Japanese Supercomputer K Hits 10.51 Petaflops 125
coondoggie writes "The Japanese supercomputer ranked #1 on the Top 500 fastest supercomputers broke its own record this week by hitting 10 quadrillion calculations per second (10.51 petaflops), according to its operators, Fujitsu and Riken.
The supercomputer 'K' consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said."
The supercomputer 'K' consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs and has a theoretical calculation speed of 11.28 petaflops, the companies said."
And the answer was... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
infinity minus 1
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Significant advance . . . (Score:2)
Fully boots Windows in under three minutes!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You've got to remember that booting the OS doesn't mean that the login or MIC mechanisms actually work, it just means they're running.
Re: (Score:1)
I can cold boot to desktop in under a min with Win7 maybe you need to upgrade your windows 98 or at least uninstall that horrible Bonzi Buddy. I fucking hate that purple monkey he still haunts my dreams.
Re: (Score:2)
The only way I can think you can boot to desktop on Win7 cold is if you mean liquid nitrogen cold with severe overclocking.
Re: (Score:1)
Warm boot: A simple reset.
Re: (Score:2)
Duh. I know what a cold boot means. But there isn't a PC that can cold boot inside of 1 minute using either a regular BIOS or EFI to a Windows desktop in under a minute unless it's overclocked.
Re: (Score:2)
BUILD showed off a laptop that cold booted Win8 to desktop in 5-8 seconds. I thought that was pretty good.
Re: (Score:2)
Old story.
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ [lwn.net] - Linux booted in 5 seconds to usable desktop. Back in 2008.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/01/13/2248207/embedded-linux-1-second-cold-boot-to-qt [slashdot.org] - boot to QT in 1 second.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It takes longer than 15 secs for Windows to start up everything. (Booting to a usable state != booting to the point where something is on the screen. The claim was to boot to a desktop - which means all all initial services up and no further initialization being performed.)
Re: (Score:2)
Not always. My PC (with SSD) takes 9 seconds from the end of the BIOS, to on the desktop, usable, with hard drive activity completely finished and stopped. I have turned off one or two extraneous services (crap like Adobe Updater/Apple Updater/Google Updater/Office Preload etc), but other than that haven't done anything special to optimise. SSDs are very fast, especially for that 'post boot churning' stuff which is a lot of random IO.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It should be noted that an Apple MacBook with an SSD boots almost instantly. But that should come to no surprise because Apple owns both the hardware and OS. They can optimize as they wish.
The 13" i7 / 4GB / 256GB SSD Macbook Air takes as long to boot OSX Lion as it does to boot Windows 7.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but a VM image isn't a cold boot. A plain VM image is essentially a warm boot (a lot of the system is already initialized) and most VMs are quite capable of handling VM images that are partially into a boot (since the first phase of the bootstrap really doesn't do anything that's important to a VM).
If you're going to consider VMs and other such hacks, then Coreboot + Linux + image of a ramdisk in Flash would give you a 3 second bootup time to a console, just not to a GUI desktop. With a few additional
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Toshiba L755D-U stock everything, Win7HP: 57sec from cold. After that: virtual machines.
OSX: 3m40s
SuSE 11.4: 1m14s
XPSP3: 23s
Win2K: 1m24s
Timed with this reply box open.
My netbook (stock EeePC 1008HA) boots XP Home in just over a minute.
Re: (Score:2)
Huh? My PC takes less than 20 seconds from cold boot to usable desktop, and every component in it bar one is ~4 years old. 11 seconds for the BIOS and AHCI crap, and 9 seconds actual boot (broken down into 8 seconds Win logo, 1 second loading to desktop). No exaggeration - just timed it to make sure.
The 'one component' that is not 4 years old is a Corsair Force SSD, which of course is the main reason it boots that quickly. But even with the old rotating hard drive it was well under a minute. If your PC take
Re: (Score:1)
But there isn't a PC that can cold boot inside of 1 minute using either a regular BIOS or EFI to a Windows desktop in under a minute unless it's overclocked.
You've just made my PC disappear.
Re: (Score:1)
Turning on fast boot in the bios and having a SSD is all you need.
Re: (Score:2)
I wasn't aware Windows still ran on SPARC.
Great (Score:2)
You can play a wicked game of Space Invaders on it !
Re: (Score:1)
How about a nice game of chess instead?
Re: (Score:2)
No thanks. Blew up four worlds and sent a fifth tumbling into a black hole after GNU chess accidentally crossed pipes with Galactic Thermonuclear War IV, the Sequel.
Re: (Score:2)
Skynet is bigger (Score:1)
consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs
Where goes the border between a supercomputer and a cluster?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
consists of 864 racks, comprising a total of 88,128 interconnected CPUs
Where goes the border between a supercomputer and a cluster?
Communication time. Trying to run a massively parallelized plasma physics simulation on a mere cluster is essentially a waste of time. The scaling is terrible.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Basically, yes. The distinction is whether a system is tightly-coupled or loosely-coupled.
Re: (Score:2)
A linux cluster using a hypercube topology of infiniband connections would give you a fully-connected system with full-bandwidth between any two points. A butterfly network will do that but in a slightly smaller subset of cases. A fat tree would give a much smaller subset, but it would still be superconnected. A fat tree using 10 gig ethernet wouldn't have the raw bandwidth for a superconnection but it could still be considered a supercomputer (just).
Re:Skynet is bigger (Score:4, Informative)
Technically, a cluster can be a supercomputer if it is tightly-coupled, which basically means high bandwidth, low latency and as little overlap on the fabric as possible. (ie: 88,128 PCs linked via the Internet could be considered a grid but it would not be considered a supercomputer. The same number of PCs in a server room using a hundred or so switches, with each switch stuffed to the gills, would be considered a regular cluster. The same PCs in the same room using high-end switches linked as a Fat Tree, Butterfly or - ideally - a hypercube topology would be considered a supercomputer. The same PCs in the Cloud would be considered a torrential downpour.)
The problem is ultimately, as Plasmaphysiker says, communication time. From a technical standpoint you can just as easily say "a supercomputer is any computer that can mimic or better a vector processor's overall performance for the same compute power". Ok, maybe not as easily as it's longer to say, but it comes to the same thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Computers don't scale linearly. Amdahl's Law. The reason home computers don't go beyond 16 cores is that even getting a 16-way SMP is a horrifically difficult problem. If you built a 32-core machine it would run SLOWER than a 16-core one because of all the overheads (locking on the bus, scheduling, interprocessor communications, stuff like that). You can't just add cores and expect a faster machine. You have to put in an enormous amount of time and effort to engineer the design and you really have to do so
Re: (Score:1)
So 16 cores is certainly not some sort of upper bound at the moment. The only thing keeping it out of sub 1k desktop computers is price. And that'll come down in a die shrink or 2. No fundamental new design r
Re: (Score:2)
Whats so big in this ? Sounds like every now and then someone adds another 10,000 new chips and they have a new world record holding super computer.
Interconnect. Adding more nodes has a linear cost increase, but connecting them all with low-latency links is difficult. It is easy enough to buy a 48-port switch, but a 1000 port switch with low latency is a completely different story, and if you need 10000 ports you are in fully custom territory - it can easily cost a lot more than all the nodes combined.
Re: (Score:3)
Spock: "Computer. This is a class one priority directive. Compute, to the last digit, the value of Pi."
Computer: "The answer is 10, base Pi."
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Real artificial intelligence - "No. I'm not falling for that one."
imagine ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Screw crysis. Let's load dwarf fortress up on this bitch.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe this system can finally process The Great Adamantine Space Elevator...
Re: (Score:2)
Which abuses cave in mechanisms to pump magma to space where it falls down and boils away the oceans. At *pinky to lip* one million frames per second.
Pretty Interesting, But.. (Score:1)
I wonder how that would compare to the combined computational power of every smartphone, laptop, and desktop computer around the world.
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.xyster.net/blog/?p=40 [xyster.net]
Claims an iphone 3g can do 20Mflops double precision linpack.
Assuming there are about 100M handsets with that level of performance:
2000 Million (10^6), Million(10^6) flops = 2 * 10^15 = 2 petaflops, and that's just the smartphones. The laptops and desktops would both perform better, and have a much higher count.
Does anyone have... (Score:1)
A car analogy? Or how may libraries of congress / football fields?
Seriously I doubt 10.51 petaflops means anything to anyone except a small coterie of supercomputer nerds.
Re: (Score:2)
Ugh. Please mod parent down.
To provide a more accurate and specific comparison:
An i7 2600K can get around 130 GFLOPS.
10 Petaflops == 10,000 Teraflops == 10,000,000 GFLOPS
So that is around five orders of magnitude between your desktop and this computer. Not two.
Re: (Score:1)
A mid-range GPU pulls about 10 gigaflops. This is a million times that.
Re: (Score:3)
A car analogy? Or how may libraries of congress / football fields?
Seriously I doubt 10.51 petaflops means anything to anyone except a small coterie of supercomputer nerds.
That's why I read Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
It's enough to accurately simulate the meaningful chemistry of about 1/100% of a human brain, in real time.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't they turn it up to eleven? (Score:2)
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't k
K machine technology (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer [wikipedia.org]
IBM has the Sequoia system coming on line in 2012 and it is also targeted at the 20 Petaflop range. It will be significantly more power efficient at 3000 Mflops/watt, three times lower then the K system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sequoia [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Be patient. Transcomputational problems take time.
Re: (Score:2)
With so much power one would think that it could have already discovered fusion [...]
No, the number of cores needs to increase by another two orders of magnitude before we achieve ignition.
Re: (Score:2)
They've invented nuclear weapons maintenance, isn't that enough for you?
Re: (Score:2)
No one would buy it because nothing would run on it.
Real-world uses! (Score:4, Interesting)
How many bitcoins per hour is that?
Re: (Score:1)
According to bitcoinwatch.com [bitcoinwatch.com], the computing power is around 10% of the bitcoin network.
145 (+/- a few) blocks are solved every 24 hours. Each block is 50 bitcoins, plus any transfer fees, but I'll ignore those.
50*145/24 = 302 bitcoins (and change) per hour. 10 % of that would be ~30 bitcoins per hour.
At current rates, that's around 88 dollars per hour.
Most, if not all, of that money would probably go to pay the electric bill.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks to you a fuse just blew in Bernanke's head.
Difficult to believe... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
The SPARC64 VIIIfx can carry out 8 floating-point instructions per core per cycle.
88,128 cpus x 8 cores x 2.0e9 cycles/s x 8 flops/cycle = 11.28 petaflops maximum theoretical speed.
How is it used? (Score:2)
I've always wondered how supercomputer time is rationed. How much does computer time on these things cost? How is the cost calculated? Is time divided up something like how it's done on a large telescope, where the controlling organization get proposals from scientists, then divvies up the computer's available time according to what's been accepted? Do they multi-task (run more than one scientists' program at one time)? Does the computer run at top power (10pf) at all times, or does the resource usage go up
Re: (Score:2)
For the very little I know, when you rent time, you request a certain amount of capacity. So more than one thing can run at a time. I would imagine it would be hard to write something for a massively paralleled system. That's all I got.
Re: (Score:2)
How much does computer time on these things cost? How is the cost calculated? Is time divided up something like how it's done on a large telescope, where the controlling organization get proposals from scientists, then divvies up the computer's available time according to what's been accepted?
On the supercomputer centers I'm familiar with, scientists write proposals which are evaluated by some kind of scientific steering committee which meets regularly (say, once per month), and gives out a certain amo
Yeah, it can be unpleasant (Score:1)
I get petaflops sometimes when I eat at Super Taco Burrito down on Jackson at Halsted. Man, the mega-super is really tasty but you suffer later.
With Super Taco Burrito and all the gyros places on the corner, that's ground zero for intestinal distress. But something keeps pulling me back there.
Now what were we talking about?
Oh yeah, is it Spring Back and Fall Forward or the other way around? Damn, now I got a taste for one a those mega-super burritos and an order of guac. I think they're open til midnigh
Jaguar Will Become The Fastest Soon! (Score:1)
#1 (Score:2)
The Japanese supercomputer ranked #1 on the Top 500 fastest supercomputers
Rumor has it that it's also #1 in the top 2,342 fastest supercomputers.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also #1 in the top 1 fastest supercomputers. What was your point, because I don't get it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What have we discovered recently that we couldn't, if we didn't have a supercomputer?
Weather forecasts are now 0.002% more accurate