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."

Change in paradigm

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.

I feel bad for Whyle E. ...

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

so what else is new?

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?

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...

ummm...

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...

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

Take that petaflop with a grain of salt

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.

Re:Question

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

Re:Question

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:Question

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

Re:Question

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:exaflop, zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraf

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

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

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

"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:Not in perspective - this is a media number

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

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:The future

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.

This CELL is not single precision

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:But can it run....

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.

Allow me to oblige ...

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

Re:Summary should have a shout out

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.

Re:Summary should have a shout out

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:Summary should have a shout out

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

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.