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"Intrepid" Supercomputer Fastest In the World

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Jun 19, 2008 11:00 AM
from the bravely-and-quickly dept.
Supercomputing
Stony Stevenson writes "The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to the Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers. The list was announced this week during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid,' is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall. The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application used to measure speed for the Top 500 rankings. According to the list, 74.8 percent of the world's supercomputers (some 374 systems) use Intel processors, a rise of 4 percent in six months. This represents the biggest slice of the supercomputer cake for the firm ever."
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Submission: 'Intrepid' supercomputer fastest in the world by Stony Stevenson (954022)
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  • ... will it run Vista with everything on?
  • What happened to Blue Gene M, N and O?

  • Apparently, not necessarily. [netlib.org] It's just some Fortran routines.

    So much for that joke.

  • Perhaps even more importantly (Score:3, Informative)

    by SpaFF (18764) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:05AM (#23858617) Homepage
    This is the first time a system on the TOP500 has passed the Petaflop mark.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by bunratty (545641)
      "The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops."

      This is the first time a system on the TOP500 has passed the Petaflop mark.
      Or 0.557 petaflops, but who's counting?

      • Re:Perhaps even more importantly (Score:5, Informative)

        by clem.dickey (102292) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:14AM (#23858849)

        Or 0.557 petaflops, but who's counting?

        You were misled by a terrible headline. The 0.557 petaflop computer is the fastest *for open science.* Roadrunner, at Los Alamos, tops the list. It does 1 petaflop.

        • Petaflops (Score:3, Informative)

          by Henriok (6762)
          ..or more correctly: 1 Petalops. Can't leave the trailing "s" out, it stands for "second". "Floating point operations per" doesn't mean much.
      • RTFA. Yes, the supercomputer being discussed in the article has a peak performance of 557 TF, however it is number 3 on the TOP500 list. Number one on the TOP500 list is now over 1PF.

    • Let me know when a system not on the list passes the petaflop mark.
      That will be newsworthy.

      • Extrapolating from the performance development chart [top500.org] which shows a 10 fold increase about every 4 years (desktop computers should be pretty similar), and assuming top desktop computers today hit around 100 gigaflops, then you can expect we'll hit that sometime around 2024.

  • Supercomputer (Score:5, Funny)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:08AM (#23858699) Journal
    Computer scientists building the monstrosity admit that it still isn't powerful enough to run VISTA with all the bells and whistles turned on.

    George Broussard says that when the next generation of this machine reaches the desktop, Duke Nukem 4ever will be released. "Really", he said, "The game's been finished for over five years now. We're just waiting for a powerful enough computer to play it on."

    Sources say that besides computitng power, DNF is waiting for the holographic display. The The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system lacks a holographic display.

    Gamers were reportedly disappointed in the news, although most said the price of the DoE's new computer wouldn't faze them. "After all" one said, "you have to have a decent machine to play any modern game!"

  • Does not compute (Score:5, Informative)

    by UnknowingFool (672806) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:08AM (#23858721)
    The title says: "'Intrepid' Supercomputer Fastest In the World" for open science while the article says "IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid', is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall." There needs to be some clarification. Roadrunner [networkworld.com] is considered the fastest in the world and is also built for the DOE. I'm guessing that Roadrunner is used exclusively by Los Alamos and is not available for open science while Intrepid is.

  • The actual list (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hyppy (74366) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:15AM (#23858895)
    Top500 [top500.org] has the actual list. Would have been nice to have this in TFA or TFS.

  • Inaccurate Summary (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The title line of the summary isn't accurate - Intrepid is not the world's fastest supercomputer, just the fastest for 'open science'.
  • Good for open science.

    But yet another article that uses the phrase "Fastest supercomputer" for attention because it can qualify in the article which list out of the dozens it's on. We have a fastest supercomputer almost every week of varying speeds. See Roadrunner [slashdot.org].

    "Fastest supercomputer uses Slashdot"
    The fastest supercomputer in Skreech's living room has posted a post on Slashdot.
  • Firstly, the Top 500 list is the "authoritative" list, released each year at the Supercomputing Convention. Until then, nothing is really official. Though the list has it's own flaws, mostly from vendors submitting flawed benchmarks and/or guesswork.

    Secondly, the real benchmark is the application. Some algorithms run better on some platforms and worse on others. Period. Unless you are running a highly specialized set of applications - and nothing but - the rule of thumb is "design the best system you can

  • That we know about. I bet behind closed doors somewhere there is nearly unlimited funding and there is a faster machine.

  • I liked (back in the Old Days) when supercomputer rankings where based on linear, single processor performance. Now it's just how much money can you afford to put a lot of processors in a single place. That was a real test of engineering. By the current standards, Google (probably) has the largest supercomputer in the world.

    Unfortunately, single core performance seems to have hit the wall.

    • Wroooong (Score:4, Informative)

      by dk90406 (797452) on Thursday June 19 2008, @12:01PM (#23859915)
      Even in the Old Days, supercomputers had multiple processors.

      --
      In 1988, Cray Research introduced the Cray Y-MP®, the world's first supercomputer to sustain over 1 gigaflop on many applications. Multiple 333 MFLOPS processors powered the system to a record sustained speed of 2.3 gigaflops. --
      The difference today is that almost all supercomputers use commodity chips, instead of custom designed cores.

      Ohh - and the IBM one is almost a million times faster than the 20 years old '88 cray model.

    • One day Google's supercomputer will wake up to consciousness and we will all be his slaves.

      • One day Google's supercomputer will wake up to consciousness and we will all be his slaves.
        ...GoogleNet becomes self aware at 2:14 AM EST, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug... GoogleNet fights back.

    • Re:Booooring (Score:5, Informative)

      by Salamander (33735) <jeff AT pl DOT atyp DOT us> on Thursday June 19 2008, @12:28PM (#23860499) Homepage Journal

      That was a real test of engineering. By the current standards, Google (probably) has the largest supercomputer in the world.

      Sorry, but no. As big as one of Google's several data centers might be, it can't touch one of these guys for computational power, memory or communications bandwidth, and it's darn near useless for the kind of computing that needs strong floating point (including double precision) everywhere. In fact, I'd say that Google's systems are targeted to an even narrower problem domain than Roadrunner or Intrepid or Ranger. It's good at what it does, and what it does is very important commercially, but that doesn't earn it a space on this list.

      More generally, the "real tests of engineering" are still there. What has changed is that the scaling is now horizontal instead of vertical, and the burden for making whole systems has shifted more to the customer. It used to be that vendors were charged with making CPUs and shared-memory systems that ran fast, and delivering the result as a finished product. Beowulf and Red Storm and others changed all that. People stopped making monolithic systems because they became so expensive that it was infeasible to build them on the same scales already being reached by clusters (or "massively parallel systems" if you prefer). Now the vendors are charged with making fast building blocks and non-shared-memory interconnects, and customers take more responsibility for assembling the parts into finished systems. That's actually more difficult overall. You think building a thousand-node (let alone 100K-node) cluster is easy? Try it, noob. Besides the technical challenge of putting together the pieces without creating bottlenecks, there's the logistical problem of multiple-vendor compatibility (or lack thereof), and then how do you program it to do what you need? It turns out that the programming models and tools that make it possible to write and debug programs that run on systems this large run almost as well on a decently engineered cluster as they would on a UMA machine - for a tiny fraction of the cost.

      Economics is part of engineering, and if you don't understand or don't accept that then you're no engineer. A system too expensive to build or maintain is not a solution, and the engineer who remains tied to it has failed. It's cost and time to solution that matter, not the speed of individual components. Single-core performance was always destined to hit a wall, we've known that since the early RISC days, and using lots of processors has been the real engineering challenge for two decades now.

      Disclosure: I work for SiCortex, which makes machines of this type (although they're probably closer to the single-system model than just about anything they compete with). Try not to reverse cause and effect between my statements and my choice of employer.

    • Well, the real measure of fastest computer has a lot to do with what software you want to run on it. In the example of the top500 list, linpack scales almost perfectly as you add processor cores, and makes very limited demands of network speed, memory bandwidth, or single-processor performance. Other codes really can't scale past 16 processors, so these massive processor jumbles don't amount to a hill of beans.

      Most codes are somewhere between. As the machine gets larger, the more effort has to be put in des
    • Interconnecting all of those cores is a real engineering challenge. The basic problem is covered in elementary discrete mathematics books. These guys are most definitely still pushing the envelope.

  • It seems to me, at least superficially, that supercomputers these days do not use the fastest processors around. I'm sure there are processors faster than the Intels. They just use more of them.

    Quite smart, as using commodity processors must save a lot of money compared to specialised processors. And I suppose it may make programming easier as the compilers for the architecture are there already, and are very mature in development.

    But then what we now call an average desktop is what twenty years ago was a

  • This year the top 500 also tracks how much power is used by each system. Systems under development at Oak Ridge National Lab will reportedly have annual power bills of more than $30 million when they debut in 2012. See ComputerWorld [computerworld.com] and Data Center Knowledge [datacenterknowledge.com] for more.

  • Beowulf Cluster of PS3s (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Thursday June 19 2008, @12:55PM (#23861085) Homepage Journal

    The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application


    The PS3's RSX video chip [wikipedia.org] from nVidia does 1.8TFLOPS on specialized graphics instructions. If you're rendering, you get close to that performance. The PS3's CPU, the Cell [wikipedia.org], gets theoretical 204GFLOPS on its more general purpose (than the RSX) onchip DSP-type SPEs, and some more on its onchip 3.4GHz PPC. A higher end Cell with 8 (instead of 7 - less one for "chip utilities" - in the PS3's Cell) delivers about 100GFLOPS on Linpack 4096x4096. Overall a PS3 has about 2TFLOPS, so 278 PS3s have a theoretical peak equal to this supercomputer. But they'd cost only $11,200. YMMV.

  • The summary is wrong - both Intel and AMD together (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tweenk (1274968) on Thursday June 19 2008, @01:30PM (#23861709)
    It's not Intel chips that have 74.8% share, it's x86 chips. Those are produced by both AMD and Intel. In fact, there are 7 systems with x86 hardware in the top 10, and the 4 faster ones use AMD Opterons (Crays are also Opterons) while the 3 slower use Xeons.

    • Re:Cliche (Score:4, Funny)

      by Gewalt (1200451) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:38AM (#23859409)
      You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

      gDefine: Intrepid [google.com]

    • Achievement aside, isn't the name a cliche?

      Intrepid can refer to: [wikipedia.org]
      • Chevrolet Intrepid, the International Motor Sports Association GT Championship car, which raced from 1991 to 1993
      • William Stephenson, the Canadian World War II spymaster whose code name was Intrepid
      • Dodge Intrepid, the automobile
      • Intrepid Games, a satellite company of the computer game developer Lionhead Studios, now disbanded
      • The Lunar module of the 1969 Apollo 12 lunar landing mission
      • Several real and fictional ships named USS Intrepid
        • USS Intr

    • Key words: "For open science" (Score:4, Informative)

      by LighterShadeOfBlack (1011407) on Thursday June 19 2008, @11:38AM (#23859425) Homepage

      The top500 list [top500.org] clearly show that roadrunner is #1. What's this one then?
      I'll let TFA answer this one:

      IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid', is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall.
      In other words I don't really know why this is news. I don't think anything has changed about its position recently (other than Roadrunner becoming #1 a few weeks back).
    • It's a Beowulf cluster, not just a cluster! You AC types can't even get the meme's right anymore. What's slashdot coming to!?
    • If you're protecting the nation's energy, why not set and example and use less of it?

      Because the less energy there is, the more the DoE is needed. They have to protect their cushy jobs, you know.
    • How could Intel PR attach themselves to the story which should be about first ever Petaflop (documented) supercomputer made possible by IBM low power/mhz PowerPC processors and AMD Processors?

      Gotta respect to such PR and sold out tech journalists (!).

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