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Cray, Intel To Partner On Hybrid Supercomputer

Posted by kdawson on Tue Apr 29, 2008 04:58 AM
from the you-can-pet-a-dog-and-you-can-pet-a-cat dept.
Supercomputing Intel Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "Intel convinced Cray to collaborate on what many believe will be the next generation of supercomputers — CPUs complemented by floating-point acceleration units. NVIDIA successfully placed its Tesla cards in an upcoming Bull supercomputer, and today we learn that Cray will be using Intel's x86 Larrabee accelerators in a supercomputer that is expected to be unveiled by 2011. It's a new chapter in the Intel-NVIDIA battle and a glimpse at the future of supercomputers operating in the petaflop range. The deal has also got to be a blow to AMD, which has been Cray's main chip supplier."
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Submission: Cray to build hybrid supercomputer with Intel by Anonymous Coward
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  • I'm sure the volumes of chips they sell in Crays is a drip in the ocean compard to other channels. It's not like Supercomputers are a big seller...
    • After their acquisition of VIA and then later ATI, they have established themselves in a larger market than simply performance graphics chips for end users. Heck, every Nintendo product since the gamecube has used ATI hardware.

      The last line of that summary is clearly flamebait.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by pipatron (966506)

        every Nintendo product since the gamecube has used ATI hardware

        I'll list them for you:

        1. Gamecube*
        2. Wii

        *The company that made the Gamecube hardware was later bought by ATI, so ATI didn't have much to do with that.

      • VIA Technologies is an independent company and I don't recall any significant talk of a merger with AMD. Since AMD acquired ATI they have little to gain from buying VIA anyway.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dreamchaser (49529)
      It's more about bragging rights and PR/marketing than about volume of chips sold. I doubt AMD is terribly worried as they have much bigger concerns right now.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lakeland (218447)
      AMD might be worried. Cray and similar deals are all about bragging rights, not about sales.

      Like that Fujitsu supercomputer... it makes you think 'hey, maybe there is something to Fujitsu more than photocopiers...'

      I don't know what influences normal customer's perception of a company like AMD. I don't even know who AMD's main customers are - white-box manufacturers? enthusiasts? So while industry analysts put a lot of weight on these high-profile shifts, ... well, it might sway public opinion.
      • >it makes you think 'hey, maybe there is something to Fujitsu more than photocopiers...'
        Interesting to see how different territories have different takes on this. I've never seen or hear of Fujitsu making photocopiers. When I think of them I think of laptops/desktops & hard drives.
        • And when i think of them i think of pain and suffering, mostly for people who are unfortunate enough to have bought their laptops/desktops.
          • I have an old P133 Fujitsu and it is a tank. Dropped it 3Ft to concrete and all that broke was the status LCD. I also have a pair of Stylistic pen tablets (486DX4100) and they rock for what they are.
            -nB

    • Re:AMD worried? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770) on Tuesday April 29 2008, @06:10AM (#23236228) Homepage
      Please make sure to make a "Supercomputers is an irrelevant little niche" comment in a thread about Linux in supercomputers. Let me know how the charred remains of your karma is doing afterwards. It's all about bragging rights, in particular "the world's most powerful supercomputer" title. Most of these are trying to run some O(ugly) problem and improving the model or algorithms probably means a lot more than just adding 10x more power.
    • Isn't a petaflop Cray the minimum hardware required to run Duke Nukem Forever?
  • Always makes me wonder why they need all this power, after all anybody can build a very impressive home cluster these days that would of been classed a super computer a few years ago. I guess computing requirements rise to meet available systems thus fueling demand.

    I support AMD right now, and if they got bigger then Intel then I would support Intel.

    My belief is that any firm needs adequate competition to keep it innovative, competitive and customer focused. When one of them has a monopoly then we sho
    • I run full-wave electromagnetic simulations to investigate fields generated inside the human body. My runtime is reasonable if I pick some parameters, but running an automated optimizer could easily take weeks using a 30 node Opteron cluster. If you give me more cycles, I can think of stuff to keep them busy. But if you want to see a really power-hungry project, talk to the protein folders - the guys that model chemical interactions starting at quantum mechanics, and try to find out how the shapes of prote

      • "And are you not," said Fook leaning anxiously forward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

        "A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."

    • You support the little guy solely because he's the little guy? That's pretty silly, surely. Size doesn't mean they're doing the right thing. What if AMD started to throw babies off mountains tomorrow - would you still support them? Your post seems to suggest you will.
      • The problem with high-end animation is that you need to load in many different textures and geometry models before being able to render the final image and write out a single frame. Most of the supercomputer work seems to have everything in CPU node memory at the same time, and just run one iteration instantly (a 2048^3 3D grid of CFD cells for simulating supernova).

        Previous research in parallel processing tried allocating processing nodes to different locations in the scene or different geometric models, o

  • Intel convinced Cray to collaborate on what many believe will be the next generation of supercomputers -- CPUs complemented by floating-point acceleration units.

    Let me guess, it's going to be called the 8087 [wikipedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheThiefMaster (992038)
        Or possibly the ludicrously powerful floating point processors known as GPUs?

        Perhaps now that Intel and nVidia have commercial "floating-point acceleration units" for supercomputers, AMD/ATI will come up with something too? The Hypertransport bus is already pretty popular with supercomputers for plugging an interconnect into (Infiniband/path, as well as Cray's own) so a GPU (sorry, "floating point accelerator") that plugs directly into that bus and has direct communication with the system's CPU(s) should be

  • And the cycle continues... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jesus_666 (702802) on Tuesday April 29 2008, @06:10AM (#23236230)
    A few years from now Intel will unveil their shocking new techology - they will build the floating point accelerator right into the CPU! For massive performance gains! And then a few years later they will move it out of the CPU for better performance. And so on, and so forth, etc. etc. etc.
    • Cute and all, but..no. The "floating point accelerator" is a massively parallel CPU. It would either become the CPU itself, or remain an add-in. You don't add a "massively parallel CPU" to a "CPU".
  • Since no one else seems to have mentioned it yet; blah blah blah it's the birth of Skynet (this time with an improved graphical interface).
  • The data at Top500 shows a linear increase (on a semi-log plot) for the entire time from 1993 to today. Every seven years, the performance increases by a factor of 100, but Moore's Law predicts an increase of 2^(7/1.5) = 25, meaning that the supercomputer market is besting Moore's Law by a factor of 4.

    • Most likely? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Whiney Mac Fanboy (963289) * <whineymacfanboy@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 29 2008, @05:56AM (#23236158) Homepage Journal
      it will most likely just be used for more nuclear weapons simulations [emph mine]

      The majority (but not all) supercomputers on the top 500 supercomputer list [top500.org] are related not to nuclear weapons research, but meteorological/oceanographic & other scientific uses.

      • The majority (but not all) supercomputers on the top 500 supercomputer list are related not to nuclear weapons research

        Yeah, but what about those NOT on the list...

        • Yeah, but what about those NOT on the list...

          I'd speculate that most of them would be doing crypto-breaking rather than nuclear weapons simulations.

        • Re:Most likely? (Score:5, Funny)

          by encoderer (1060616) on Tuesday April 29 2008, @08:04AM (#23236892)
          Like W.O.P.R.

          Do you think WOPR is studying the climate?

          No way.

          It spends it's spare cycles playing a special version of The Sims where all human life is annihilated and WOPR is the supreme ruler.

          Oh, and searching for WOPETTE porn.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dreamchaser (49529)
        Sure, but posting actual facts doesn't give the same cheap karma boost as posting something anti-war or anti-nuclear.

        Then again, I'm sure people would rather see us blowing up actual bombs as tests rather than simulating them (sarcasm).
      • Surely the November 2007 [top500.org] top500 list would be a better link than the June 2003 one? The computer at the top of the list you link to is only 30th on the most recent one.

        Especially since the #1 system has the following in it's description:

        The upgrading of BGL, notably through the addition of nodes with twice the memory, allows scientists from the three nuclear weapons labs to develop and explore a broader set of applications than the single package weapons science oriented work that has been the mainstay of the machine in the past.

      • DOE, which does the US nuclear weapons simulations, is probably the largest single buyer of capability-class supercomputers, but still a small fraction of the total. Even within DOE, only a large minority of systems are dedicated to Nuke simulation. Sandia, livermore, and Los Alimos all have 2-3 large nuclear simulation machines each. (or will admit it publicly) Large systems at Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkely and Argonne are used for open science research.

        High-end supercomputers are used, in
        • DOE, which does the US nuclear weapons simulations, is probably the largest single buyer of capability-class supercomputers, but still a small fraction of the total. Even within DOE, only a large minority of systems are dedicated to Nuke simulation. Sandia, livermore, and Los Alimos all have 2-3 large nuclear simulation machines each. (or will admit it publicly) Large systems at Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkely and Argonne are used for open science research.

          I suspect that the NSA buys more sup

    • it will most likely just be used for more nuclear weapons simulations.

      s/nuclear weapons simulations/homeland security boondoggles

    • Can it play global thermonuclear war?
      and what is the back door login?
      • Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying the weather.

        Only on Slashdot.

        • puts tinfoil hat on...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by CRCulver (715279)

          Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying the weather.

          The OP's point is valid, people requesting funding have better success if they can tie their research to defense, even if it's in some vague way. As a linguist, I've seen this in my own field. For decades, a world centre for the study of the minority languages of the USSR was the University of Indiana at Bloomington. The U.S. government gave enormous amounts of funding to the scholars there, who in r

        • Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying the weather.
          Maybe, if we make that

          Yes, because clearly this whole nuclear weapons research thing is a smoke screen for studying weather control.
        • If by weather you mean climate, sure. Don't forget protein folding, physical chemistry, lattice QCD, and materials science. "Stockpile stewardship" is definitely there in the list of supercomputer applications, but there's lots of unclassified work that gets done to improve the world.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by chuckymonkey (1059244)
      It's not always about just how much data they can process. It's more about being able to do it quickly and in parallel. Say for instance you want to simulate a black hole. You have so much raw math that needs to be handled all at the same time, there's no way you can do this with current internet technology. Another example is a weather simulation, you have to take so many things into account all at once. That's why the compute nodes in supercomputers are connected by extremely high speed interconnects
        • Your smug is showing, I work with one on a daily basis for the government in the missile defense arena. Hell in two months I'm going to be building one of those new IBM machines, we just signed the purchase with IBM. Yes I said that I'm going to be building one, IBM is not allowed in our building. I don't even have to rent nodes of it, we have it all to ourselves. It's not the applications or the hardware that is the problem, it's the latency. I don't care how fast your internet connection is, you cannot match the interconnect fabric of these machines. If you want to parse out little bits of data to a vast number of computers using the spare cycles of home computers is great, I'm not trying to downplay that. You just cannot run them in parallel and do real time simulations on them. That is why we have these huge monolithic computers. Let me give you two examples: Protein folding, not parallel and also not time sensitive. More of a when you finish I'll give you a new problem to chew on. Tracking millions of orbits from shit in space, very parallel requires correct timing low latency transactions between CPU nodes. Also needs results as events occur, there's no room for "When your done I'll give you a new one". Working out the problems with star travel as the original parent said is a grand idea using a distributed system, running the simulations in real time to actually have an idea of whether or not those solutions will work is where computers such as the ones I work with come in.
            • MMORPG is real time as far as the human mind is concerned. If you look at all of them they have a latency counter too, they suffer badly sometimes from that problem. Hell the new supercomputer systems are not even real time, they have problems with latency as well. That's usually what the limiting factor as far as computing nodes is, the farther you space nodes out, or the more hops that they take over the fabric all has latency. For instance, one of our old SGI machines is limited to 2048 processors (SGI claims 512) because the NUMA link interface is too spread out beyond that. Of course that's running over copper with electrical signalling, newer systems use fiber which is very fast over the line, but the bottle neck is in the connections. So yet again we run into the problem of latency being the limiting factor. They even have specialized routers in them that are designed to be transparent to the overall machine, but beyond a certain number of hops you still have latency. I wish I could post diagrams and say a little more, but I'm already treading into the "trade secrets" ground. The difference between real-time simulation and an MMORPG though is a little more sticky problem. Think of it like this, the MMORPG connects to a main server, that server has the world running on it, it keeps track of all the other players in the game. The client computer merely syncs with that server, it doesn't do anything other than present the world to the end user and take the data from the server and display it on the screen. There really isn't a strong emphasis on real-time as compared to a weather simulation. When you're running these huge simulations you have multiple independent processes and threads all going through the machine at the same time, all to achieve one single end result. I'm sorry if I'm not doing too well at making sense, I have a little trouble explaining it because I'm more of a visual person. The best I can really say is that the comparative complexity of the problems between the two is vast. Someone out there that's a little better with words feel free to step in and help me out here. Now, when we all have fiber running to every computer connected to the internet maybe then the distributed systems become more of a reality. Another problem that I see with distributed systems though is the variation in hardware. When the programs get written for the supercomputing platforms there is an expectation of sameness for the hardware. All the processors, all the memory, all the fabric links, all the buses, all the ASICS, everything is the same from one point to another. Intelligently identifying hardware differences and exploiting them for real time simulation would be a real trick if someone could pull it off. Hmmm, my firefox spell check seems to think I'm British.
              • I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but as to the MMORPG problem I had another epiphany. The main difference is that in those games you aren't trying to send all the data from a maxed out processor over the internet, it's just sending a lot of little bits of data. You're just sending your position in the world and your actions within it. If you were going to do on the supercomputer level you would be sending not only that, but all the weather that you generated around you, the windspeed of your
                • "I know it's bad form to reply to my own post, but as to the MMORPG problem I had another epiphany."

                  Indeed. I am not sure we really need you to spend time writing any of this down.

                  Nothing to see here. Move along.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by encoderer (1060616)
              The MMORPG argument is a bit like comparing a VNC session to a cluster.

              In both cases you're harnessing the power of at least 2 CPU cores over the internet to accomplish a computing task.

              But the capacity of the two is separated by multiple orders of magnitude.

              And, really, a 10 second delay is hardly even an annoyance for a human as we swap between our IM, Email, iTunes and the game we're playing. But that same 10 seconds in a parallel computing environment where X nodes are idled waiting for a result from Y?
    • Yeah, thats all we need to break the laws of physics, a billion PCs all working together!

      Computers can't consider anything. They can't contemplate, they can't theorize.

      They pretty much do math.

      Of course as I read your post, I realize you're probably joking. Oh well, my statement stands.
        • I don't know if you have worked on the things you claim and just are confused now, or if you worked for companies that did those things and are just overstating your involvement, or what... but I do find your reply funny in a way. If you think your understanding of modern supercomputing architectures and cognitive science is up to the task, I'm sure you can find someone to back the prototyping of such a system.

          However, this sort of reminds me of the guy who inspired this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch? [youtube.com]

      • One meter, two meters...
        One petaflop, two petaflops
        One mph, two mph
        One flops, two flops (not two flopss)
        One petaflops, two petaflops

        The single trailing 's' cannot be dropped since that is the unit of time over which the work is performed.

        I'm not learning much about a computer that is capabile of performing a quadrillion floating point operations. My laptop can do that in 90 minutes. Doing that in a second? Now that's something!

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