IBM To Build 3-Petaflop Supercomputer 73
angry tapir writes "The global race for supercomputing power continues unabated: Germany's Bavarian Academy of Science has announced that it has contracted IBM to build a supercomputer that, when completed in 2012, will be able to execute up to 3 petaflops, potentially making it the world's most powerful supercomputer. To be called SuperMUC, the computer, which will be run by the Academy's Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany, will be available for European researchers to use to probe the frontiers of medicine, astrophysics and other scientific disciplines."
Not POWER7, Not BlueGene, (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
"The system will use 14,000 Intel Xeon processors running in IBM System x iDataPlex servers."
IBM has two in-house HPC platforms that could both reach 3 PFLOPS (BlueGene/Q and POWER7), but instead they're building a Xeon cluster. I'm surprised that they would want to put a machine near the top of the TOP500 that wasn't a full-on IBM benefit--maybe IBM Germany is the contractor, and they don't have the R&D expertise? Or the Xeon cluster is cheaper/easier to program and maintain?
Re:How should we measure supercomputers now? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had to really think about measuring the efficiency of a simulation and I came up with a single answer: money. I was at a lecture about gyrokinetic simulations, and when I heard about the amount of resources being used for some simulations, I asked "how much does one of these simulations cost, in euros?". Luckily for me, the guy knew (large simulations cost in order of thousands), and he also knew how much an experiment on ITER will cost (order of a million); his argument was "it's obviously efficient to run a thousand simulations and pick the most relevant set of parameters for an experiment afterwards".
I think this is the way to go with comparing supercomputers: "In order to simulate experiment X, we needed N1 euros for the developers, and N2 euros of electricity to run the code on a machine that cost N3 euros to build". If you want to be thorough, add some maintenance costs. It's a bit complicated, because developers might actually be researchers, and it's not very clear how much of their time goes into writing code... but we don't really have a better way of measuring efficiency.