. Now this isn't a politically viable option. So some other way of modelling the stability and reliability of the weapons is needed. This is vastly harder than designing the weapon. You need to do finite element modelling on an astoundingly fine scale and include nuclear physics approximations. All happening at energies that make the materials physics very very weird. A petaflop is probably still not really enough.

Comparing it with Ranger, or other machines is hard. An old college of mine coined the phrase "gigaflop harlotry" (you can see how long ago this was) to describe the habit of HPC guys to talk up the raw (linpack) performance of their latest toy. These numbers are only a very rough indication of the real performance on real problems. Indeed, unless all you do is big matrix solvers, it is a useless metric. The speed of the interconnect, memory and IO is just as important as raw cycles, but is never mentioned in the big-dick comparisons. That can lead to vast differences in apparent price performance which are quite meaningless. What matters is price performance on the job in hand. That is a number you are never going to hear from this machine.

[tuRnitUpsuM]

This is "maybe/most likely" where they had the brainstorm of adding cell/vector processing.

Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with a Cluster of Eight PlayStation 3s

they werent the first to do it...(that site)....cant seem to find the first...but its basically 8 PS3s in a network hub/switcher running Linux... Yellow Dog Linux?? < pretty sure unless they have compiled their own from source.


having a mini-supercomp to run audio isnt as far away as you would think...could actually do it now.

8 PS3s running yellow dog linux + Ardour + some form of ethernet connection to ur audio source, be it ethersound audio cards etc.

pretty fascinating stuff though if u ask me...2025 > 1 petaflop personal computers?.

cheers

[bcgood]

Kiss the face of fallacy, virtual reality.

(This is a line from a song I wrote in 1998.)