Cell-based "Roadrunner" Tops Elusive Petaflop Mark

prunedude writes "The NY times is reporting that an American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

Summary should have a shout out

[HolyCoitus]

1350 IBM Linux cluster team. xCAT for pwning.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Summary should have a shout out

[chrysrobyn]

From what I've heard (I'm no expert), these processors are good at certain types of calculations, but horrible at others. Ask a Cell to run Folding@Home, and it'll be blazing. Ask it to do general-purpose computing, though, and you'll quickly see the strength of other processors.

You're precisely correct. Cell's strength is in very predictable workloads (ones it can perform without branch mispredict penalties), very parallelizable workloads (ones that can be distributed over 6-8 SPU's / SPC's) that fit within 256 KB of local storage per SPU (manually managed cache, mapped to main memory). The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads. Roadrunner's Cell-DP eliminates that last limitation. While video games, encryption, nuke simulations and anything else that involves matrix manipulation can really stretch their legs on such a beast, general purpose computing won't find a benefit.

Re:

[adisakp]

The non-double precision floating point enhanced version's (the version in the PS3) strength is further limited to integer and single precision floating point workloads.

BTW, the original Cell can do Double Precision in hardware. The big limitation it had was the DP was not PIPELINED so all DP instructions caused huge stalls in processing. You can use DP on the PS3 just fine and it's still fairly fast (especially compared to software DP) -- it's just not nearly as fast as SP.

The Cell's double precisio [hpcwire.com]

Re:Summary should have a shout out

[jacquesm]

The biggest problem is not to acquire the hardware (the graphics boards can be bought easily enough and some manufacturers make motherboards that will host 4 of them), the problem is in the software.

As you probably know your current desktop computer executes software 'in parallel' on multiple cores. Unless that software is written to use multiple cores then the parallelization will probably take place at the task level, in other words, unless special care was taken during the development each core will be executing a different process (or parts of a process, slicing itself up between multiple processes as long as the number of tasks is greater than the number of cpus).

The cell processor and the graphics cards you are talking about (I assume you refer to the nvidia 'cuda' architecture) are not your ordinary processor (though the cell comes a lot closer). They need special software to get the maximum out of their parallel features, which means that you can only exploit that speed when you are trying to solve a particular class of problems.

The issue is that not every problem is easily adapted to a parallel solution, and for some classes of problems it's simply impossible. For general purpose computing a general purpose cpu (with or without multiple cores) is good enough.

If you have a problem that you can solve in a parallel way (say computing chess moves, analyzing genetic strings, ray tracing an image or fluid dynamics, add your own examples here) then it makes sense to invest the extra time to code the problem up in such a way that if you have lots of cpus that they can each work on a small part of the problem.

The graphics cards are closer to a traditional vector processor than the cell, and thus even less suitable to be used as general purpose cpus.

Re:Cell processor

[BiggerIsBetter]

One thing to remember is that there is various iterations of the cell processor. The Xbox is a 3 core version The Playstation. I believe the Playstation is a 6 core processor. The roadrunner will use a 8 core processor. IBM originally discussed having a 16 core processor. There was not much talk about it afterwards. My guess is that there was significant bus contention issues. The original Power4's shut down one of their cores while running at full speed to avoid contention. The Power6 was designed to overcome these issues.

No, the XBox 360 has a three core PowerPC processor, not a Cell BE processor. The Cell BE in the PS3 has 1 PPE (Power core) and 7 SPEs (that "other" CPU core), while IBM apparently gets to use the fully functional Cells (PPE + 8 SPE) in their more expensive hardware. Those Cells with even fewer functioning SPEs might end up in HDTV TVs or similar.

Re:Cell processor

[bestinshow]

XBox360 has a tri-core in-order PowerPC - each core is actually very similar to the single general purpose PPU in the PS3's Cell.

Cell in addition has 8 SPUs. 1 is disabled in the PS3 for yield reasons, and another is reserved, so there are 6 available for general purpose computing.

Both run at 3.2GHz. I think Cell has at least 3x the vector/streaming power of the XBox 360 CPU, but only 1/3rd of the general purpose capability. Figures pulled from thin air, etc.

But can it run....

[CastrTroy]

By can it run Crysis?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want to?

Crysis is a miserably boring game.

Re:But can it run....

[setagllib]

The marketing for that game was done all wrong. Insiders report that it was meant as an interactive preview of 3DMark2020.

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy]

Nah, really should've been sold as Doom 4. ...which would be about the same thing. Never mind.

Re:

[Warll]

Mah I'm a PC gamer myself, haven't used a handheld in years.

Re:

[beav007]

Can it even run Vista Ultimate?

Re:But can it run....

[nawcom]

Hah you think the military is dumb enough to even install Vista? Haven't you ever heard of military intelli... errm.. nevermind. Yeah, I'm sure they have it installed already.

Re:But can it run....

[Hojima]

Windows: End Program - Untitled - Nuclear Defense. This program is not responding. To return to Windows and check the status of the program, click Cancel. If you choose to end the program immediately, you will loose any unprotected civilians. To end the program now, click End Now. Army personnel: Sir, I think we should send an error report.

Re:

[asc99c]

I was just assuming while the nuclear defenses were down, the unprotected civilians were being catapulted to safety. Or certain death for the ones not wearing parachutes.

Re:But can it run....

[pha7boy]

military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines

yes. yes it can. and, most likely, it will also blend.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

But would any of them be full speed. By your argument, based solely on flops, you could get a cluster of pentium II's to run Crysis. Given enough of them, you could get enough instructions to run many instances of it. However, could you ever accomplish the task of displaying it full screen, with a high frame rate? The game only runs as many threads as it is programmed to run. You can only parallelize it out to as many processors as you have threads. And then the distribution and gathering of the data st

exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop

[anaesthetica]

Military taking the lead on computing as usual. Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?

It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion. Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change.

So, it also has Cell-based processors AND Opterons. I wonder what the functional division between the two chip types is?

"If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you're driving will benefit from this," said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex. Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Who cares? It's awesome sui generis.

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[Renraku]

The military is more progressive because there's not a whole lot they can do to advance things.

They can hope for random breakthroughs, mostly based on chance/luck/etc..

Or they can follow the natural progression of things. If you want to make things explode you have to know the nature of the explosion. And to know the nature of explosions you have to know all about high-energy physics at a molecular level. And to know about high-energy physics you have to know about how molecules and atoms interact. Now, with all of these things you can either make them yourself and study the real explosion, or you can simulate it and confirm with real-world results..which is what they're doing.

They have the resources AND the desire to do so, and therefore, they are doing so. Private industries will rarely do things like this on their own. They're much more likely to wait for someone else to do the research, or research with grants and then patent the results for their own profit. Its the same reason NASA has spurred many developments and improvements in the rest of the civilian world.

This setup will make it easier to study weather, physics, etc, etc. On the other hand, it'll also make it easier to figure out how to make bigger sticks that are lighter and sharper.

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[the_humeister]

Military taking the lead on computing as usual. Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?

I wouldn't say "as usual." The prior computer at the top for more than 2 years was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Re:

[students]

Livermore uses their Blue Genie/L for mostly the same thing. They are responsible for the country's nuclear technology. The upcoming Blue Genie/P will also do weapons simulations, among other things.

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[DogDude]

Military taking the lead on computing as usual. Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?

Are you kidding? [warresisters.org]

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[anaesthetica]

Are you kidding?

Not really. The post you link to describes the defense budget as it dwarfs other spending, but doesn't really argue why or why not that spending is progressive/regressive.

The military was one of the first racially integrated public institutions in the U.S., it researched and funded the Internet, it's pouring money into synthetic fuels right now, and it's pushing the limits of computing power as seen in this article. There are numerous other scientific and social areas in which the military advances society, with far more practical results than do-gooders in other government or public institutions.

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[blahplusplus]

"There are numerous other scientific and social areas in which the military advances society, with far more practical results than do-gooders in other government or public institutions."

It's because the military doesn't have the scrutiny and oversight other institutions do, lets face it. Do public institutions besides the miilitary get secret prison's and liscense to do whatever the want? The military is not held back by moral qualms. We've seen this with all sorts of classified documents coming out of the government. The military has budgets that are kept secret. For anyone to claim the 'military helps us' vs public institutions, we'd have to do an analysis. But that would be fairly difficult and politically sensitive, now wouldn't it?

Re:

[anaesthetica]

...secret prison's [sic]...not held back by moral qualms...

Are you really arguing that the scientific and social advances from the military arise from secret prisons and lack of moral qualms?

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[blahplusplus]

My point is they do not have the same barriers other institutions do: i.e. the gaps funding and scrutiny. My point about mentioning secret prisons was merely an example of the previous point.

Re:

[GigaplexNZ]

The job that JAG's done in opposing Bush and Yoo--and defending both the Gitmo detainees and the Constitution--at the cost of tens, if not hundreds, of individual careers--is nothing less than heroic. It makes me proud to be an American.

Yeah, I would feel really proud too if the leader of my country was an illiterate moron who violated human rights and caused honest people to lose their careers because they chose to do the right thing.

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[religious freak]

Why is the military so much more progressive (with practical results) than any other institution of government?

Military is the expression of the power of a nation as a whole... the means by which nations, using their national resources, keep ahead of the pack. The rest of the government is bloated bureaucracy designed to keep that powerful military in check and keep society functioning.

Re:

[anaesthetica]

You sound like a lot of the scary fin de siècle German political theorists that I have to read for my poli-sci Ph.D. studies. Calm down--we all know how that story ended.

Re:

[religious freak]

Who's excited? I'm not saying if it's good or bad, I'm saying this is the truth.

Re:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it also has Cell-based processors AND Opterons. I wonder what the functional division between the two chip types is?

Each node has two Opterons and 4 PowerXCell 8 processors (an upgrade to the PS3's Cell processor). This allows a developer writing code for the platform to run in a number of different modes: all Opteron, all Cell, or something in between. The first of these (all Opteron) may constitute a significant amount of the early work on the machine by practitioners, as they can simply compile legac

Re:

[StormyWeather]

They are more progressive because lives are at stake in an immediate fashion. Who wants to be the guy that says "yea we could have built a supercomputer to test nuclear mishandling, but we decided it would take too long and be too expensive.. oh, yea sorry about turning the Dallas metroplex into a cherry red ember."

The future

[Renraku]

Who didn't see this coming from Cell?

Re:The future

[Thalin]

This is actually based on Cell 2 or as IBM marketing likes to say it "Cell eXtreme"!

Cell 1 (the Playstation chip) didn't have the double precision floating performance to achieve the petaflop mark; Cell 2 is far better on that front.

Enough With The Fanboyism

[Anonymous Coward]

"I certainly didn't"

He was obviously asking about people with a clue, not stupid little fanboys who love to spout obviously false quotes and claims supposedly made by console makers.

Sony NEVER once claimed the PS2 was a supercomputer. Not ONCE.

The EE WAS powerful, cheap, and power efficient enough that at the time of its arrival on the market it fell under government scrutiny for its potential military uses. The EE utterly SHIT over any other chip on the market or would be on the market for another two year

So what is it for?

[sweet_petunias_full_]

"if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

This contraption makes lots of people really, really, tired of punching on calculators?

calculators

[hansoloaf]

I bet if everyone had the TI-57, it'll take the aforementioned 46 years.
But the TI-68 will cut it down to 23 years.

Re:

[kylehase]

Wow, Roadrunner is going to put a lot of calculator operators out of work.

Change in paradigm

[karvind]

If one looks at http://www.top500.org/ [top500.org] list and compare the CPU frequencies of the top supercomputers - all BlueGene CPUs were running at less than a GHz. And it seemed those low power cores were key to HPC (high performance computing). Cell and opteron - both run at multiple GHz and (presumably consume more power). IBM still has next generation of BlueGene/Q in works and is also for +Petaflop computation.

Re:

[the_humeister]

The Bluegene/L uses a PowerPC 440 chip. However these chips don't include an FPU in the core, unless IBM made special ones with an FPU or they're using a separate FPU chip on the processor boards. I think it's interesting their Linpack score/processor is on par with the #3 spot consisting of quad-core Xeons.

wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Each Compute or I/O node is a single ASIC with associated DRAM memory chips. The ASIC integrates two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors, each with a double-pipeline-double-precision Floating Point Unit (FPU), a cache sub-system with built-in DRAM controller and the logic to support multiple communication sub-systems. The dual FPUs give each BlueGene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6 GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS). Node CPUs are not cache coherent with one another.

Re:

[TubeSteak]

all BlueGene CPUs were running at less than a GHz. And it seemed those low power cores were key to HPC (high performance computing).

Supercomputing is on its way to a water cooled infrastrucure.
IBM is already selling a product under the name bluefire
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207100873 [eetimes.com]
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/IBM-Ships-First-WaterCooled-Supercomputer/ [eweek.com]

I hope we see more water & less air in the future

I feel bad for Whyle E. ...

[CaptainPatent]

...There's no catapult in the world that will catch THAT roadrunner!

so what else is new?

[WheresMyDingo]

the roadrunner always wins, so it no surprise it topped this "petaflop mark" guy (yeesh, what a name).

and roadrunner's always been cel-based, at least in the modern era. i bought one of those cels from the warner bros. store before they went under, nice one too with his tongue sticking out

Perspective?

[Bob54321]

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

That really put it in perspective for me. I normally judge a supercomputer by how many "all Earth people hand calculation years" it can do in a day...

Re:

[Digestromath]

Normally I would compare computers by floating operations per second. However sicne I guess we are going back to the old style of comparing it to people doing calculations by hand. What about all the people on earth using abaci 24/7? Or by leagues per bushel over cubits squared?

Re:

[Thalin]

At IBM we like to measure things in "Libraries of Congress per second", or perhaps "747s of phonebooks per second". ;)

Re:

[Arathon]

What I need to know, is how many candlepower is its HDD access light, and how many horsepower would it take to drive this thing from Tokyo to Timbuktu?

ummm...

[WheresMyDingo]

if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day

probably because most of those people would either try to eat the calculator or sell it for food and medicine

Re:ummm...

[x2A]

Grr, we're already overpopulated without everyone on the planet multiplying t the same time.

Back it my day!

[Anonymous Coward]

The kids these days are lazy, back in my day if we wanted to know if a nuke worked we'd take it out back test it!
Whatever happened to nuked marsh mellows or sitting round with Geiger counters trying to make funny sounds?
Kids are lazy these days!

Not in perspective

[justinlee37]

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

That does not put the performance of the machine in perspective at all. Technical details would be much more accurate and effective.

Re:Not in perspective - this is a media number

[mykepredko]

This is a perfect example of a propellor head trying to come up with an analogy for a media/marketing type. I suspect that this was the only one that the powers that be felt non-techies could relate to. I've been asked to come up with these analogies a couple of times and it can be pretty frustrating on both sides.

I suspect the first example of this happening was trying to estimate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

Other meaningless analogies could be:

• How long it would take Roadrunner to count all the atoms in the universe
  
• What speed your car would run at if the speed difference between Roadrunner and your home computer was multiplied by 60 mph
  
• If we could go this many times faster than the speed of light, how fast could we cross the universe
  
• If in every instruction it could take in one byte of text, how long it would take to read the Library of Congress
  
• How fast it could render "The Incredibles" compared to how long it took the original server farm (actually, this might be one that's understandable)
  
• How fast it could break the 128 bit encryption used when you log onto your bank's web page to pay your bills (this might also be understandable and would probably be a bit scary)
  

The simple fact is that a petaflop computer works faster than humans can conceive and any kind of analogy cannot be comprehended.

myke

Re:Not in perspective - this is a media number

[jareds]

How fast it could break the 128 bit encryption used when you log onto your bank's web page to pay your bills (this might also be understandable and would probably be a bit scary)

No, not at all scary. It's apparently twice is fast as the BlueGene/L, which apparently set a record of 478.2 teraFLOPS. Let's assume it takes 1 floating-point operation to test a single key, which is a gross underestimate. We'll thus assume the Roadrunner can test 10^15 keys per second. Testing 2^128 keys would then take about 10^16 years.

Re:

[mykepredko]

Thanx - I should have done the back of envelope like you've done here before coming up with that particular analogy.

myke

Re:

[swillden]

That's assuming you have to try every single key to break 128-bit SSL encryption. Is that actually the case?

Unless the 128-bit cipher being used is weak, that is the worst case, and the average case is that it takes half that long.

Re:

[jthill]

The analogy I've liked best is distance: in this case, in the time it takes ars's God Box to get to the supermarket, this puppy has been around the world a few times.

A link from LANL itself -- some propaganda

[gardyloo]

I missed all of the general-audience talks which have been given at LANL so far about Roadrunner, but this makes me want to try a bit harder at making it to some of them:

http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/1663.article/d/200805/id/13277 [lanl.gov]

Take that petaflop with a grain of salt

[jimhill]

As a software developer who's worked on the Lab's previous ASC machines (Blue Mountain, Q, Lightning) I can say that once the calculation is run to get a machine atop Jack Dongarra's gee-golly list, it's partitioned, segmented, divided, and subjected to such crappy resource management that if I could trade the entire machine for a pair of coupled 8-core Mac Pros I'd do it in a heartbeat.

The real PITA with these machines is that the powers that be are trying to kill two birds with one stone: they want an R&D platform for advanced computing, but they also want to certify an aging and untestable nuclear stockpile. That rather requires a fairly static platform, and so far our experience with ASC has been that when a machine hits that sweet state, they yank it and give us the next one.

Computing the data pyramids

[Eternal Vigilance]

Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week...

I think this analogy may reveal a little more than intended about government's vision for humanity.

"Let my people goto!"

Re:

[anaesthetica]

You're right. The Bush Administration has had plans from before 9/11 to pour vast sums of money into actuarial and accounting schools through a secret CIA slush fund operating in various former Eastern bloc countries.

The result of their research:

[suck_burners_rice]

The answer is 42. The question is left as an exercise for the reader.

WTF happened to plain old units of measure?

[PseudoThink]

if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day

I'm glad to see the continuing trend of creatively "dumbing down" units of measure (in this case, flops) to the point where they are not only practically useless, but entirely divorced from reality. I would like to propose the following similar, hype-worthy measure for fuel economy:

Old: Miles per gallon
New: Number of miles from which one would smell the excrement from the number of cattle one could feed for a day with the amount of corn it would take to produce one gallon.

Re:

[ozbird]

I'm glad to see the continuing trend of creatively "dumbing down" units of measure (in this case, flops) to the point where they are not only practically useless, but entirely divorced from reality.

Yes - are they regular (infix) or Reverse Polish (postfix) notation calculators? Dumbed-down minds need to know!

Yes, It Does Run Linux

[Doc Ruby]

As I posted the last time this story was reported (in IBM Touts Supercomputers for Enterprise [slashdot.org]") in "Yes, It Does Run Linux" [slashdot.org]:

From IBM's detailed press release [ibm.com]:

the QS22 boasts an open environment, utilizing the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and the open development environment of Eclipse.

That means that a PS3 running Linux [psubuntu.com], even with its ridiculously low 512MB RAM, can be used as a $500 development platform for these CellBE BladeServers.

And, in turn, some QS22 SW might be usable on the PS3, if it can be ported to use the tiny RAM. Or if someone hooks an i-RAM bank to the SATA port as swap/ramdisk, using perhaps iSCSI over its Gb-e for storage.

Now get out there and supercompute!

Old News

[MBHkewl]

This was covered last year, and the Los Alamos website [lanl.gov] had a few interviews with some people involved on what the uses of Roadrunner are. They had a time-line of what phases are to be done, and as far as memory serves me, they were going with Opterons for the first phase, then performance assessment, then add the Cell processors in the third phase.

From these pictures [lanl.gov], it clearly shows they're using IBM Blades (4 chassis in each rack), and IBM already offers BladeQ [ibm.com] servers which use Cell processors for HPC applications. The IBM BladeQ servers pack double the CPUs of a PS3.

If you take a look at the Folding@Home project statistics [stanford.edu], you can see the performance of PS3 boxes, and almost relate...

Explore scientific problems like climate change?

[hamster_nz]

The article mentions that it will be used to explore climate change. At 3MW, perhaps it is likely to cause climate change!

It will take new technologies.

[Jane Q. Public]

It is highly doubtful that the "zettaflop", a million times this petaflop, will be achieved by "conventional" circuitry. That will take optical or some other kind of computing (probably not quantum). The yottaflop will likely be quantum or molecular-state computing, or something unexpected.

NOT MILITARY!

[serviscope_minor]

It's the department of energy, not the military. Specifically, it is at Los Alamos, which is not a military base.

Re:

[mrbluze]

It's the department of energy, not the military. Specifically, it is at Los Alamos, which is not a military base.

What, you mean hundreds of moderator points were wasted on above military-related posts? Woohoo!! Bingo baby!

I misread and expected cell phone supercomputers

[witherstaff]

My first thought when I saw the article title was a cellphone based networked super computer. Something along the lines of Rainbow's End [amazon.com] or Halting State [amazon.com].

I wonder how many iphones would be needed to do a cellphone petaflop computer.

Human Brain

[Kifoth]

A quick Google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=human+brain+petaflop [google.com], suggests that we're probably in spitting distance of at least matching the processing power of a human brain.

Not sure about the software though...

Re:

[francium de neobie]

They're trying to pull 1000 times your lab's results.

Re:

[jacquesm]

maybe he should get 6 billion hand calculators and mail them out ?

That's probably a new contender for the stupidest metric ever, it beats 'libraries of congress per second' hands down.

Re:Question

[avalys]

It will be used for nuclear weapons simulations - primarily for investigating issues related to how warheads will perform as they age.

Re:Question

[Anthony Rosequist]

Before it does weapons simulations, it will first work on some scientific problems, like model testing to predict climate change.

After it's done with that (I wonder how they will determine what done is...), it will go classified and do nuke simulations.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And I've heard that republicans eat babies. As someone who has worked with climate models including data collection I can safely say you're full of shit. There are thousands of research stations collecting the data. For it to be generally corrupted, there'd have to be some vast global conspiracy whereby publically competing research stations and countries agree to privately skew their data.

Now there IS something of a vast global conspiracy (PNAC, Republicans, Bilderberg, etc), but, er, it's not on the p

Re:

[Kirkoff]

I understand that you really don't like certain politicians and certain stances and ideas. I have to wonder though, can you really say that a major political party be considered a conspiracy? This is a political party that holds open elections, has existed since the 1800's and has 55 million members (roughly 1/6 the population of the US) in all 50 states. It doesn't seem to really make great argument for conspiracy.

Data Collection anomalies

[drew30319]

Are you familiar with this site? http://www.surfacestations.org/ [surfacestations.org] There are 1221 USHCN climate stations in the USA and (according to the website) no photographic database of these stations exists. It includes examples like:

Forest Grove, OR (air conditioner exhaust blowing directly on temperature shelter, nearby asphalt and buildings)

and

Aberdeen, WA ( large heat source: sewage treatment plant - nearby parking, hot automobile radiators )

I could see how these would be of concern to anybody interested in d

Re:

[bpkiwi]

Yes, but it would only work if you made that funding available to everyone in the world, or else the data out of wherever it wasn't available would conflict with where the funding was available.

In fact you could analyse such systemic bias by comparing data sets from varying geopolitical areas (say comparing Russian data to US data).

Re:

[bersl2]

You'd need a very large number of abnormalities to make a significant difference, unless there is a disappointingly low number of measuring devices, which I find unlikely. But by all means, if you can find a systematic skew in the results that reinforces itself (rather than cancels itself out by erring in both directions randomly), please present this evidence; accuracy of evidence is a legitimate issue.

Re:Question

[Brian Gordon]

Quick, make it play tic tac toe against itself.

Re:Question

[kylehase]

Perhaps they should invest in a computer to track warhead parts.

Re:Question

[x2A]

The previous model used hundreds of dual core P4s, just running NOP's at full speed. The heat generated, being equivelant to that outputted by a nuke, meant they could run simulations without having to actually write any code.

Re:Question

[attemptedgoalie]

Lets say you have designed a nuclear weapon.

Wouldn't it be really neat to run some tests before you build it?

For instance, how cool would it be to have a simulation that could test a weapon being mishandled, or shot. At every single point from every possible angle at every possible velocity?

It would be nice to know that there is a possibility of detonation if it were to drop off of a loading rack.

Re:

[TechyImmigrant]

>You obviously know nothing about nuclear weapons.

So nobody has to shoot him.

Re:

[Brett Buck]

"shady things" ? What in the world are you talking about?

          Brett

Re:Question

[anaesthetica]

What exactly would the military use a supercomputer for?

The military will use this advanced technology to assist and perhaps automate the RTFA process, also known as Reading The Fucking Article, which would allow you to answer your query without posting.

Re:

[ediron2]

What exactly would the military use a supercomputer for?

They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.

Re:

[mikael]

They can also use a system like that to simulate the response of the populations of other countries to particular events.

DARPA Files Patent On Predictive Simulation [slashdot.org]

Modeling Urban Panic [slashdot.org]

Re:Question

[ScrewMaster]

the only thing I can really think of is the air force doing the obvious shady things that it does.

Uh ... what exactly do you mean by "shady things"? If you have a problem with what our armed forces are doing, you'd be better off leveling your charges at Congress. Ultimately, they're the ones that fund any "shady" things the military does.

Re:

[snl2587]

Uh...codebreaking?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It was designed originally for the PS3. But not solely for it.

Cell was the brainchild of Ken Kutagari of Sony and Peter Hofstee of IBM.

Re:

[CrazyJim1]

Especially if the people on the calculators are just pressing +1 over and over again for 46 years.

This CELL is not single precision

[raftpeople]

The CELL processor is single precision, which translates into wrong answers most of the time. Me guess is that for problems requireing double-precision numerics, you should divide CELL based supercomputer by 10 to 100 (software emulation of double precision is MASSIVELY SLOW), so this is really a teraflop machine. No big whoop...NEXT!!!

Things move fast in technology Jethro, including this 2nd gen of the CELL proc, this is what you missed:

Double Precision FP - 190TFLOPS (5 times faster than 1st CELL)
Memory: Expanded to 32gb
Memory: DDR2 instead of Rambus
65nm (I know, I know, but it's better than 90nm)

Re:

[afidel]

IBM's process at 65nm is pretty good since it includes SOI and strained silicon. They are going to make the original cell at 45nm for Sony so I'm sure cell-2 will move to that process eventually, the East Fishkill fab has to be pretty busy since AFAIK it's IBM's only 45nm plant and it just started volume production this quarter.

Re:

[faragon]

The difference between the two Cells it is not "abysmal", let's do some comparisons:

a) PS3 "Classic Cell" 1 PPC64 w/ 2 threads and 7 SPEs (8, but one disabled, defective or not):

GFLOPS 32-bit (float): 3.2GHz * 8 FLOPS/Hz * 7 SPEs = 179.2 GFLOPS
GFLOPS 64-bit (double): 3.2GHz * 1 FLOPS/Hz * 7 SPEs = 22.4 GFLOPS (huge penalty, because of simulation via unoptimized simple precission operation)
GFLOPS 64-bit (double) a optimized 32-bit operation [netlib.org]: 3.2GHz * 3.9 FLOPS/Hz * 7 SPEs = 87.36 GFLOPS

Re:

[thatskinnyguy]

That might be just the standard meme here, but this time it really got me to think. Having run a Beowulf cluster in the past, what would one use to connect all of these supercomputer nodes together to make a more massive computer? Cat5 just won't cut it in this situation. I have to wonder if fiber could even keep up.

Allow me to oblige ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

Take everyone on earth, and put them each in a different Ferrari Testarossa [wikipedia.org] with no engine, no gas in the tank, and no ignition system. That is how fast this thing moves.

Some other equally useful analogies:

Take the same aforementioned people, and give them a OLPC. The amount of time it takes them all to calculate their degree of separation from Kevin Bacon [wikipedia.org], and divide by a googolplex [wikipedia.org]. , then round up. That is the number of people that think the calculator analogy in the article was a good one.

Take the inverse of the clock frequency and multiply it by the number of instructions required for Windows to boot far enough to attempt to obtain an IP Address dynamically. Add to that the time it takes for the DHCP request to reach your Billion made router [apcmag.com]. That is the amount of time it takes for it to hose your router. Take the inverse of the clock frequency and multiply it by the number of instructions it takes to apply a service pack. Add it to the boot time, calculated as described above. That is the amount of time it takes to achieve a BSOD.

HTH,

- Thomas P. D'Agostino