The Supercomputer Race 158
CWmike writes "Every June and November a new list of the world's fastest supercomputers is revealed. The latest Top 500 list marked the scaling of computing's Mount Everest — the petaflops barrier. IBM's 'Roadrunner' topped the list, burning up the bytes at 1.026 petaflops. A computer to die for if you are a supercomputer user for whom no machine ever seems fast enough? Maybe not, says Richard Loft, director of supercomputing research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. The Top 500 list is only useful in telling you the absolute upper bound of the capabilities of the computers ... It's not useful in terms of telling you their utility in real scientific calculations. The problem with the rankings: a decades-old benchmark called Linpack, which is Fortran code that measures the speed of processors on floating-point math operations. One possible fix: Invoking specialization. Loft says of petaflops, peak performance, benchmark results, positions on a list — 'it's a little shell game that everybody plays. ... All we care about is the number of years of climate we can simulate in one day of wall-clock computer time. That tells you what kinds of experiments you can do.' State-of-the-art systems today can simulate about five years per day of computer time, he says, but some climatologists yearn to simulate 100 years in a day."
Financial modeling and spying better funded (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, while predicting the weather and better understanding it ultimately helps a lot of people, I suspect a LOT more computing power is thrown at more mundane things like predicting where the financial markets are going to be based on a gazillion data inputs. Probably even better funded are the vast datacenters around the world that fondle communications and other data for the spymasters. I doubt those computing resources are represented in the annual supercomputing lists. :)
Anonymous Coward (Score:1, Insightful)
The people who want to simulate 100 years of climate a day will, when they get it, want to simulate 2000 years a day.
Non-story... (Score:3, Insightful)
...ever looked at gaming benchmarks? Server benchmarks? Productivity benchmarks? Rendering benchmarks? In fact, any kind of benchmark? Seen how they all differ depending on the product and test run? Same with supercomputers, you got some synthetic benchmarks, and you got some real world benchmarks. But the weather simulation may not be a relevant benchmark at all if you're doing nuke simulations or gene decoding or finite deformation or some other kind of simulation. Synthetics are the lowest common denominator - you'd rather see benchmarks in your field, and most of all benchmarks with your exact application. That doesn't change that those are individual wants and synthetic benchmarks are the only ones with any value to everyone.
Thats not a "barrier" (Score:3, Insightful)
computings Mount Everest - the petaflops barrier
Two bad cliched metaphors in one! Its not a peak, and its not a barrier, just another arbitrary milestone. Who writes this crap? ... a "professional" writer from an industry magazine. That figures.
Oh
This guy should enter the The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest [bulwer-lytton.com]
RoadRunner (Score:2, Insightful)
Is running relatively stock Fedora (the ppc distribution). True, it's ram hosted, but the OS is hardly specialized in terms of libraries and such. You could say the Cell SDK is a tad specialized, but the underlying platform is not so custom as implied.
In fact, every single Top500 system I've ever touched has been far more typical linux than most people ever expect.
In any event, the most compelling aspect of RoadRunner in my view is the flops/watt. Application developers who can leverage highly parallel clusters are those who have the best shot of taking adequate advantage of something like the cell architecture, which is admittedly a pain for those that are accustomed to no more than 1 or two concurrent heavy-loaded processes or threads.
BTW I still hate the Infiniband cabling with a passion. Even as they've made it less bad over time, it's still a huge connector. Nothing like Quadrics, mind you, but still reminiscent in bulk to 10base5.
Re:I agree (Score:4, Insightful)
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner [wikipedia.org]
Cost per computing power (Score:3, Insightful)
As for top500: really, quit with this political joke benchmark. E.g. In molecular simulations alone you will spend on a computer which has either broad memory access for matrix inversions in quantum calculations. Or on a high clock speed, low bandwidth one for MD, which basically does nothing but floating point operations. The score in the top500 will give you 0 information about what machine to choose.
Re:Financial modeling and spying better funded (Score:2, Insightful)
I suspect no computing power is being thrown at predicting where the financial markets are going.
A lot is thrown at pretending to predict it, but it's brilliantly obvious that the output of such things is no better than chicken entrails or the last two presidential elections.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Insightful)
It's marginally more useful if it predicts 0% chance of rain because the average surface temperature of the planet has exceeded 100C on Wednesday, October 6th, 4008
I think it is in phases.. (Score:1, Insightful)
IBM retains their engineering, but sometimes the business decision makers fail to understand the value of that, and try to profit by slapping IBM logo on other company's products.
Let's presume we start with an outsourced generation of products. IBM does it and gets slapped with warranty/service costs/get complaints from the services organizations saying they cannot build quality solutions on random white-box systems, and generally customers see little product differentiation from the companies whose products IBM are reselling at increased price.
Then they have a generation of good, IBM-engineered product that uses their in-house engineering teams to produce product. The products work well, and the customers and IBM services business can consistently build upon them.
Then, they decide it's going so well, if only they could cut costs by outsourcing, and the vicious cycle continues.
Re:Well, let's see (Score:3, Insightful)
"Until then, supercomputing will continue to be a curiosity that us mainstream programmers and users can only dream about."
I'm not so sure that's a bad thing... most applications don't need the power of a super computer...
At the same time, I agree that I wish that desktop development tools made it easier to do threading for multi-core machines. Every new computer comes with more than one core... but the development tools (languages, compilers, IDE's, debuggers) simply aren't helping the everyday joe programmer out there make use of them...
Friedmud
Re:Uhh, do you have a model? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? You see, you opened a hole so broad that your statement isn't accurate even today. It's always summer and always winter on the earth. So it could be the same temperature in summer and winter in 4008.
Also, you didn't explain what future climate predictions you came to that conclusion over. I might have not been specific enough for a fan boy like you, but I was making the claim to future weather predictions from climate predictions. Of course a prediction is an attempt to explain what the future will be like so it is in the future too. You can conceive the seasonal climate differences in a particular spot from historical reference but not future climate predictions. In other words, you can't claim the climate will be X in the future and then make a claim about the weather from X. Or do you know something the rest of us thinking individuals don't? I mean how do you come to the conclusion that summer will not be as cold as winter by using climate predictions alone?
That's a cop out. I really wish you guys wouldn't get your panties in a knot when someone questions the premise of your faith. The only flaw in my logic is where it hampers with your beliefs.
And the site your talking about uses some false logic and logical fallacies in and of itself. I remember it, in one article, attempting to reference a claim that was recently refuted in order to refute the claim that just refuted the previous claim. Yes, your head should be spinning by now. It's like saying your wrong because of this stuff that your claiming is wrong shows something different. But that's what I would expect from a site pioneered by a NASA scientist who said he knew information he was using was flawed but "exaggeration by scientists had its place when it was necessary to mobilize public opinion." [findarticles.com] Of course the father of global warming also published his first climate model claiming global cooling was a threat in 1971. And to make things even worse is the political hijacking of the issue and almost all of it's purposed solutions. But like you've said, we have had this talk before.
Re:Uhh, do you have a model? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wasn't talking about your faith in science. I am talking about your faith in global warming and how it has to be true.
I'm wasn't talking about absolute certainty. I was talking about the ability to predict climate independent of weather. It can't be done which was the point of my post and the reason why separating climate from weather has no bearing on the accuracy claims.
Actually, you don't have evidence in a non-political manner. That is the problem. Hansen fought forever to keep his evidence secrete. It wasn't until someone collected enough of their own to check and find something was wrong before they started opening it up. I have heard the arguments about peer reviewed and all but when a lowly blogger attempts to get the data, he runs into road block after road block, lost data sets, and all of the rest. You have heard the saying, Garbage in Garbage out, well we have no guarentee that there isn't garbage in and until we do, all the work from the political organization, the IPCC, has to be questioned. But, as you will notice by using your expert scientific mouse clicker and go back, I have said nothing disputing global warming now have I. But somehow, pointing out that separating climate from weather with a definition that locks them together and blasting a biased site who's main contributor claims it is perfectly fine to exaggerate because the ends justify the means, you now have me denying science altogether. Well, here is a hint for you, Not trusting the source of something say nothing about it at all. I don't get how if we don't just accept what your deity says without question, we are somehow non-believers and committing blasphemy. In fact, that is so wrong that I'm not sure you can even claim to be scientific in your beliefs. The basic premise of science is to question the answers and test everything.