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Technology

Birth Of A Terascale Baby 75

Posted by Hemos from the wah-wah-wah dept.
Seanasy writes: "Want to follow the construction of the most powerful unclassified computer in the world? The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will be publishing status updates on the installation of the Terascale Computing System. Right now you can view an MPEG movie of the first clusters to be installed."
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Birth Of A Terascale Baby More

Birth Of A Terascale Baby

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  • Oh, I don't know.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now, with all the really interesting personalities gone from /., I'm just so tired of it. I guess it could be ennui, and a jaded sense that it's all been trolled before, but nothing here seems original anymore. It's all so, so... I don't know, mature.

    I mean, it takes all the energy I have just to read the blurb for the articles, let alone actually reading the article itself or even 1/3 of the posts - I know they'll be on-topic mostly, or if not, really not have the bite and flame-inducing stupidity of the old guys - you know, siggy, oog, grits-boy, pertriphile, and so on. Sometimes it's just not worth going on!

    I've been here too long, I think. My uid is below 1000, and I've just seen and read too much on /. I'm tired. It's all sooooooo boring. Won't someone at least try to be a filthy karma whore and start the flames of /. again? Please!!!!!
  • Speaking of clustering (no, not Beowulf) check out Sun's new FREE clustering software (more precisely a batch-processing system) called Grid Engine. [sun.com]

    Hey, it's free, works with Solaris/SPARC - what's not to like, if you can use it?

  • "Did you know that computers like this use alot of power? Like alot alot?! "

    Umm, "a lot" is two words. ;>

  • Hmmmm (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    But does it run Linux? ;>

    Between this box and the previous 3D display, we should be able to view high-framerate, fully 3D porn like never before!

    Now, where do we sign?

  • Do 'they' ever do anything useful with these things? It's fun drooling, but I personally think something with this much power would be well-suited to intense graphics work or something equally resource-consuming. So far all i've heard is done with supercomputers is number-crunching.

    That's because that's what supercomputers do -- crunch numbers. Mostly big physics, chemistry, and engineering problems. Where I work (a supercomputer center), that IS what's considered useful. The target audience for this thing is NSF-funded scientific researchers, and they (NSF) didn't pay $36M+ for a really nice Quake server...

    --Troy
  • When my eye passed over the title of this posting, I could have sworn that it said "Birth of a Testicle Baby".

    Paging Mr. Freud...

  • And another thing....

    If you touch my car I will fuck your dog.

    Juan Epstein
  • My understanding is that newsreels were as much of an event as the movies themselves. ISTR that they would have been special shows, with admission charges.

    But this would have been in the ear of serials - works on film somewhere beteween TV mini series and full blown TV shows. The Lone Ranger comes to mind.

  • ...how much "Terascale" looks like "Testicle" when you read it quickly.
  • Believe it or not, the main goal of the people who build these supercomputers is not to get into the Top 500 List.

    In other words, the engineering part is more important than the popularity-contest, awe-factor part.

    Compare and contrast with the "open source" software community... ;)
  • the site is pretty slow, so i've mirrored the
    movie for those folks in AU/NZ who want to get
    it a bit faster.

    http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/movies/misc/wec_ movie.mpg

    -jason
  • Is it just me, or have the techs in that mpg been drinking WAY to much Jolt cola?

    Jeremy
    Glutious


  • Got any stats on those? I bet it's a bit more impressive. The NSA measures its computers in acres...
  • Umm just FYI, in your .sig it should be beset, not bisect.


    ----
    Dave
    MicrosoftME®? No, Microsoft YOU, buddy! - my boss
  • The real question is why are you posting your raving nonsense with a +2 bonus?


    Even valuable, conscientious posters have to kick back and be silly now and again. ;)


    You're quite right about all your criticisms -- especially 1 tera = 10^12, not 10^16, which was a mental lapse on my part. I'll be more careful about posting lighthearted stuff with a +1 bonus in the future.

  • Apparently PSC is feeling the slashdot effect...

    I'm sitting on a gigabit 1 hop away from PSC (in CMU) and this site is taking FOREVER to load...
  • heh, gotta stop glancing at headlines.

    That would be one sweet machine to work on.
    -motardo
  • ...even a Beowulf cluster of these things can't
    stop them from being slashdotted.
  • Like IBM hasn't had terascale computers for two years. Hell, even Intel's ASCII Red has been chugging over a teraflop for a couple years, and it runs Pentium Pros.

    $45 million and all they can come up with is 6 teraflops? IBM's budget for Blue Gene is $100 million and they expect to reach 1,000 teraflops (1 petaflop). I am unimpressed.

  • The article mentioned that the software rendering systems used for this display were proprietary. Why doesn't the company use an already-available rendering system like OpenGL?

    OpenGL is already widely used in the scientific visualization community, and it has the advantage of hardware adaptability -- for example, SGI's Cave, mentioned before on Slashdot, uses a library derived from, and directly compatible with, OpenGL. If you have a program already written to use OpenGL, it's trivial (as in, adding only a few lines of code) to get the software to work in the Cave.

    Having to rewrite major portions of software to support their 'proprietary system' will be a pain (read: expensive). However, having to add only a few lines to your existing OpenGL code to get it to work would make it EXTREMELY desirable for many scientific and even home users.
  • Looks like I replied to the wrong article! This should have gone on the 'volumetric display' article. Sorry 'bout that!
  • Who really cares about these computers anyways? This is nothing but a "hey guys, look at the big computer, lets jerk off to it" article. And of course half the comments will be shit about beowulf clusters and how fast it could play quake3 or download pr0n. Who really gives a shit? These computers are used for scientific research, not games and wank fodder. It seems that /. has the urge to post a story like this once every other day, which is why they suck.

    Andrew J. Tosh, dropping his karma since 10.03.2000

  • I think the problem is that we hear about these wonderful advances (super computers with real mean stats) but that's the last of it. We never see anything that's done on these. When you finally get your program written and run it on one of these badboy computers do you plan on telling us what you found?

    Case in point: Voyager I and II are still operating and NASA is still communicating with them. However, if they didn't have this site [nasa.gov] I, being John Q. Public, would be a little bored with the subject and say "What the hell is NASA doing these days?"

    What I'm trying to say is that after you've run your simulations take a day a create a web page telling us common folk what you found. That way we know someone is using these powerful computers and we might just learn a little something we didn't know yesterday.

    In advance, Thanks.

  • Frag without lag, hell yes.

  • The issue of power requirements for all the hardware that the "new economy" runs on is big, big, big and is going get bigger in the next few years.

    It's been estimated that 8% of total U.S. power consumption is related to IT, and that figure is going to climb. In addition to pressure on the demand side, there's a problem on the supply side as the last several summers have shown. Power companies are offering people rebates for allowing them to install thermostats which they can control remotely to manage power demand in peak periods.

    The first issue of the Huber-Mills Power Report [powercosm.com] (PDF) at www.powercosm.com [powercosm.com] is very interesting reading.

    The Wall Street Journal has also run a few interesting articles recently. "Got a computer? More power to you," (September 7 page A26) is available here [manhattan-institute.org]. The WSJ ran another article entitled "Cisco opposes plan for new power plant" (September 18 page A2) which I couldn't find, but Google has related things here [google.com]. It's somewhat ironic that Cisco is against more power to run its hardware; it wants to build new office space nearby and is concerned about quality of life issues. A power company executive said "if this plant isn't built I'm guaranteeing you outages...I'm guaranteeing you an economic disaster in the valley." That's hardly coming from a disinterested party, but it's still a hot topic.

  • I can't look at the site because it's flash, but I think your numbers are wrong. 1000 liters a day is on the order of two truck engines. It's hard to believe that Schiphol doesn't use more than that (and it would make it irrelevant - a 747 does a gallon per second, so a single 747 would burn more in five minutes than Schiphol in a day?!).

  • Do 'they' ever do anything useful with these things? It's fun drooling, but I personally think something with this much power would be well-suited to intense graphics work or something equally resource-consuming. So far all i've heard is done withsupercomputers is number-crunching.


  • I didn't mean just processing graphics, a la playing Quake...I meant as in creating them. Maybe I phrased it wrong, but I didn't mean number crunching was a bad thing, just that computers with that much power have the possibility to also be used for different things.


  • when I realized the article title was not "Birth of a Testicle Baby"
  • No slashdotting it please! Carnegie Mellon University connects through these folks and we've got enough problems as it is :)
  • It may be powerful, but I bet we could still give it a taste of the ol' Slashdot effect
  • Construction is in full swing now; hardware to come online first quarter 2001, software "will take a little longer".

    Perhaps I should send them that little 'earth simulator' perl script I knocked together the other night...

    ;-)

  • For the love of God, quit banging up the PSC site. It's taking forever to download the movie....
  • 10.000 meters square

    er, thats square meters. 10,000 meters square(d) is HUGE :)
  • Ah well, for that kind of power, it doesn't seem to handle that well of tidal wave from /.

  • I thought it was about a real baby. Damn, I was soo lookin forward to that.....
  • "Right now you can view an MPEG movie of the first clusters to be installed."

    Translation: "The first 2 people to see this new topic can view an mpeg movie of the first clusters to be installed. After that, the server will stop responding due to the SlashDotDOS attack."
  • As in, a couple G4s?
  • Where are the thoughtfull, quick witted comments I have come to expect from /.?
    I, although surrounded by high-end, high-performance computers all day, am quite impressed by the sheer numbers involved with this thing.
    Unlike some of you, I can think of a few OTHER applications for such a monstrosity than prOn or that pathetic excuse of an FPS Quake III.
    How about the S.E.T.I. league? I'm sure they could put it to good use. Or the Human Genome project?
    Or that article posted about electron fission, a beast like this could definately be put to use on the location of electrons at a point in time which would be required for my matter teleportation device.
    Then again, it sure would be a lot of PrOn.
    Hmmmmm, Pooooooorn. (dribble dribble)
  • I've always wanted to reply to my own post.

    Yeahhhhhhh!
  • Thanks Buddy for enlightening me on the laws of Physics.
    You mean radio isn't instant? Oh...My...GOD...
    My point was more that people couldn't come up with an application for such a supercomputer other that prOn, not that the SETI league should be the ones to use it....
    Why the hell am I explaining it to you? You didn't get it the first time.
  • perhaps when they fully assemble the supercomputer they can use some of that massive computing power to compress a video clip of 42sec (with no sound) to something less than 6MB! tsk, tsk...

    that's the kind of bloat I'd expect from you-know-who :)
  • I misread the title to be "Testicle Baby" and figured it was news on that wacky new method of making babies with 2 men...

  • Hey,

    Is it too late to add one of these to my must-have Christmas present list [slashdot.org]?

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • Allthough I'm not the guy who actually wrote the code (my professor did) I'm currently working on an MPI / OpenMP implementation of it and it should be finished soon, with an abundance of simulations to follow.

    If you want to see what it does, click on the link 'program' in my parent post. Allthough it will probably not make that much sense to someone outside of the field at least it is out there to see. Basically it helps us find ways to model the evolution of early galaxies.

    If you're very interested in this kind of stuff, head to our main site [utoronto.ca] to check out all the work that the other astrophysicists are doing.

  • The brain of the proposed six teraflop system will be an interconnected network of Compaq AlphaServers, 682 them, each of which itself contains four Compaq Alpha microprocessors.

    Wow. I'm using 4 of these servers right now and I thought that was pretty impressive.

  • Right now I'm currently working on a program [utoronto.ca] that simulates galaxy evolution using these Alpha servers. Often in physics this is the only way that we can test many of our theories since there is no way to set up a universe in the lab - the next best thing is a simulation. Computational science is exploding right now and there are many researchers who need time on these machines, it's definately added a new discipline to the rigid framework of theorist/experimentalist. It's kind of sad that so many people take the point of view that these machines are 'useless'. They are quickly becoming one of the most important tools for scientific research.

    From what I have been hearing on /. lately it seems that most people don't really think advances like this are that interesting. While we're at it we might as well tear down all our particle accelerators and stop doing space missions as well since they don't really have any immediate use...

  • heh, you think your university has net problems? try being under merit(.edu)

    all the points they connect to see to always die. *sigh* it makes working on the university a bit harder. oh well.

    [mrzer0] (i've got stinky net :)
  • Yeah I bet we could Slashdot it, but it's not always a measurement of how powerful a server/computer is, but also how much bandwidth they have available. Although if they have that much money for a computer, I'm sure they have a nice pipe to connect it, it it's connected at all.

    [mrzer0]
  • comparable to (682*4) Alphas? Why would you want to use Intel processors in a supercomputer?

  • Graphics work is number-crunching, with the distinction that you get a pretty picture at the end of it. Or did you expect a computer to be manipulating something other than numbers?

  • For a vivid demonstration of power usage in a supercomputer, try switching off the cooling system. The Cray-1 would, apparently, become a molten mass with a few seconds (not sure if this is true or not).
  • i question the value of this project. whenever i hear terms like "supercomputer" i become quite skeptical; similar to when i hear people still refer to the net as "the information superhighway". there doesn't seem to be a whole lot that's new in the piece, nor anything terribly relevant to current hardware development. sounds like a lame duck to me.

    1. I LOVE YOU [mikegallay.com]
  • Heck if this thing can play the star wars chess game let it play some ice hockey or football video games. Even better have ESPN broadcast live games you can watch on one of these. That's where we're going in the future.
  • Hiya. I work for the NCSA in Urbana/ IL at U. of Illinois. We were contesting against Pittsburg for the endowment to build the supercomputer, but lost. Well, I don't know if it's public knowledge yet, but we're planning on building a competing computer, anyways. We have some funds and are lobbying for more, and hopefully will still beat Pittsburg to a finished product. Apparently, the final computer will consist of 1,000 1GHz either Pentium IV or IA64 processors.
  • Heck if I know, I don't design the supercomputers. And I really dont think that the CPU architecture is the limiting factor in a clustered computer, anyways. I was talking with guys in the C&C division, not the people designing the computer. All I see as important is that the NCSA is going to try, after all. What's worst is, they had 2 matching offers, so had they won the $45 mil, they would have had a total of over $100 to play with.
  • It seems so cool! rows of machines whirring away... until you look at the nameplate. 45 Million for a compaq? These pinheads brought us the ipaq. How sad. I would be VERY curious to know how many rack units arrive DOA. I heard there was a bidding war for this project, too bad Amiga couldn't beat compaq's bid. ;)
  • with the way our skys are rendered (QF [quakeforge.net]), probably about 20 fps unless you have a good 3d card :/ (nice effect, but we're fillrate limited on slow cards (eg g200)). However, with that sort of grunt behind quake, particles would be virtually free :).

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Does anyone know if this system will support OPENMP?

    Probably. The building blocks are ES-40s, which are 4-way SMP systems. The individual ES-40s are connected via Quadrics, which is a fairly fast (and *very* expensive) network fabric. One way you could write a parallel application for such a system is to break your problem up across boxes with MPI, and then use OpenMP to parallelize the loop structures within the program running on each box. I've written a couple codes this way, and it's not really any harder than doing pure MPI.

    OTOH, you wouldn't be able to use more than 4 processors on it using just OpenMP (unless Quadrics does some funky shared-memory-between-boxes stuff I don't know about). To get larger processor counts for a purely OpenMP application, you'd need a large SMP or ccNUMA system like a Compaq GS320 (up to 32 CPUs), a Sun UE10k (up to 64 CPUs), or an SGI Origin (up to 512 CPUs).

    --Troy
  • Man, this is weird...

    When slashdot has been plagued by trolls for so long that a "classic troll remark" is funny because it's nostalgic, now THAT is pitiful. :)

    Who's going to resurrect meept? You realize that eventually Natalie portman, grits, and stoning will all be classics too...

    As much as some people hate them, slashdot ain't slashdot without the trolls.

  • I never liked 'terabyte' as a computing term. Just doesn't fit in with the 'million, billion, trillion' nomenclature.

    I would like to propose that we redesignate one thousand trillion bits as equal to one Electronic Ton. After all we have british tons, metric tons, even a volumetric ton. Why not an Electronic Ton? When you realize that 10 tera-tera (10*(10^16)^16) electrons actually weighs about a metric ton, it seems especially relevant! :)

    Welcome to the age of the 1 ton computer! Next year I predict we'll all have half-ton palmpads! ;)

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by ALG ( 41966 )
    If Hemos posts any more stories on this bad boy, they'll have to build another one just to handle the Slashdot Effect.

    ALG
  • It would seem to me that this computer is so big and will take up so much power and leave off so much radiation, etc., that its existince will change its own results. The more climatology work this thing does, the hotter things will get!

  • So far all i've heard is done withsupercomputers is number-crunching.


    JUST number crunching? Scientific and medical research generate so much data that even this machine would never be able to process even the smallest fraction. There is always a need for number crunchers; they give us insights into the meaning of data (for example, the Human Genome project). Sure, they're sequenced it, but now they have to just "crunch numbers" in order to figure out where the genes are and find homologues in other organisms... but I guess that's not important. Neither is is analyzing protein folding and protein-ligand docking, because that's just "number crunching" and could never produce useful results...

    I sincerely apologize for this rant, but I simply cannot stand the attitude of people who feel "if it can't play Quake[III/IV/XXX] at 200 fps, it's crap". (Although I will admit, if it's not Scottish, it's crap!). Computers do have uses for things other than looking at pretty pictures and splattering your buddy's insides all over a wall.



    -------
  • What kind of framerate would such a thing give me in Quake??

    "Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
  • How about the S.E.T.I. league? I'm sure they could put it to good use. Or the Human Genome project?

    SETI is a joke and a waste of computer time. Suppose that some alien culture did use radio waves for communication. Suppose they were oh, 100,000 light years away from us. That would mean they would have to have been using radio 100,000 years ago for us to get it, and then even when we did get it, would we be even recognize it as anything but noise? And if we did recognize it, what are the chances we could decode anything intelligible. Even if we did that, our info would be 100,000 years old. And all that is only if their planet is actually letting any radio waves out. Most of our noise is being abosrbed by the atmosphere, theirs might be more ionized than ours and reflect even more.

    What the point? We are probably not alone, can't we just work on more relevant things and assume that there probably other beings out there and be content with that?
    -

  • This could make a great Newsreel. Remember Newsreels? The "current event" programming (ahem: propaganda, sometimes) that used to run before feature films in theatres. Well, I don't remember them either, because I was born in the 1970s, but I visited the Smithsonian museum in DC not too long ago and saw a bunch of these. I really enjoy some previews, but sometimes I think it'd be nice to have something Newsreel like beforehand. This "birth of a supercomputer" thing loosely reminds me of seeing some of the "look at the Hoover Dam being built" newsreels. Sure beats reading the infoblurbgraphic in USA today.

    Just some random thoughts.
  • Quote from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Pittsburgh's terascale computer will use 682 of the next generation of Compaq's AlphaServer computer, each of which contains four computer processors. In addition to a 6-teraflop peak speed, the computer will draw on 2.7 trillion bytes, or terabytes, of random access memory, will have 50 terabytes of online hard-disk storage and another 300 terabytes of additional tape or disk storage"

    hmmm... Compaq has shown interest in linux, i wonder what the OS will be? (anything but windows :)

  • Just in time (Score:3)

    by the_tsi ( 19767 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:04AM (#731500)
    Just in time for November's Top 500 list. Oh, "scheduled to be installed." Guess not. Sorry, guys!

    -Chris

  • It has to be said... (Score:3)

    by handorf ( 29768 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:07AM (#731501)
    Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

    OK, Fire the moderation beam!

  • Funding? What funding? (Score:3)

    by RollingThunder ( 88952 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @10:12AM (#731502)

    NSF Awards $45 Million to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center for "Terascale" Computing

    Looking into the future, I can see the next one to be posted...

    Project cancelled, following $48 million bill in bandwidth due to excessive setup movie download by 'Slashdot' readers

  • A look at the competition (Score:3)

    by sferics ( 189924 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:52AM (#731503)

    The Japanese are carrying out an insanely ambitious [hoise.com] project,for a 640 node, 40 sustained TeraFlops computer, housed in a building the size of a large hockey arena. They call it the "Earth Simulator" and its main purpose is to carry out atmospheric/climatological research and simulations of the simmering ball of lava we live on (volcano and earthquake research).

    Construction is in full swing now; hardware to come online first quarter 2001, software "will take a little longer".

    More tech-oriented info here [jaeri.go.jp].

  • /.ed (Score:4)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:42AM (#731504) Homepage Journal
    Funny how a site dedicated to such a powerful system is now slashdotted and not responding.

  • Fun stuff to know: power usage (Score:5)

    by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:42AM (#731505)
    Did you know that computers like this use real much power? Like, *real* much?!

    In Amsterdam (the Netherlands), no more computer-centers (e.g. co-locations where you can put your servers with a fast net connection) can be built because there is not enough power for them! Level 3 Communications [level3.com] has a co-location building there which is about 10.000 meters square (this is not as big as it sounds, it's just 100x100 m), filled up with ISPs servers and the like. This single building is actually using more energy than Schiphol airport (which is rather big - many trans-athlantic flights go through Schiphol. If you've ever been in the Netherlands you'll know)

    They also have a diesel power generator that can power the entiry building in case of a blackout - it burns around 1000 liters (about 250 gallons or so) a day.

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