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Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Nov 14, 2008 05:46 PM
from the minimum-requirements-for-crysis dept.
from the minimum-requirements-for-crysis dept.
Protoclown writes "The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."
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New Top 500 Supercomputer List 138 comments
geaux and other readers let us know that the new Top 500 Supercomputer list is out. The top two both break the Petaflops barrier: LANL's IBM "RoadRunner" and ORNL's Cray XT5 "Jaguar." (Contrary to our discussion a few days back, IBM's last-minute upgrade of RoadRunner salvaged the top spot for Big Blue. Kind of like bidding on eBay.) The top six all run in excess of 400 Teraflops. HP has more systems in the top 500 than IBM, reversing the order of the previous list. Both Intel and AMD issued press releases crowing over their wins, and both are correct — AMD highlights its presence in 7 of the top 10, while Intel boasts that 379 of the top 500 use their chips.
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Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Accurate economic modeling needs infinite resources, as the existence of the economic modeler needs to be taken into account, and it could be argued that the entire universe would have to be modelled 100% accurately - one atom being in a different place could cause drastically different outcomes years down the line, causing different economic conditions.
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Ultimately human behavior is near-continuous series of yes/no decisions. Our brains iterate pretty deeply, but at some level it's ones and zeros. Though we may need more petaflops than angels on the head of a pin before we can scratch that itch. At any rate, the application of such a model will probably always doom it to failure.
How much do we really know about climate? Probably a lot less than we think. Scientists are always so sure they are right. And then a few decades pass and they realize they weren't.
Re:Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scientists are always so sure they are right. And then a few decades pass and they realize they weren't. And then they repeat that same behavior.
Not really. Most scientists know they're always wrong, they just try to be less wrong each time. Hence the scientific method.
There's a brilliant article by Asimov about it, in fact, "The Relativity of Wrong" if you care about it.
Parent
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Look at the caption on your graph. Hansen's Scenario A is a high emissions scenario which does not correspond to the emissions which actually occurred. If you want to legitimately test the skill of a climate model, you need to compare apples to apples. In this case, Hansen's Scenario B is the one that most closely corresponded to the real emissions trajectory. (Since Hansen is a climate scientist, not an economist, he gave a range of possible emissions scenarios and did not claim the world would follow
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Pre-marital sex?
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Every time you have sex outside marriage, god kills an economist (and a kitten)
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I would suggest that marital sex results in offspring more frequently* than pre-marital sex, if you get my point.
*more offspring per "event", on average.
Yeah, the supercomputing stuff is nice and all... (Score:3, Insightful)
But I really got it to play Tempest 2000.
How does that work? (Score:2)
So, like, how do so many people use the computer effectively? Do they have a sign-in sheet? I bet there's a long line. :p~
Re:How does that work? (Score:5, Informative)
There is a queueing system. If you want to run a job on a machine like this, you log into the control node (which is just a linux box) and submit your job to the queue, including how many CPU's you need for it and how much time you need on them.
A scheduling algorithm then determines when the various jobs waiting in the queue get to run, and sends mail to their owners when they start and stop.
On many machines there is a debug queue with low limits for number of CPU's and runtime, and thus fast turnover; this is used to run little jobs to ensure everything is working right before you submit the big job to the main queue.
Each project has an al
Parent
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Wow, I was actually joking, but ... cool. I actually thought it worked more like a mainframe/*nix terminal server.
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Don't buy it (Score:4, Funny)
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So, I'm standing in front of my new Jag, with my WOW CD in my trembling hands. Where do I plug in my Game Keyboard, and Mouse? There's nothing in the owners manual about where the plug is to connect to my Cable Box!? How much was this thing again?
And another thing, where is the Cup Holder?
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It was eliminated from this model. But you can buy an extra toilet seat!
Non-Obligatory Frisky Dingo Reference (Score:2)
Boosh!
Kudos to Atari (Score:5, Funny)
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good upgrade path (Score:3, Insightful)
The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system.
That sounds like Cray engineered this to aggregate components across product generations. For short product life cycles that seems like a great idea, not throwing out the old system when you get the new one but combining the two systems instead. Though obviously for long product life cycles it would be a losing proposition; The space and power requirements of inefficient older components would be greater than the space and power savings of upgrading to the latest model + the expense of the upgrade.
Re:good upgrade path (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
I knew.. (Score:2)
Tm
Folding@Home Contribution? (Score:3, Insightful)
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To have complete and accurate pre-computed models of all steps in the protein folding process for all possible mutations of the AIDS virus
1. Each trajectory would be several terabytes (possibly verging on petabypes).
2. The largest simulation I know of is this one: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/STMV/ [uiuc.edu] they simulated for 50ns and it's 10 times smaller than HIV. Protein folding takes milliseconds, not nanoseconds... it's not really tractable right now. I don't know how much cpu time the simulation took but it would have been a lot.
3. Clusters like these are rarely idle, jobs are queued up to run when the cpus become available.
Love the paint job! (Score:3, Informative)
Check out the gallery if you haven't.
I've always wanted to get some custom graphics like that on my server racks. Maybe a penguin, a butterfly, and a can of Raid. :)
Supercomputers definitely don't look as exciting as they did in the "old days".
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Who said super computing had to be boring?
That's the kind of work I wish I could be doing.. building and configuring those monsters.
That being said, look at the size of that room! If half of it is the computer, then that's one big open space left doing nothing.
I'm sure they'll use it for something eventually.
181,504 Opteron cores! (Score:2)
I wonder how much they paid for all those Opterons. I wonder what kind of volume discount is typical for these kinds of supercomputers.
Climate modeling ves. fusion energy (Score:2)
If we can get fusion energy working cheap, we won't need the climate modeling. Not only that we can build a hundred of these things cheaper with the technology advances.
Climate change is gradual .. the need for new drugs and fusion energy is more pressing.
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Climate change is gradual, but the emissions we put into the atmosphere today will last for centuries. Even if we switched over to all fusion power tomorrow, we'd still see more climate change, and the longer we wait to replace fossil fuels, the more we will see. Realistically, it takes a long time to widely deploy a new energy technology. Fusion isn't even feasible in the lab, let alone ready for deployment, let alone widely deployed.
Also, even if fusion were widely deployed, that doesn't mean we'd nece
Beep Beep (Score:3, Interesting)
In the not too distant future, we shall see a new Top 500 list. It just seems like yesterday that RoadRunner cracked the Petaflops barrier, and the whole world seems to have fallen on its ass in the interim. Banking failures, government bailouts, people losing their retirement portfolios. The irony is too much. Even as the computers get better, the answers that people need don't come fast enough.
Then the light turned on for me. People in general, the people you see on the street going on their busy way to whatever, are mostly relying on "someone else" to come up with the answers. Most people have little confidence in their own ability to answer hard questions.
Well, maybe things will turn around because of the power of supercomputers. It would be about time, wouldn't it? Here's how it may play out. Supercomputers so far, good as they are, serve up expensive results, so they are applied to difficult problems that are useful but far removed from everyday life.
As supercomputer clock cycles become more abundant, researchers can apply them to do more mundane things that the unwashed can relate to. The result could be revolutionary. People who have always aspired to some inconsequential achievement that requires some expertise or training may suddenly have access to highly instructive supercomputer-generated procedures that explain both how and why. Not only will people become more expert do-it-yourselfers, but robots will become far versatile, with amazing repertoires.
Crossing the petaflops barrier may be sufficient psychological incentive for people to request that governments begin to make supercomputing infrastructure available for public consumption, like roads and other services. Certainly, exciting times are comiing.
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There is already a wealth of political will for global warming, whats lacking is evidence ..
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Please no climate modelling! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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And the only cause that is politically useful.
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Who says the climate modeling they are doing is related to global warming?
Even if it is, however, if the modeling increases our knowledge of the subject, it is not a waste of resources for scientists to seek the answers they are looking for.
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All good points but lets not forget that simulation != observation.
This point was made about astrological observations on older slashdot stories and it holds true for climate prediction too.
I have to admit I am sceptical about blindly believing in global warming. I used to in the past however I've become a little smarter since then I can not see any hard observations for it, especially when volcanoes pump out 26 times more CO2 per year then all of humanity on the planet (however I'm slightly sceptical of ho
Re:Please no climate modelling! (Score:5, Funny)
Why do climate modelling?
Obviously climate modelling has to be carried to out to find out what impact running energy-hungry supercomputers has on the environment.
Parent
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It would take them roughly a quarter million years with no breaks of any kind to do what this machine can do in one second.
Re:translation???? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not nearly that bad... more like 3 days. I failed to realize that my 270000 figure was seconds not years.
Parent
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It can't, because Crysis is not multithreaded. If you can figure out a way to parallelize it, then you certainly could run Crysis on it.
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You, sir, are an idiot.
LANL, LLNL, and SNL are all weapons labs. ORNL is primarily a science lab.
I myself have worked at three of these labs and held an account on an earlier iteration of Jaguar as well as some of LANL's other supercomputing clusters, so I ought to know.
ORNL's Jaguar cluster, although parts of it are I think "controlled" rather than open so that it can run export-controlled code, is not at all classified. It's used for biology, astronomy, physics, CFD, etc.
Also, if you knew the first thing
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You, sir, can't read.
He was specifically talking about LANL and LLNL rather than ORNL.. that was the entire point.
Granted, yes, his description of disallowing classified non-classified connectivity as "ludicrous" is a little off-base, although writing things down by hand really is stupid- there are plenty of procedures in place for putting data on transportable media and then arranging to declassify that media once it has been verified so that it can be used elsewhere.
That doesn't change his fundamental po
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No. Jaguar. 1995 XK12, Six-Litre.
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No. Jaguar. 1995 XK12, Six-Litre.
I'd rather doubt the 1995 XK12, as cool as it was, was any competitor to the Jaguar XJ220 [wikipedia.org].
Re:Silly Me (Score:5, Funny)
Hahah, eat it, 3DO.
Parent
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creating better algorithms? Or at least educating a little bit all non-CS scientists about performance and optimization?
The guys who work on the the dynamic cores for the biggest climate models (NCAR, GFDL, NASA, etc.) do world class numerical hydrodynamics. Maybe not quite on par with the nuke guys at, say, Sandia, but pretty good. And they do hire programmers and numerical methods people to do algorithm design, optimization, and parallelization. They're cutting edge in terms of grid solver algorithms for these sorts of problems. There are lots of complications from irregular topography, coupling between atmosphere, oce