NNSA Supercomputer Breaks Computing Record

Lecutis writes "National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton F. Brooks announced that on March 23, 2005, a supercomputer developed through the Advanced Simulation and Computing program for NNSAs Stockpile Stewardship efforts has performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOP/s) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world."

Re:Neat

[the_2nd_coming]

the increased flops is simply a function of the fact that they are expanding the number of nodes.

still not fast enough

[ottawan]

This computer is still way too slow for things like studying molecular structure, even with simplified models.

Earth Simulator

[Anonymous Coward]

I rather miss the time when the world's most
powerful supercomputer was used to study our
planet. It was something to be proud of, actually.
These machines are essentially weapons. Pity, that.

You are not seeing the larger picture

[ravenspear]

This is the same flawed logic that people try to apply to NASA on here a lot, that we shouldn't send people to the Moon/Mars until we fix all the problems on earth.

Halting scientific research to worry about all of our other problems is the wrong approach for many reasons. It is often scientific advances which lead to improved quality of life in many other areas of society.

Re:Neat

[imsabbel]

You are misstaken.
We didnt STALL at 30Gflops, its just that the 30Gflops were SO much better than everything else available that it took a couple of years to catch up and overtake it.

If you average over the last 10 years, the the Earth simulator was a bump above moores law and now we are back on track.

Re:Earth Simulator

[lp-habu]

Historically, I'll think you'll find that a great many technological advances were made with the original purpose of killing other beings -- usually other humans. Seems to be one of the basic human characteristics. Pretty effective, too.

Sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a BeoWulf Cluster of these!!!

Re:AMazing

[mikael]

Or we can model protein folding even faster.
Run more accurate climate simulations even faster.
Run population simulations even faster.
Run CAD/CAM simulations even faster.

More Computer Power=Fewer Nuclear Explosions

[Nova Express]

To study the effects of different nuclear weapon designs, there are basically two approaches:

1. Throw massive amounts of computing power at the problem (as done here), or:
2. Actually set off a nuclear weapon.

Having massive computing power in the hands of Lawrence Livermore scientists reduces or even eliminates the need for U.S. nuclear forces to actually detonate nuclear and thermonuclear explosions.

Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.

Re:and its only half the machine too!

[RicktheBrick]

It would seem to me that with the great accuracy and concrete penetrating weapons that we possess that we could establish a future date when the United States would destroy all of our nuclear weapons. I believe that we could do this unilateraly. I believe we could wipe out all the leadership of any country that dared to launch an attack on our country and hopefully we will be able to intecept their missile before they reach our cities. I do not believe that we can morally tell anyone not to possess nuclear weapons unless we dedicate ourself to a date when we do not possess them too.

Can we qualify this a bit?

[Moderation abuser]

"making it the fastest supercomputer in the world"

Or rather the fastest supercomputer with published LINPACK results. There are a number of reasons that agencies with supercomputers might not want to publish results.

Re:Neat

[JQuick]

Actually Intel compatible clusters in the supercomputer rankings are not all that compelling. True, linux cluster did fare very well for several years as measured by price/performance. Also it is true that about 63% of the top 500 supercomputers are Intel or Intel compatible.

Despite this, the majority of systems at the top of supercomputer top 500 chart are based on the POWER architecture, not Intel chips.

The POWER based systems, including BlueGene and PowerPC systems, are all much better on both price/performance, and Watt/performance basis. Intel chips do have a per chip advantage over PowerPC on many work-flows. However, when scaled, they directly consume more power, and indirectly require even more power to run higher capacity air conditioning.

Looking at the top of chart reveals that Intel compatible systems are a small minority. In the top 10, as of November 2004, are one NEC, HP, SGI, Alpha, Xeon, and Itanium, and 5 members of the power family. IBM powers more than half of the top 100, with all other chip families dividing the remaining half.

It is cheaper to build and operate a supercomputer cluster using either Apple or IBM gear (running either Macos X or Linux) than to do so using Linux on Intel these days.

OK then...

[caveat]

How 'bout we use Blue Gene for climate modeling, and start setting off full-yield nuclear tests to insure the viability of the stockpile? I don't terribly like the idea of nukes, but the genie is out of the bottle and there's no stuffing it back in - we need to have the things, and if god forbid we ever have to use them, I'd like to see them work properly. Seriously...unless you use one of the interconnect cables to garrote somebody, these computers are hardly "weapons", quite the opposite in fact.

Re:More Computer Power=Fewer Nuclear Explosions

[ozborn]

Of course, some people would prefer to see the United States undertake unilateral nuclear disarmament, something they've been advocating since SANE/FREEZE was telling us we could trust the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Only today they claim we can trust Kim Il Jong and the mullahs of Iran more than the democratically elected government of the United States, just as they claimed we could trust Leonid Breshnev and Yuri Andropov more than we could trust Ronald Reagan. Their views are every bit as ill-conceived now as they were then.
Nice strawman you've constructed, but pray tell who are these "some people" you are talking about? I challenge you to cite a single press release, webpage or publication by any independent NGO (even kooky ones) pushing for nuclear disarmanment that claims Kong Il Jong can be trusted. I can't think of any disarmament/peace group that would be opposed to 3rd party bilateral weapons inspections.

Re:and its only half the machine too!

[Henry V .009]

I do not believe that we can morally tell anyone not to possess nuclear weapons unless we dedicate ourself to a date when we do not possess them too.

Then the solution is to immorally tell other nations that they can't have them. That way you have neither the stupidity of unilateral disarmament nor the stupidity of looking the other way on nuclear proliferation. I hope that this bit of Life 101 helps you out there.

The belly of the beast

[theufo]

Here's an article describing some of the specs.

http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegene/talks/ gupta.pdf [llnl.gov]

It's from the days when BlueGene/L was still relatively small, but the basic design hasn't changed since then.

Turns out it's split into I/O and computing nodes. The 1024 I/O nodes run Linux. Each controls 64 dual-cpu nodes, which use simplistic microkernels written from scratch using Linux as an example.

The network architecture sounds funky: apparantly it's based on a torus!

Re:and its only half the machine too!

[InadequateCamel]

I get your point, but I think that to describe this in terms of police is a little inaccurate because that really is the police's job. Perhaps this is closer to a heavily-armed civilian militia (I hesitate to say "Mafia" or "gang", but you could argue points there too) taking on the police role?