Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer 154
Protoclown writes "The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."
Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
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From the minimum-requirements-for-crysis dept.
How about running Crysis...on VISTA!
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How about economic modeling?
Nothing beats a pair of dice.
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They tried, but the computer crashed.
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How do you model PILLAGE and THEFT and CONFIDENCE GAMES?
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Accurate economic modeling needs infinite resources, as the existence of the economic modeler needs to be taken into account, and it could be argued that the entire universe would have to be modelled 100% accurately - one atom being in a different place could cause drastically different outcomes years down the line, causing different economic conditions.
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The same could be said of any simulation of a system where both the system and the simulation itself aren't completely independant (and, one could say, always have been). But since that's an unrealistic expectation we approximate, and AFAIK in the case of economics we do it pretty well.
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Of course, the climate models have failed to correctly predict global temperate going forward. In particular, James Hansen's most famous prediction has failed miserably -- see http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/25/hansen_forecast_1988.jpg [typepad.com] , which calls into question Hansen's and Saint Gore's doomsday predictions.
Curve fitting are easy; prediction is hard. Given the lack of prediction success of the climate models, true global economic models will probably have the same issues.
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Look at the caption on your graph. Hansen's Scenario A is a high emissions scenario which does not correspond to the emissions which actually occurred. If you want to legitimately test the skill of a climate model, you need to compare apples to apples. In this case, Hansen's Scenario B is the one that most closely corresponded to the real emissions trajectory. (Since Hansen is a climate scientist, not an economist, he gave a range of possible emissions scenarios and did not claim the world would follow
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Ultimately human behavior is near-continuous series of yes/no decisions. Our brains iterate pretty deeply, but at some level it's ones and zeros. Though we may need more petaflops than angels on the head of a pin before we can scratch that itch. At any rate, the application of such a model will probably always doom it to failure.
How much do we really know about climate? Probably a lot less than we think. Scientists are always so sure they are right. And then a few decades pass and they realize they weren't.
Re:Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scientists are always so sure they are right. And then a few decades pass and they realize they weren't. And then they repeat that same behavior.
Not really. Most scientists know they're always wrong, they just try to be less wrong each time. Hence the scientific method.
There's a brilliant article by Asimov about it, in fact, "The Relativity of Wrong" if you care about it.
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Pre-marital sex?
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Every time you have sex outside marriage, god kills an economist (and a kitten)
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The fact that they are immune to gods wrath should tell you something about them....
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I would suggest that marital sex results in offspring more frequently* than pre-marital sex, if you get my point.
*more offspring per "event", on average.
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I would suggest that you can't be sure of that, especially not for firstborns. You'll have to do some math on an awful lot of people and when you do so you'll make quite a few enemies and find out that a large number of firstborns were conceived before their parents married, in fact were the reason their parents married.
Try it!
(and if you're a firstborn then you are the obvious test case ;) )
Yeah, the supercomputing stuff is nice and all... (Score:3, Insightful)
But I really got it to play Tempest 2000.
How does that work? (Score:2)
So, like, how do so many people use the computer effectively? Do they have a sign-in sheet? I bet there's a long line. :p~
Re:How does that work? (Score:5, Informative)
There is a queueing system. If you want to run a job on a machine like this, you log into the control node (which is just a linux box) and submit your job to the queue, including how many CPU's you need for it and how much time you need on them.
A scheduling algorithm then determines when the various jobs waiting in the queue get to run, and sends mail to their owners when they start and stop.
On many machines there is a debug queue with low limits for number of CPU's and runtime, and thus fast turnover; this is used to run little jobs to ensure everything is working right before you submit the big job to the main queue.
Each project has an al
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Wow, I was actually joking, but ... cool. I actually thought it worked more like a mainframe/*nix terminal server.
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NCCS is a capability site, so no. You just need to be willing to wait for your job to bubble up to the top of the queue. In fact, as a capability site, the whole point is to develop codes that can run on the entire machine. Now, once your job runs, you will have to wait a while to get another opportunity, as the queues are set up to provide an 8 week moving average of "fairness".
yes but does it run vista/crysis (Score:1)
well that got that one out the way
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It can't, because Crysis is not multithreaded. If you can figure out a way to parallelize it, then you certainly could run Crysis on it.
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Hell, you could *simulate* an x86_64 CPU on that thing, and it would not even hiccup on Crysis on Vista with every setting set to "Extreme". :D
I wonder if someone could replace the engine by a full global illumination raytracer first.
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I don't think you have a clue how such a machine works. To simulate a non-trivially-parallelizable system like an x86_64 on it you could run your simulation on exactly the same number of cpu's as you have cores in your simulated cpu, or less (for a much easier to program simulation).
Clusters such as these are *built* using standard hardware, in this case a (rather large) bunch of AMD opterons.
If you can show me how to run 'Crysis on Vista' faster on rack with 10 pcs without rewriting either (and I did not s
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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So, I'm standing in front of my new Jag, with my WOW CD in my trembling hands. Where do I plug in my Game Keyboard, and Mouse? There's nothing in the owners manual about where the plug is to connect to my Cable Box!? How much was this thing again?
And another thing, where is the Cup Holder?
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It was eliminated from this model. But you can buy an extra toilet seat!
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Non-Obligatory Frisky Dingo Reference (Score:2)
Boosh!
Kudos to Atari (Score:5, Funny)
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I always knew you could pull it off!!
That's nothing. I'll have the world's most powerful supercomputer in a month. This is what I do... See.. they took 200 cabinets and added that to the already present 84....
This is how I win. I add 400 cabinets!
AHAHAHHAHAa!!! I GOT THE MOST POWERFUL ONE NOW! MUAHAHAHAHAH 200 ain't shit on my 400! ...... I just hope noone else can imagine a number greater than 400 and beat me....
good upgrade path (Score:3, Insightful)
The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system.
That sounds like Cray engineered this to aggregate components across product generations. For short product life cycles that seems like a great idea, not throwing out the old system when you get the new one but combining the two systems instead. Though obviously for long product life cycles it would be a losing proposition; The space and power requirements of inefficient older components would be greater than the space and power savings of upgrading to the latest model + the expense of the upgrade.
Re:good upgrade path (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that hard... (Score:2)
These systems are not so tightly integrated as you may imagine. True, many size a full-speed fabric just-right, each little bit costs a ton. However, commonly at scale, you only have full-speed fabric in large subsections anyway, and oversubscribe between the subsections. Jobs tend to be scheduled within subsections as they fit, though the subsection interconnects are no slouch.
This is particularly popular as the authortitative Top500 benchmark is not too badly impacted by such a network topology, and re
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i can easily imagine the hardware people making the interconnect lanes be backward compatible, but i believe there has been some endpoint capability changes between the two generations.
whats difficult to believe is that they actually managed to encorporate the necessary changes in the resource allocator
translation???? (Score:1)
Can someone please translate the performance into people/hand held calculator/time and space into number of libraries of congress? I am not sure what the numbers they're talking about mean.
Thanks.
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It would take them roughly a quarter million years with no breaks of any kind to do what this machine can do in one second.
Re:translation???? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not nearly that bad... more like 3 days. I failed to realize that my 270000 figure was seconds not years.
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I knew.. (Score:2)
Tm
!scimanydomreht fo wal dnoceS (Score:1)
Will environmentalists ever stop trying to reverse the second law of thermodynamics?
"Insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Damn.
"Used for open science..." (Score:1)
There are much bigger computers around in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore that are used to model thermonuclear weapons sitting around in storage to see if they'll still go pop when we push the Big Red Button.
The scientific community would like to use these machines for something useful, and in fact the scientists at Los Alamos have allowed some folks from my lattice QCD group to use a bit of spare time on it. Unfortunately the UNIX security features aren't enough; they weren't allowed to ftp our data out,
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You, sir, are an idiot.
LANL, LLNL, and SNL are all weapons labs. ORNL is primarily a science lab.
I myself have worked at three of these labs and held an account on an earlier iteration of Jaguar as well as some of LANL's other supercomputing clusters, so I ought to know.
ORNL's Jaguar cluster, although parts of it are I think "controlled" rather than open so that it can run export-controlled code, is not at all classified. It's used for biology, astronomy, physics, CFD, etc.
Also, if you knew the first thing
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You, sir, can't read.
He was specifically talking about LANL and LLNL rather than ORNL.. that was the entire point.
Granted, yes, his description of disallowing classified non-classified connectivity as "ludicrous" is a little off-base, although writing things down by hand really is stupid- there are plenty of procedures in place for putting data on transportable media and then arranging to declassify that media once it has been verified so that it can be used elsewhere.
That doesn't change his fundamental po
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In that case, pardon my misunderstanding in thinking that his post was at all related to the posted article.
His title, "Used for open science...", was a quotation from the summary specifically about the ORNL computer. His rant about "much bigger computers around" was plausibly interpreted as the biggest one, the new ORNL cluster. I certainly must have been misled.
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So, let me get this straight: If someone writes something you think is not true he or she is an 'idiot', whereas if you write something that you admit wasn't true you 'have been misled' ?
Upgrade! (Score:1)
They should really upgrade, Jaguar is ancient!
64-bit Jaguar (Score:1, Informative)
remember that its not a true 64-bit multimedia system its two 32-bit systems connected together XD
Folding@Home Contribution? (Score:3, Insightful)
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To have complete and accurate pre-computed models of all steps in the protein folding process for all possible mutations of the AIDS virus
1. Each trajectory would be several terabytes (possibly verging on petabypes).
2. The largest simulation I know of is this one: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/STMV/ [uiuc.edu] they simulated for 50ns and it's 10 times smaller than HIV. Protein folding takes milliseconds, not nanoseconds... it's not really tractable right now. I don't know how much cpu time the simulation took but it would have been a lot.
3. Clusters like these are rarely idle, jobs are queued up to run when the cpus become available.
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There's no reason, whatsoever, to use a highly-connected, high-bandwidth HPC machine, like Jaguar, on distributed computing jobs. There are other very worthy jobs that can be run on such a system, that can't be run on a pile of desktops all over the internet. Use the real supercomputers for real supercomputer jobs. There are plenty of idle xbox in the world for distributed computing.
what, no 'Vista capable' jokes? (Score:1)
And I downloaded the summary and all the comments too! wtf?
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Awww shit dude, your day is totally ruined! Don't worry, I think Crysis and Beowulf made it in. Phew! I thought /. was losing its edge!
Love the paint job! (Score:3, Informative)
Check out the gallery if you haven't.
I've always wanted to get some custom graphics like that on my server racks. Maybe a penguin, a butterfly, and a can of Raid. :)
Supercomputers definitely don't look as exciting as they did in the "old days".
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Who said super computing had to be boring?
That's the kind of work I wish I could be doing.. building and configuring those monsters.
That being said, look at the size of that room! If half of it is the computer, then that's one big open space left doing nothing.
I'm sure they'll use it for something eventually.
not that great (Score:1)
It's been offline a lot [ornl.gov] this month...
Just one thing (Score:1)
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The real trickery is in the interconnects and the cooling, the cpu's are probably discounted quite a bit but I doubt they're the biggest item on the tab.
Climate modeling ves. fusion energy (Score:2)
If we can get fusion energy working cheap, we won't need the climate modeling. Not only that we can build a hundred of these things cheaper with the technology advances.
Climate change is gradual .. the need for new drugs and fusion energy is more pressing.
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Climate change is gradual, but the emissions we put into the atmosphere today will last for centuries. Even if we switched over to all fusion power tomorrow, we'd still see more climate change, and the longer we wait to replace fossil fuels, the more we will see. Realistically, it takes a long time to widely deploy a new energy technology. Fusion isn't even feasible in the lab, let alone ready for deployment, let alone widely deployed.
Also, even if fusion were widely deployed, that doesn't mean we'd nece
What's the score? (Score:2)
I noticed this a short time ago, but have yet to see the 'Rmax' performance. They speak to Rpeak, which does beat out the current Rpeak by 23%, though the Rpeak by itself is even more uninformative than Rmax, which is already quite synthetic. Assuming the current #1 hasn't managed tuning or upgrades, this will have to beat 65% efficiency to technically win. 65% is likely an acheiveable goal, though the larger the run, the more difficult to extract a reasonable efficiency number, so it's not certain. I w
Time to act like a user (Score:1)
SETI (Score:2, Funny)
As for me... (Score:1)
I think I'll wait for Leopard.
I bet the guys at... (Score:2, Informative)
I'll wait for official word on that... (Score:2)
In June the Jaguar had 30,000 Quad Core Opterons, and now it has 45,000. The previous machine was an XT4, but the most recent update shows that 200 XT5 cabinets have been added to it. I have been unable to find how many cabinet
Beep Beep (Score:3, Interesting)
In the not too distant future, we shall see a new Top 500 list. It just seems like yesterday that RoadRunner cracked the Petaflops barrier, and the whole world seems to have fallen on its ass in the interim. Banking failures, government bailouts, people losing their retirement portfolios. The irony is too much. Even as the computers get better, the answers that people need don't come fast enough.
Then the light turned on for me. People in general, the people you see on the street going on their busy way to whatever, are mostly relying on "someone else" to come up with the answers. Most people have little confidence in their own ability to answer hard questions.
Well, maybe things will turn around because of the power of supercomputers. It would be about time, wouldn't it? Here's how it may play out. Supercomputers so far, good as they are, serve up expensive results, so they are applied to difficult problems that are useful but far removed from everyday life.
As supercomputer clock cycles become more abundant, researchers can apply them to do more mundane things that the unwashed can relate to. The result could be revolutionary. People who have always aspired to some inconsequential achievement that requires some expertise or training may suddenly have access to highly instructive supercomputer-generated procedures that explain both how and why. Not only will people become more expert do-it-yourselfers, but robots will become far versatile, with amazing repertoires.
Crossing the petaflops barrier may be sufficient psychological incentive for people to request that governments begin to make supercomputing infrastructure available for public consumption, like roads and other services. Certainly, exciting times are comiing.
Awesome, (Score:2)
Will it run Cybermorph?
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There is already a wealth of political will for global warming, whats lacking is evidence ..
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Please no climate modelling! (Score:4, Insightful)
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And the only cause that is politically useful.
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Anthropogenic warming is the desired cause as that is the only one we can do a damn thing about.
People can do something even if the warming is not man made. If the cause is proven to be man made maybe the people will be persuaded to react faster.
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Global warming is not based merely on correlation studies. It has a direct and well understood physical cause, which is the greenhouse effect. (What is less understood is the climate system feedbacks which modify the greenhouse effect.) And climate scientists can indeed say with a high degree of confidence that the recent warming is due mostly to human activities. This evidence comes from physical reasoning as well as observational measurements (such as the stratospheric cooling signature of the enhance
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To clarify myself, I do not have a particular stance on global warming itself. I do not know climatology. I do believe however that
a) Appeal to consensus are irrelevant, scientific truth comes from repeated and verified experiments, not consensus.
b) Whether it is man made or not is an ethical puppet to distract attention. What's done done.
c) Most of the politics and economics surrounding global warming are flawed. That much I can tell. Even the worst prediction of the IPCC are quite tame compared to other d
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The worst IPCC scenario (A1FI) gives a worst case of 6.4 C (11.5 F) global warming in less than 100 years. I don't know if it's the worst thing that is likely to happen, but that's not that tame (especially when you consider that land warms faster than the global average, and northern latitudes even faster than that). As for the economics, Nordhaus's book A Question of Balance is a good place to start. Nordhaus isn't ideological. It's economically worth mitigating some CO2 emissions to insure against th
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Whether it's man made or not is quite important, actually. If it's not (a scenario that's looking pretty damned unlikely) then doing something to halt or slow it becomes difficult as we have to find out what the hell IS causing the problem.
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Who says the climate modeling they are doing is related to global warming?
Even if it is, however, if the modeling increases our knowledge of the subject, it is not a waste of resources for scientists to seek the answers they are looking for.
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All good points but lets not forget that simulation != observation.
This point was made about astrological observations on older slashdot stories and it holds true for climate prediction too.
I have to admit I am sceptical about blindly believing in global warming. I used to in the past however I've become a little smarter since then I can not see any hard observations for it, especially when volcanoes pump out 26 times more CO2 per year then all of humanity on the planet (however I'm slightly sceptical of ho
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I have to admit I am sceptical about blindly believing in global warming. I used to in the past however I've become a little smarter since then I can not see any hard observations for it, especially when volcanoes pump out 26 times more CO2 per year then all of humanity on the planet
That's not even remotely true. Volcanic CO2 emissions are about 1% of human CO2 emissions (see here [usgs.gov]). Where did you get the rather specific, and wrong, factor of 26?
Maybe you'd see the hard evidence if you spend a little more time reading about it, since you appear to have some peculiar misconceptions. I recommend Kerry Emanuel's essay "Phaeton's Reins", David Archer's undergrad textbook, and the IPCC AR4 report for technical details.
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Who says the climate modeling they are doing is related to global warming?
Oak Ridge does [ornl.gov]: "Climate scientists are calculating the potential consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and the potential benefits of limiting these emissions."
Re:Please no climate modelling! (Score:5, Funny)
Why do climate modelling?
Obviously climate modelling has to be carried to out to find out what impact running energy-hungry supercomputers has on the environment.
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Why do climate modelling?
Well, purely scientific reasons for one. Climate science existed long before global warming was a concern.
Another reason is to inform adaptation. No matter what policy is realistically put in place, at least some more climate change is expected to occur. People are going to have to adapt to whatever change is not prevented. It's thus important to improve our understanding of what may happen. It also tells us how large and how fast a policy response is required, although as you note, we are not yet even
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No. Jaguar. 1995 XK12, Six-Litre.
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No. Jaguar. 1995 XK12, Six-Litre.
I'd rather doubt the 1995 XK12, as cool as it was, was any competitor to the Jaguar XJ220 [wikipedia.org].
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Yes! But the XJ isn't made of Unobtanium!
Re:Silly Me (Score:5, Funny)
Hahah, eat it, 3DO.
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If you are searching the whole Local Group, it seems reasonable.
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Why do Brits drink ale at room temperature?
They have Lucas refrigerators.
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creating better algorithms? Or at least educating a little bit all non-CS scientists about performance and optimization?
The guys who work on the the dynamic cores for the biggest climate models (NCAR, GFDL, NASA, etc.) do world class numerical hydrodynamics. Maybe not quite on par with the nuke guys at, say, Sandia, but pretty good. And they do hire programmers and numerical methods people to do algorithm design, optimization, and parallelization. They're cutting edge in terms of grid solver algorithms for these sorts of problems. There are lots of complications from irregular topography, coupling between atmosphere, oce