Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer

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?

How about economic modeling?

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There already exists economic modeling. And it is no more impossible than climate modeling. Granted, human interaction becomes a factor when the general population is aware of the economic predictions, but I am talking theory, not necessarily practice.

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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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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?

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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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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how do you explain the mess the world is in?

Pre-marital sex?

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Every time you have sex outside marriage, god kills an economist (and a kitten)

Yeah, the supercomputing stuff is nice and all...

But I really got it to play Tempest 2000.

Don't buy it

Yeah, Jaguar might look cool with its advanced capabilities, but there's no games for it and the controller design is lame.

Kudos to Atari

I always knew you could pull it off!!

good upgrade path

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

Then when you get new cabinets you just decommission the oldest ones. Keep rotating the old ones out once they fall below some flop/dollar threshold.

Folding@Home Contribution?

It would be nice on these sorts of systems to have recurring, perhaps low priority, jobs issued by worthy outside distributed computing projects. Depending upon how busy the system is with other jobs it could make regular contributions to drug research and especially to AIDS research. To have complete and accurate pre-computed models of all steps in the protein folding process for all possible mutations of the AIDS virus, for example, would be a technological triumph and of potentially great benefit to humanity in the development of new drugs and possibly even an effective vaccine.

Love the paint job!

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".

Re:How does that work?

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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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!

I would say more than lack of evidence is lack of causation rather than correlation. Scientists appear to agree that at least in the short term the earth is a little warmer. What they can't say with any certainty is why. Anthropogenic warming is the desired cause as that is the only one we can do a damn thing about.

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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.

Re:Please no climate modelling!

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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Assume every single person on earth can do a 16-digit operation on a calculator in one second.

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????

Wait, shit, astronomical fail!

It's not nearly that bad... more like 3 days. I failed to realize that my 270000 figure was seconds not years.

Re:Silly Me

Hahah, eat it, 3DO.

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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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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