Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin

Posted by kdawson on Sat Feb 23, 2008 08:54 PM
from the one-teraflop-per-researcher dept.
Supercomputing Science
SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: Half-petaflop supercomputer deployed in Austin by SethJohnson (112166)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Now We Know (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Saturday February 23 2008, @08:55PM (#22531320)
    So now we know why there is such a shortage of quad-core AMD Opterons otherwise.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Chris Snook (872473)
      If I had mod points, I'd mod this insightful, not funny. There are a lot of HPC projects that were planning to use Barcelona, that were held back by the TLB bug. I'm sure anything approaching this magnitude already had a contract with AMD that includes guaranteed delivery dates and penalties, either directly or through the OEM. If you don't have a signed contract with AMD or with someone who has one with AMD, you're going to have to wait in line.

  • I've heard this computer is so fast (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    that it completes an infinite loop in only 5 seconds!

  • Apostrophes (Score:3, Funny)

    by gardyloo (512791) on Saturday February 23 2008, @09:00PM (#22531354)
    Perhaps it can run spell- and grammar-checks on Slashdot submissions!
    • How many supercomputers would be needed to spell check for a million monkeys?
      • There's a lot of variables here. Sadly I've just spent the last 5-10 minutes of my life considering them all and was writing up a post about it. Then I realised that sometimes, I take jokes waaaaay too seriously.

    • It's peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years ...
      What I don't understand is how the editor could it wrong and then in very next sentence get it right. Do the Slashdot editors just toss a coin to see if they should use an apostrophe?
  • Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as:
    • global climate change - btdt
    • water resource management - nimby
    • new energy sources - boring
    • natural disasters - omg!
    • new materials and manufacturing processes - yesterday
    • tissue and organ engineering - day before yesterday
    • patient-specific medical therapies - yeah, right...when pigs fly
    • ...and
    • drug design - Well! Hello! In that case, count me in and please proceed!
  • A: The more flops, the more powerful it grows.

  • AMD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by milsoRgen (1016505) on Saturday February 23 2008, @09:09PM (#22531420) Homepage
    I'm glad to see AMD based projects like this, as they have certainly took a hit in the HPC space [top500.org] as of late.
    • Couldn't see details, but this may use Sun's hypertransport switch as an interconnect. Until Intel's next generation of chips with QPI, you couldn't do that sort of interconnect with Intel processors. Admittedly though, I'm not convinced that it is significant enough a benefit over recent Infiniband solutions despite the penalty of going through an Infiniband chip and then a PCI express controller.

      Even with the L3 errata straightened out, it still looks to be a rough road for AMD, who hasn't demonstrated

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Wesley Felter (138342)

        Couldn't see details, but this may use Sun's hypertransport switch as an interconnect.
        Sun doesn't make a Hypertransport switch and Ranger uses Infiniband just like other high-end x86 clusters.
      • Power and cooling penalties? Are you looking at the same spec sheets I am because I'm seeing better performance per Watt out of Barcelona systems than out of Intel quad core Xeon's based systems. Most of it has to do with the fact that Intel uses power sucking FB-Dimms, but that's a design tradeoff that Intel made.

  • Half-computer (Score:3, Funny)

    by SEWilco (27983) on Saturday February 23 2008, @09:18PM (#22531484) Homepage Journal
    And the other half is deployed in Dallas?

  • Gee, this computer is the BIGGEST flop generator of them all!

    That's too bad.

    NO! That's GOOD!

    It is?

    Yeah, lots and lots of flops per second - the more the better!

    So the bigger the flops, the better?

    Right!

    Fewer flops is bad?

    You got it!

    And researchers want more money for more time with bigger flops?

    Now you get it!

    So they got $59 million for this humongous flop generator?

    Yep!

    Why don't they just burn the money if they want to generate a really big flop?

    That wouldn't work - that wouldn

  • 4 year lifespan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeftPunk79 (1232522) on Saturday February 23 2008, @09:29PM (#22531542)
    The 4 year lifespan in the /. article refers to the amount of time the award money covers for operations costs. So if it finds some others mean s of operation funds it could live longer... of course those funds will probably be from a private organization and the ranger would no longer be open for research.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pimpimpim (811140)
      Within four years the Performance/Watt ratio will have dropped compared to state of the art, so it would make very little sense to keep the thing taking valuable computer room space and working hours of the technical staff. It happens with all supercomputing machines, just Moore's law in practice. What I think is still a big problem is that there are still many problems getting the hardware work correctly in parallel. Often half a year or longer is lost debugging file system/network issues, which is a consi

  • Global climate change, new energy sources... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tmack (593755) on Saturday February 23 2008, @09:34PM (#22531594) Homepage Journal

    attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources..

    With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!

    Tm

  • In their backyard, and Sun gets the job instead. (Maybe this is why Dell has started offering AMD?)

  • actually... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elite1789 (1245036) on Saturday February 23 2008, @10:44PM (#22532032)
    I was at TACC a few weeks ago, and the peak performance was around 519 teraflops.... Sadly, they also said the word on the street is that IBM wont take too kindly to the new king in town, and since TOP500 is biannually, everyone is biting their nails about blue-gene getting a quick upgrade in time to stay on top. Turns out the blue-gene systems are so scalable its quite easy to strap a few thousand new processors for a nice performance boost.
  • And the answer is apparently yes. According to techtarget.com [techtarget.com] It'll be running CentOS just like slashdot [slashdot.org] does.
  • how many bogomips per petaflop?

  • What happens after lifespan? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HockeyPuck (141947) on Sunday February 24 2008, @12:28AM (#22532608)

    Ranger comprises 3,936 compute nodes in a Sun Blade(TM) 6048 Modular System with 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors, and Sun Fire(TM) x4500 servers providing 1.7 petabytes of storage.
    Since TFA says this hardware will last only four years, what typically happens to these supercomputers built out of so called commodity hardware? Is sun going to donate/resell this gear? Or does it end up in the scrap heap? Surely, these Sun Blades are supposed to have a useful lifespan greater than four years. Sun could probably give these blades to every elementary school in all of Texas. Is the future of super computing aka disposable computing?
  • UT students have been pushing against putting a polluting plant in Austin (very green-aware city) for years. This is just a move to placate the protestors, I'm sure. 4 years? What happens after that?

    • What, is it an android from Blade Runner?

      I think you mean replicants. Androids, like Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek, have practically unlimited lifespans.

    • Nope, but I'll be scanning ebay in 2012! Daddy needs some Distributed.Net action!
    • It uses Opterons not Phenoms

      • And? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Junta (36770) on Saturday February 23 2008, @09:36PM (#22531606)
        Both Opteron and Phenom were at the same B2 stepping, complete with the same L3 errata, despite the different packaging. That's why you haven't seen a Tier one vendor touch the Opterons with a 10 foot poll for a generally available product. You can bet your ass this is the reason AMD released the kernel patch so 'some customer' could proceed with a Linux Opteron deployment with B2 parts without the performance penalty nor risk of the L3 errata.

        This deployment is probably where AMD focused a firesale of B2 parts, since it's nice and well controlled.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by EvanED (569694)
      Seems like the "processor hours" metric needs some adjustment to account for multi-core. Otherwise I could build one of these with 15,744 single-core processors and claim the same performance.

      Why are you associating processor-hours with performance anyway? You could hook up 15,744 286s and get the same number of processor-hours too. So why don't you complain about that?
    • Just grab a few and you'll be set for the next four years...

      Seriously though, this money comes from an NSF grant earmarked specifically for this project. We get these kind of complaints from other departments and especially undergrad editorials in the student newspaper. Unfortunately, the budget from the football team won't be used to renovate the social work buildings.
    • Do what most other slashdotters do... use a paper towel or a sock.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.