BOINC Exceeds 2 Petaflop/s Barrier 114
Posted
by
kdawson
from the faster-faster-for-science dept.
from the faster-faster-for-science dept.
Myrrh writes "Though an official announcement has not yet been made, it would appear that the BOINC project as a whole has exceeded two petaflop/s performance. The top page features this legend: '24-hour average: 2,793.53 TeraFLOPS.' According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)."
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing. BOINC requires no CO2 to operate.
It could just as easily be run on computers powered by nuclear or solar power, producing no CO2 (past initial construction).
Why does CO2 have to be the end-all-be-all of everything? Why not ask how much coal dust or mercury is now in the atmosphere thanks to the plants that power most of those computers.
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:2, Insightful)
Since they know what CPUs are running on every BOINC client and the thermal power of them are generally known, it should be possible to calculate...
That only counts CPU usage. It doesn't count I/O, which would at least include memory I/O, disk I/O, network I/O.
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Insightful)
I can guarantee that several orders of magnitude more kWh are consumed by computers that are needlessly on and idle.
Running BOINC on a computer that's sitting idle helps improve its energy efficiency. It may be consuming electricity, but at least then it's doing something.
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad. So was the coming overpopulation and world famine. And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....
There are more important questions. Much of this energy would be used anyway, but it would be in centralized supercomputers. This way though it's cheaper for the scientists so we can get more research done, even though it's slightly less efficient.
I'm just really tired about CO2 being discussed attached to everything. "Should I buy new shoes?" "Well, the CO2 produced from rubber is... and.... but...".
Why is this being compared to top500? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is NOT a supercomputer. This is a cluster, and a very slow cluster at that. It seems like people think that anything fast is a "supercomputer" and as techies, we ought to know better.
What makes a supercomputer "super" is its internode communication. You have extremely fast links so that, in theory, any node can access the memory from any other node as it would its own local memory. Now in reality there are some performance penalties, but still. Basically you really have created one large computer, rather than tons of small ones.
This is a cluster, which is as the name implies just a bunch of little computers networked in some fashion working on the same problem. That's great, but not the same thing. The nodes do not have high speed communication, some may even be on modems and only connected occasionally.
Now, why does this matter? Well it depends on the problem you are trying to solve. Some problems need very little communication. A good example would be cracking cryptography. You just divide up the keyspace among all your nodes. There's also very little data to send back and forth. You send you the problem, consisting of the encrypted message to the nodes, and then all the communication from this on is:
Node: Didn't find the key.
Controller: Ok try this range.
Node: Ok.
As such link speed of the cluster can be very slow. Well other problems still work in a clustered environment, but need higher link speeds like gig Ethernet. 3D rendering would be an example. All the nodes can act independent, they are just divided up on frames to render, or parts of a frame or whatever. However since the problem and results are much larger in this case, they need faster communication to make it practical. A modem won't cut it for transferring images that are 50MB each when you are rendering thousands.
However, there are other problems where there is heavy inter node communication. A particle simulation would be like this. Since what happens with one particle affects all others, nodes have to chat continuously. For this, you need a supercomputer. The bandwidth of links must be extremely high and the latency must be extremely low, or else processor power will be wasted just waiting on getting the data that is needed.
So just because something has a lot of CPUs and can crunch a lot of numbers, doesn't make it a supercomputer.
Re:Why is this being compared to top500? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no reason "supercomputer" needs to only refer to monolithic machines with high-speed interprocess communication, merely because it has primarily meant that in the past.
82% solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why is this being compared to top500? (Score:3, Insightful)
Barrier? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think not: 2 petaflops is just a matter of recruiting enough computers and having them running BOINC at the same time. If it has achieved this mark, then it couldn't have been that much of a barrier, could it?