IBM Building 20 Petaflop Computer For the US Gov't 248
eldavojohn writes "When it's built, 'Sequoia' will outshine every super computer on the top 500 list today. The specs on this 96 rack beast are a bit hard to comprehend as it consists of 1.6 million processors and some 1.6TB of memory. That's 1.6 million processors — not cores. Its purpose? Primarily to keep track of nuclear waste & simulate explosions of nuclear munitions, but also for research into astronomy, energy, the human genome, and climate change. Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012."
Processors, not cores (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Aluminum foil hat. (Score:3, Insightful)
It could also be used to search for "suspicious behaviour" by searching Government databases, Credit card companies' databases, credit bureau databases, Choicepoint's, telecommunication companies' databases, airlines, and any other firm that the Government bullies into giving access.
Well, that's not as paranoid as you might think. The case against is quite simply the publicity that's been given to this behemoth of a machine, so I really don't think it's too likely in this particular case.
However this is EXACTLY how you go about putting together a machine for intelligence purposes. The key to running an intelligence service is deniability at as many levels as possible, and keeping anyone from seeing the big picture.
So you comission some huge piece of hardware, with a benign-but-complex sounding (usually simulation) function.
Then you get the low leve software put together for the platform. If that can be done in modular fashion, so much the better. You don't mix the platform with the real world data during design.
At the final stages, and presumably in house, you can write your overlaying interface (which intelligence employees will use), and only then is the pure function of the suite necessarily made apparent.
Of course there are lots of people in the design process that have a notion of how things are being put together, what they will interface with, etc, who can take a stab at the function. And sure, everyone signs an NDA just because. However, since nobody sees all of it, and the big picture is never confirmed outside of a very small number of people, and nobody is going to break an NDA to talk about part of something that MAY have some function... you essentially reduce the risk of leaking your cababilities, system spec, and intention by a not insignificant amount.
So let's see.... (Score:5, Insightful)
- IBM is building a computer that will be functional in about 3.5 years.
- The power of this computer, in 3.5 years, will outshine every other supercomputer currently running today.
I should hope so! What's the point of taking 3.5 years to build the thing, if it's going to be 3.5 years out of date by the time they build it?
Heck, in 3.5 years, your desktop computer will be 4 times more powerful than anything currently running today, too.
Duuh.
Re:Aluminum foil hat. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need 20 petaflops to do that, you need a few tens of teraflops and a really really huge memory and really really fast IO. You'd do much better with some of the 1/4TB memory systems from Sun or IBM + spending a huge pile of money on SSDs than a real supercomputer.
The cost of the IO interconnect is a huge chunk of cash to sink into a supercomputer that you just don't need for that sort of tin foil hat application.
Re:Why always nuclear simulation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because funding for military expenditures is much easier to obtain than funding for climate research.
Re:Aluminum foil hat. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, I don't believe it.
I think using a BlueGene for run-of-the-mill data processing would be a horrible waste of money. There's simply no need for things like a parallel filesystem or PB of RAM or low-latency interconnects. You want to "scale out" for distributed processing like you're talking about, not "scale up".
No, I'd bet intelligence gathering is done on Google-like processor farms.
Because we can accurately model (Score:3, Insightful)
nuclear explosions whereas climate simulations don't have all the variables.
Actually I think they model the effects on decay in current nuclear weapons. Besides its not something I want them to physically test.
Re:at least they admit its true purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
And this can't be done with say, Excel?
Ahh, Excel... the first choice in corporate database management systems.
How many other slashdotters work at fortune XXX firms where on paper some executive bean counter says "we use oracle" but on the ground all databases are done in Excel (along with a smattering of everything else?)
It is a step up from three jobs ago, where at another fortune XXX the database management system of choice was what boiled down to an administrative assistant and Lotus's word processing solution. Yes we used plain english to request that Patti make changes instead of sql update statements. Also our sql select statements always began with "hey Patti, could you look up...". Any yes, all "ORDER BY" stanzas were in fact powered by swear words and performed by cut and paste.
Sadly I am not making any of this up.