Blue Gene\L

ixfd64 · 2004-11-05, 23:40

[link]

Quote:

By MATTHEW FORDAHL, AP Technology Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A $100 million supercomputer being built to analyze the nation's nuclear stockpile has again set an unofficial performance record — the second in just over a month.

IBM Corp.'s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy (news - web sites) said Thursday.

The world's current official leader, Japan's Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

The announcement is the latest in a series of claims leading up to next Tuesday's unveiling in Pittsburgh of the official list of the world's top computers.

Since 2002, much to the chagrin of some U.S. technology companies, the Japanese system has topped the list, which is maintained by several university computer scientists who run the Top500 project.

In September, IBM announced that the Blue Gene/L prototype had sustained speeds of 36 trillion calculations per second. Last week, NASA (news - web sites) announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Both Blue Gene and the NASA computers are still unfinished, and the performance of both is expected to improve as more microprocessors are added.

Blue Gene, for instance, is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator's performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.

According to the Energy Department, the computer will be used to better understand pressing scientific issues, including how nuclear weapons age.

The new supercomputer "will reduce the time-to-solution for many computational problems, allowing DOE scientists to explorer larger, longer and more complex problems than ever before," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a statement.

Anyone want to send them e-mails? :-D

jinydu · 2004-11-05, 23:52

I suggest waiting until Tuesday...

moo · 2005-10-28, 22:17

http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showA...leID=172901185
ibms new super computer does a 2xer on thoughput.
if we ask mabey they will let us ""barrow it""

in other news

new fiber at one tarabit
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...0/s1492314.htm

and the legal battle of jpeg still goes on
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/28/rim_jpeg/index.html

jinydu · 2005-10-31, 16:25

With a speed of 280.6 teraflops, Blue Gene is over 7 times faster than the Earth Simulator, which was the fastest computer in the world at one time in 2004!

Why have supercomputer speeds (apparenly) grown so much faster than personal computer speeds?

cheesehead · 2005-10-31, 18:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by jinydu

Why have supercomputer speeds (apparenly) grown so much faster than personal computer speeds?

From the eet.com article: "... Blue Gene running the software on its 131,072 processors ..."

PCs can be, what, ... dualies, quads, octos?

moo · 2005-10-31, 22:18

I think its impressive to have that many procs working in sync the switching fabric must be very rugged and durable not mention flexable

E_tron · 2005-10-31, 22:33

how do they use these computers? do they run special software threaded for 10000+ cpus? do they do some really cleaver load balancing? do they run 10000+ programs or instances at a time?

moo · 2005-11-01, 01:18

wonders if you run 100000 instances of prime95 can you heat a small town... will you suck up most of the internets bandwidth to get new work and will you use over 2 tarabytes of data folders for prime95....

delta_t · 2005-11-01, 07:18

It's suppose to reach 360+ Teraflops when it's completely done.
They have a small photo gallery (scroll down).
http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/b...gene_home.html

Dresdenboy · 2005-11-01, 11:34

The whole topic of supercomputers is complicated. One has to know very well what to do with the thing before it's getting ordered. Blue Gene (btw, there is also a "Blue Brain" supercomputer to be built in Lausanne/Switzerland) seems to be the result of a tradeoff between per core performance, performance/watt and I/O capabilities. I think, the low performance per core (which indeed allows a nice performance/watt-ratio) increases the need for communication between the cores. Think about Amdahl's Law

BTW, there is a new PowerPC core, developed by a startup founded by ex-Alpha and other capable engineers, which should (currently only according to thorough simulations) deliver really good SpecFP/SpecInt-Scores at only 13W. Would be a nice candidate for supercomputers. See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27233 for a medium sized story.

2005-10-28, 22:17	#3
moo Jul 2004 Nowhere 1451₈ Posts	Blue Gene\L http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showA...leID=172901185 ibms new super computer does a 2xer on thoughput. if we ask mabey they will let us ""barrow it"" in other news new fiber at one tarabit http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems...0/s1492314.htm and the legal battle of jpeg still goes on http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/28/rim_jpeg/index.html Last fiddled with by moo on 2005-10-28 at 22:29

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2004-11-05, 23:52	#2
jinydu Dec 2003 Hopefully Near M48 2×3×293 Posts	I suggest waiting until Tuesday...

2005-10-31, 16:25	#4
jinydu Dec 2003 Hopefully Near M48 11011011110₂ Posts	With a speed of 280.6 teraflops, Blue Gene is over 7 times faster than the Earth Simulator, which was the fastest computer in the world at one time in 2004! Why have supercomputer speeds (apparenly) grown so much faster than personal computer speeds?

2005-10-31, 22:18	#6
moo Jul 2004 Nowhere 329₁₆ Posts	I think its impressive to have that many procs working in sync the switching fabric must be very rugged and durable not mention flexable

2005-10-31, 22:33	#7
E_tron Sep 2002 Austin, TX 231₁₆ Posts	how do they use these computers? do they run special software threaded for 10000+ cpus? do they do some really cleaver load balancing? do they run 10000+ programs or instances at a time?

2005-11-01, 01:18	#8
moo Jul 2004 Nowhere 329₁₆ Posts	wonders if you run 100000 instances of prime95 can you heat a small town... will you suck up most of the internets bandwidth to get new work and will you use over 2 tarabytes of data folders for prime95....

2005-11-01, 07:18	#9
delta_t Nov 2002 Anchorage, AK 3×7×17 Posts	It's suppose to reach 360+ Teraflops when it's completely done. They have a small photo gallery (scroll down). http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/b...gene_home.html

2005-11-01, 11:34	#10
Dresdenboy Apr 2003 Berlin, Germany 19² Posts	The whole topic of supercomputers is complicated. One has to know very well what to do with the thing before it's getting ordered. Blue Gene (btw, there is also a "Blue Brain" supercomputer to be built in Lausanne/Switzerland) seems to be the result of a tradeoff between per core performance, performance/watt and I/O capabilities. I think, the low performance per core (which indeed allows a nice performance/watt-ratio) increases the need for communication between the cores. Think about Amdahl's Law BTW, there is a new PowerPC core, developed by a startup founded by ex-Alpha and other capable engineers, which should (currently only according to thorough simulations) deliver really good SpecFP/SpecInt-Scores at only 13W. Would be a nice candidate for supercomputers. See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27233 for a medium sized story.