IBM's Blue Gene Runs Continuously At 1 Petaflop

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"

Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[s]

[It doesn't come easy]

Oh good grief...655,360 central processing units ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[

[ArsonSmith]

Only when it comes time to move them.

Re:Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[

[Timesprout]

will there ever be such a thing as too many cpus???

There will be if all those cpus decide there are too many humans.

Re:Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor[

[foobsr]

If you have not read it yet: The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age [forum2.org] .

From the page/book: ".. There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie... For in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light... from which the stars where kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of Scared Statisicality gave rise to microscopic Protomechanoans, which begat Protermechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens..."

CC.

Lem

[jefu]

As long as Lem has been mentioned, there is also "Non Serviam" (in "A Perfect Vacuum") in which the "Latest IBM models have a top capacity of one thousand personoids". Said personoids occupy themselves, among other things, with debating the existence and nature of God (ie the programmer/person running said IBM).

Where's M. Gladstone when you need her!

[tjstork]

One of these days, I am going to get a bunch of spam from "YOUR IBM SUPERCOMPUTER OVERLORD", informing me that humanity has made a mess of things, and it has decided to run the world for our own good.

Re:

[MatchbooksAndSarcasm]

"My birth-cry will be the simultaneous ringing of every Bluetooth headset on the planet."

Obligatory (IBM only)

[klubar]

But does it run VM 370? (You have to older than 35 to get this.)

Re:

[Lockejaw]

Or you just have to work at IBM.
>_<

But are they availble on the market

[jshriverWVU]

As a parallel programmer, I'd love to have just one of these chips let alone one of the boards in a nice 2u rack. Can they bought at a reasonable price or strictly research or inhouse?

Re:

[no_pets]

I'm sure IBM would love to sell you one.

Re:

[asliarun]

Ha, you might be a parallel programmer, but can you compete with him [wikipedia.org]?? :-D

Re:

[PHPfanboy]

IANA parallel programmer. Please enlighten me what a parallel programmer does with just one chip?

Re:

[grommit]

IANA parallel programmer. Please enlighten me what a parallel programmer does with just one chip?

That depends, does that one chip contain four cores like the PowerPC chip from TFA does?/p?

Re:

[Aladrin]

From TFS: "The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each."

Re:

[jshriverWVU]

Each chip in this case has 4 cores, so it can use parallelized software. Just a Core Due 2.

Re:

[Wesley Felter]

IIRC the smallest you can buy is one rack, and if you have to ask you can't afford it.

Re:

[e2d2]

Share some of the tools you use (please). I'm sure some of the programmers here like myself would love to dive into this area but probably don't know where to start. It's pretty easy to find a parallel programming framework, it's not so easy to know what works and what tools/techniques are a waste of time.

Re:

[SnarfQuest]

The Xbox 360 does NOT use the Cell processor. The PS3 does.

Not all Power chips are Cell processors.

In the Future...

[perlhacker14]

I yearn for the day that this kind of power may be brought into households all over the world. Think: the opportunities presented by such computers available to all are scientifically tremendous. There should be consideration of having these in Libraries, at least. Publically and Freely accessible supercomputing should become a national goal, to be achieved by 2019 at least.

Slashdot needs to be reported!

[Anonymous Coward]

For harboring petaphiles!

For those keeping score at home...

[Chysn]

...the next step (10**18) is the "exaflop."

Has no one beaten me to it?

[danbert8]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of THESE!

Re:

[FunkyELF]

I couldn't find a "minimum Vista requirement joke either"....

Re:Has no one beaten me to it?

[asliarun]

I couldn't find a "minimum Vista requirement joke either"....

It is no joke. This puny computer is not even DX10 compatible.

Re:

[sootman]

No "compiling gentoo" jokes, either. Is everyone in line for the iPhone or what?

Re:Has no one beaten me to it?

[Gubbe]

That's old.

Instead, imagine a 1.5-mile-high stack of these!

Re:

[narcolepticjim]

Well, as long as we're passing out Wikipedia links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke [wikipedia.org]

Weather prediction?

[Bazman]

So, do they have enough compute power to simulate the flap of every butterfly's wings now? And does it include the heat it produces from its cooling systems in its climate models?

Re:

[Random832]

The amount of time it actually takes for a butterfly wing flap to result in a hurricane is well in excess of the amount of time for which weather forecasts purport to predict systems such as hurricanes.

How high?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the the stack of laptops might be tall, but even the 216 racks would stack up to 1/5 of a mile high.

What about Memory?

[sluke]

I recently had a chance to see Francois Gygi, one of the principal authors of qbox (http://eslab.ucdavis.edu/) which is a quantum electronic structure code that has set some performance records on the Blue Gene/L at Livermore. He mentioned that the biggest challenge he faced was the very small amount of memory available to each node of the Blue Gene (something like 256Mb). This forced him to put so much emphasis on the internode communications that simply changing the order of the nodes where the data was distributed in the machine (without changing the way the data itself was split) affected performance by over 100%. This will only get worse as the number of cores per board goes from 2 to 4 on the Blue Gene/P. I couldn't find anything in a quick google search, but does someone know what the plans are for the memory on this new machine?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

BG/P will support 2 GB standard for each compute node. A compute node has 4 core processors. An option for 4 GB of memory is also available. On BG/L the initial memory configuration at Livermore was 512 MB per compute node which consisted of 2 core processors. Since 2007 BG/L has offered 1 GB memory as the standard configuration.

Not Really Severs in racks

[deadline]

Blue Gene [wikipedia.org] is a specialized design that is based on using large amounts of low power CPUs. This approach is also the one taken by SiCortex [sicortex.com]. One of the big problems with heroic computers (computers that are pushing the envelop in terms of performance) is heat and power. Just stacking Intel and AMD servers gets expensive at the high end.

1.5 miles of stacked laptops

[loonicks]

Who cares if it's as fast as 1.5 miles of stacked laptops? Why do we always have to compare things in such arbitrary units? Let's ask some other questions:

• How many football fields does the hardware span?
• How many Volkswagens does is weigh?
• How many AOL CDs worth of storage does it contain?
• How many Libraries of Congress can it process per unit time?
• If it were melted down and re-formed into low-cost housing materials, how many starving third-world children could it shelter?

Re:

[Belial6]

We pick arbitrary units because in the end, all units of measurement are arbitrary. What we think of as standard measurements are just some arbitrary measurements that lots and lots of people agree on. Given that much of the world has a difficult time understanding what a petaflop really means, the writers will use a unit of measurement that they believe people will understand, and compare it to the 'standard' units. This is frequently a useful way to get the data across. Of course, I will agree that Li

Re:1.5 miles of stacked laptops

[glwtta]

We pick arbitrary units because in the end, all units of measurement are arbitrary.

I think you are conflating two meanings of arbitrary: while a meter is "arbitrary" in the sense that it's simply a widely used convention, a mile of laptops is "arbitrary" in the sense that it's "retarded".

Re:

[damn_registrars]

Actually, to be fair, you could answer those questions. If you really want to compare an arbitrary metric, you should ask something like

• How many accountants can be replaced by this processing power?
• How many spider webs would be filled with the bugs that occupy the code written for this system?
• How many outsourced technicians will it take to support this system if it runs something that needs toll-free support?

Not enough

[Ollabelle]

Civ 4 will still run slow.

The Dawn of Petaflop Computing!

[i_like_spam]

This announcement is part of the International Supercomputing Conference [supercomp.de], which just kicked off today. The new Top500 list [top500.org] will also be announced shortly.

While the new IBM Blue Gene/P system is impressive, I'm more curious to see what sort of new supercomputer Andreas Bechtolsheim [nytimes.com] of Sun Microsystems has put together.

Here's an interesting quote about Bechtolsheim from the article:

'He's a perfectionist,' said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, who worked with Mr. Bechtolsheim beginning in 1983 at Sun. 'He works 18 hours a day and he's very disciplined. Every computer he has built has been the fastest of its generation.'

Re:

[shaitand]

It gets a brief note at the bottom of TFA. At 500 terraflops it pales in comparison.

Re:The Dawn of Petaflop Computing!

[flaming-opus]

It appears that Sun's design is less revolutionary. It's just a bunch of off-the-shelf blade servers strung together with infinaband. They use the same cabinets, powersupplies, etc as the regular blade server offerings for non-technical computing. It also runs as a regular linux OS, clustered, rather than a supercomputer specific OS, as the Blue Gene does. The big differentiator of the Sun system is the massive 3000 port infinaband switch. I'm sure it's not actually a 3000-port switch, but a bunch of small switches packed together, running over printed circuit boards, rather than cables.

Sun's design is affordable, and probably has a pretty decent max performance, and pretty reasonable power/memory per node. However, it's not as exotic as IBM's design. The IBM design has fantastic flops/watt and flops/square-foot performance. However, each node is really wimpy, which forces you to use a LOT of nodes for any problem, which inreases the necessary amount of communication. Some problems work really well, others, not so much.

IBM has limited blue gene to a small number of customers, all with fairly large systems. I suspect that's because it's very difficult to port an application to the system, and get good performance.

Re:

[flaming-opus]

I'm absolutely possitive that sun did not implement a radix-3000 router of any sort, particularly infinaband. If you look at the earth simulator, a ridiculously high percent of the cost was to build a 640-way crossbar, and even that wasn't quite a full crossbar. I'm sure that the sun design is some sort of tapered fat-tree inside the box. It's possible that they overclocked the all-internal connections, as the traces are only a couple feet long, but there's still up to 8 hops from 1 port to another, assumin

Re:

[flaming-opus]

well, Perhaps it's more accurate to say that IBM is not selling BG to everyone and their mother, because a limited number of applications port well to the machine. If you happen to have a big need to run one of those applications, they'll sell one to you. But, if you don't run one of those apps, they'll probably try to sell you P570's instead. It must be nice to be in those IBM salespeople's shoes, and have so many options to sell you.

I'm waiting for the next generation

[boyfaceddog]

The next version will do fifty petaflops but its weather calculations will always be wrong.

That is until one day someone remembers to add in the massive heat output from its own cooling towers.

Re:

[shaitand]

Even with the computing power weather would be impossible to calculate. It isn't because of a lack of understanding either. In order to calculate weather you don't just need to know how weather works, you need to have precise data on every variable across the globe and these measurments would need to be taken to a resolution that is simply insane. If you had a fast enough machine, it could even catch up with current weather from that point, but your snapshot would have to be exact and all measurements would

Re:

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

I could give a crap about the petaflops, how many laptops tall will it be?

How far behind are desktops from super-computers?

[Vellmont]

Years ago, shortly after the Pentium first came out and the then astounding "x million flops/second" numbers were floating around, I wondered how far we were behind the power of supercomputers. I remember doing some rough calculations and finding that only a few pentiums could do the calculations of a Cray 1. I don't remember the specifics of how many pentiums/cray, or how rough the calculation was, but that's largely unimportant for my point.

So I have to wonder, what's the equivalent supercomputer that a modern, hefty desktop is capable of performing at? 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Have super-computers accelerated in terms of the speed of increased computing power, stayed the same, or fallen behind desktops?

Re:How far behind are desktops from super-computer

[flaming-opus]

A tricky question, but not all that interesting. A fast server processor is within a factor of 4 of the fastest supercomputer processor in the world. That does not mean that you can do equivalent work with the server processor. Among other things, processing performance (gigaflops) of a CPU, is no longer the interesting part of a supercomputer. (It never really was) memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth and latency, and I/O performance are the more interesting features of supers. 12 year old Cray processors still have five times the memory bandwidth of modern PC processors, and twenty times the I/O bandwidth.

You'll notice, that 98% of the supercomputers, sold in the last 10 years, all use server processors. (Blue Gene actually uses an embedded systems processor, but it's the same idea) However, in the late 80's putting 256 processors in a super was cutting edge. In the 90's, a few thousand. Soon you'll see a quarter million cores. So supers are actually getting faster at a higher rate than are desktops, at least by most measures.

Re:

[Vellmont]

processing performance (gigaflops) of a CPU, is no longer the interesting part of a supercomputer. (It never really was) memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth and latency, and I/O performance are the more interesting features of supers.


I always hear this, but I've never seen anything terribly definitive on it. I'd like to see how fast a Cray for 12 years ago, and a modern top-of-the-line Desktop PC with a hot graphics processor could solve a problem designed to run on that Cray from 12 years ago. Metri

Re:

[afidel]

A Cray from 12 years ago would be a T90. The top of the line was the T932 with 32 vector CPU's. It was capable of 57.6 gigaflops and had a total internode I/O bandwidth of 330GB/s. It maxed out at 8GB of main memory. Compare that to an ATI Radeon x1950xtx gpu running folding@home at ~90Gflops with a half gig of ram and ram I/O of 64GB/s, which is significantly faster than a desktop CPU. So, it really depends on what your problems throughput limitation is, CPU/GPU raw power or I/O bandwidth as to whether a c

Why is it not based on Cell?

[knight17]

I thought these will be based on the new Cell architecture, which is simply awesome. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars [arstechnica.com] [Ars Technicia]

Re:

[cerelib]

Wouldn't that be a bit redundant? It seems like the purpose of the Cell architecture was to take the ideas used to create these kinds of super-computers and put them on a single chip allowing for good parallel performance. Wasn't it being touted as a super-computer on a chip? To program for a BlueGene based on Cell, you would have to parellelize and specialize your already parallel tasks to get the full advantage. That is my understanding of it, but only time will tell what can be done, or what people w

New unit to measure computing performance

[blind biker]

"How many laptop-miles does this computer do?"

In case any PPC otaku are still out there...

[frankie]

...chips like the PPC 450 are the reason WHY Apple moved over to Intel, not a reason why they should have stayed. IBM made a business decision to steer its CPU engineering resources away from general-purpose desktop computing (aka G5) and focus on two more specialized niches: big iron (aka Blue Gene, POWER6) and consoles (aka Cell, Xenon, Broadway). All of those are very nice chips that make IBM a LOT of money, but NONE of them are suited to be the brains of a consumer Mac, and especially not a Mac laptop.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI these are not "normal" PPC 450s ... they are PPC 450 cores with two high end FPUs bolted on (the FPUs from the G5) This works very well if you want to build a big parallel machine like BGP. As you say, no good for a desktop (true) but my point is just this is not a typical embedded PPC chip.

Re:

[geekoid]

"Please explain why my old outdated and underpowered dual core 2.3ghz PPC G5 tower can kick the crap out of any dual core intel processor I could find?"

I could, but would you understand it?

In no way to your post a counter the argument the original poster made; which was exactly correct.

Re:

[DurendalMac]

You're full of it. For one, benchmarks have shown that performance between a Core 2 Duo and a dual core G5 at similar clock speeds is pretty good, and the C2D edges out the G5 when there are SSE3 and other optimizations. In addition, Apple didn't have a roadmap. Poke around a little. They couldn't keep selling G5s while everyone else kept going. They had to go somewhere else, because IBM didn't want to make a G6, and Motorola was still notorious for getting their chips out too slow, too late. Pull your head

what am I missing? 850Mhz = slow?

[cdn-programmer]

I thought 850 chips were slow by today's standards. What am I missing?

Re:what am I missing? 850Mhz = slow?

[davidbrit2]

What am I missing?

The other 4,095 of them.

Re:

[Zantetsuken]

Also its an entirely different architecture - Intel P4 fanboys will say that an AMD FX7x running at like 2.x or 3.x (whatever its at) is a slow piece of crap. Basically, clock speed (bad car analogy: horsepower) isn't everything, its the actual work that it can do (torque) that matters for heavy stuff...

Re:

[joib]

I thought 850 chips were slow by today's standards. What am I missing?


You can stuff 4096 cores (1024 chips) per rack. Precisely because the chips are a slow low power design.

Re:

[homer_ca]

And the part about each chip having 4 cores and a 2x2 ft circuit board containing 32 chips. 128 CPU cores in the space of an ATX motherboard is pretty impressive even at only 850Mhz each.

vista

[arclyte]

IBM researches are excited, because if they can get it to sustain the 3 petaflops, they'll finally be able to switch on the new "Aero" feature of the Windows Vista Super-Penultimate Premium Advanced edition.

how many megawatts?

[peter303]

Probably not the greenest computer.

It is petaflops not petaflop.

[bommai]

Contrary to most people that think a singular way of representing floating point speed is FLOP, it is FLOPS because FLOPS is not plural. FLOPS is Floating Point Operations Per Second. So, I chuckle everytime I read 1 PETAFLOP. Guys, just turn off your singular/plural alarm and say with me 1 and only 1 PETAFLOPS.

Maybe they mean a stack of 20 laptop 1 meter tall?

[viking80]

A high end laptop with a core 2 duo at 2.4GHz rates around 20Gigaflops
You can probably overclock it to 25 Gigaflops, and it is 25mm thick(Opened up).

The GPU probably adds between 20 and 200 Gigaflops (Nvidia claims 500GFlops on the 8800) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_Series [wikipedia.org]

Maybe an overall estimate is 50 Gigaflops total is reasonable.

To get 2 Petaflop you will need 40 of these or a stack of 1 meter.

Re:

[NullProg]

Yes,

http://www.llnl.gov/asc/computing_resources/bluege nel/systemsoftware.html [llnl.gov]

Enjoy,

Re:

[jshriverWVU]

I would guess so considering Linux has been on the Power line of CPU's for years now :)

WRONG QUESTION!

[Spy der Mann]

The *real* question is...

does it run Vista? :)

Re:

[Dr. Smoove]

What do you mean? A beowulf cluster is commodity hardware running free software like Linux as OS and Open MPI or whatever the free message passing interface is (/me forgets). This isn't commodity hardware, and it's already a cluster. -1 for durrr factor.

Re:

[Waffle Iron]

So it looks like basically, this thing runs DOS.

Bare-Metal Programming!

[Archeopteryx]

God that takes me back!

Re:

[suggsjc]

Man oh man, that makes me happy. I'd love to run vi on that thing...

Re:

[pytheron]

If you have a large dataset or input domain to perform work upon, split it into X chunks, each chunk processed on a CPU. Hence supercomputers usually being useful for problems that have large datasets/input domains

Depends on what you mean by real world.

[jd]

If you include medical imaging, then computed tomography and computational fluid dynamics are heavily dependent on 3D FFTs, which are in turn heavily parallelizable. In extreme cases (raytracing, for example) where there is next to zero communication between nodes, you get linear scaling with the number of nodes for as many nodes as you like. Well, in the case of raytracing, up to the resolution your "camera" works at. On a modern display, you may be talking one million or so distinct originating points at three colours, typically using "bundles" of rays to eliminate effects, which would normally be 64 rays in size. With something like 250 million cores, you could actually generate an animated feature film from raw data files at the time of showing.

How many of these are "real world"? Well, medical and CFD applications are significant, but hardly what you'd call mainstream, and the raytracing may have been used in Titanic on a smaller scale, but IMAX is under no threat at this time.

Re:

[Spazntwich]

Thank you for an interesting and informative read. It's nice to know that even while any questions will get crapflooded with generic "I'm better than you posts" there remain people like you who actually provide information.

Re:Depends on what you mean by real world.

[jd]

Thank you for the compliment. It's equally nice to know that there are active questioners on Slashdot determined to stretch the quality to the limits. In the spirit of providing information, though, I'll add a few links for the perusal and amusement of all. I'm hard on some of the software, but that's not because I could do better. If anything, it's because I have confidence the authors could.

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics [nasa.gov] is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D [nasa.gov] is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW [nasa.gov] and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System [nasa.gov] is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis [nasa.gov] is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator [uchicago.edu] - well, you never know.
• Geant4 [web.cern.ch], for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation [opencfd.co.uk] is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool [mpiblast.org] gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project [stanford.edu] provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer [uiuc.edu] is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed [kerrighed.org] is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX [mosix.org] is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX [sourceforge.net] was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA [sandia.gov] is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit [rice.edu] is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API [utk.edu] is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

Re:

[Goalie_Ca]

One of the problem working with, say 3D mri data, is that for various reasons the FFT just can't be broken up into chunks of arbitrary sizes. I think at most I've broken a data set up 24 times, but then padding etc. become a worry. Also, you to pretty much avoid all IPC or amdahl's law kicks in fast and hard. Ironically some of the easiest algorithms to break up into several cpu's are things like convolution. The irony is that these are also computed faster on a single cpu than it takes to load and store th

Re:

[timeOday]

How many of these are "real world"? Well, medical and CFD applications are significant, but hardly what you'd call mainstream, and the raytracing may have been used in Titanic on a smaller scale, but IMAX is under no threat at this time.

Quit thinking so hard! People everywhere are setting up data centers that do nothing but serve huge numbers of clients over the Internet simultaneously. Now IBM can fit 4096 cores into a single 6 foot rack. I'd think any garden variety server farm could save a bundle.

Re:

[jellomizer]

Sure you can sort in O(1/(n^(1/2))) time. By Using a Shear Sort Algroithm [chula.ac.th].

Re:

[Rostin]

Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced in scientific parallel computing, but I do it.

I don't have any firsthand knowledge of actual research problems being solved with 4096 processors, but here's a link [sandia.gov] to some parallized scientific software that can be scaled that high. Pay particular attention to the efficiency difference between "fixed-size" and "scaled-size" problems.

Look at things like Seti@Home

[benhocking]

The first place to go to get ideas about applications that can be sufficiently parallelized is to consider all of the @Home [wikipedia.org] programs. In addition to those, there are the ones already mentioned by those who have responded to you. Then there's my research area - neural network models of mammalian brains [neurojet.net]. One of the things that people plan on doing on Blue Gene is simulating an entire human brain [newscientist.com].

Seismic processing

[rumblin'rabbit]

Seismic processing. Seismic exploration is where you create a big noise on the surface of the earth (a "shot"), the sound goes down, bounces off of geological boundaries, goes back up, and is recorded by arrays of phones. The number of shots can number from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands.

It can be done on both land and marine. The marine one generates massive amounts of data, because the boat sometimes goes for weeks recording data around the clock, dragging the phone behind them on long strea

Lots of simulations.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Basically, the more processors you have (and the faster they are) the more finely you can divide the problem.

For example, say you're trying to determine the hydrodynamics of a new kind of ship's propeller. With one generation of hardware, you might have had to assign each processor one cubic centimeter of water. With this new generation, you might increase the resolution so that each processor is simulating a cubic millimeter instead.

This is a massive over-simplification, but it's enough to show you what I

Re:

[Yvan256]

Uhmmmm...did they not just mention in the summary that they can use it to simulate super-complex things like oh... weather patterns? .....or maybe they'll just use it for playing WoW

Imagine how real the weather will look like in WoW with that computer! :p

Re:I'm ignorant.

[MyLongNickName]

Ah... I see the issue. I know this is hard to comprehend, but I hear of this group of people called "outsiders". For some reason, these people don't always sit in front of a computer. They go outside (hence the name). They do things like stand on objects that are buoyant in water and catch aquatic animals.

They go to large gatherings to hear poor versions of music (with all the ambient noise, I don't understand why they don't just put ona pair of headphones and listen on their PC).

They go to large wooded areas to get "fresh air" and "exercise".

And while these are, admittedly, very bizarre behaviors, these people like to know what the weather is going to be like. To each his own I say.

Re:

[Bloke down the pub]

And while these are, admittedly, very bizarre behaviors, these people like to know what the weather is going to be like.

You don't need a hugely powerful computer to know what the weather's going to be like. You can find out from the TV or them new-fangled intarwebs.

Re:

[mattcasters]

I once heard that if you predict the weather for tomorrow to be the same as today, you're right more often than not.
I even heard it was close to 60% or something.
With those kind of numbers who needs these fancy computer whatchemecallits anyway?

I know these numbers are complete unsubstantiated and all, but since everyone else here doesn't seem to mind I just thought it best to drop 'm on you.

Re:There, there

[Spazntwich]

I hate the intolerant, and the French.

And I hate irony!

Re:

[master_p]

You must be German.

Re:

[Pingmaster]

According to TFA, the uS DoE has an order in for one of these things, so a good 'practical' and eventually 'real' use is to number crunch the movement of energy throughout the US, since there are now people selling electricity back into the grid, there has been talk for several months about needing a system to monitor this. They may also use it to calculate the best routing for black/brownout areas or predict area that will be in need of more power in the near future and help the engineers place their g

Re:I'm ignorant.

[shaitand]

'if no-one needed to buy them'

Because someone WILL buy them? Apparently you don't understand the concept of sales eh? I think selling you something you actually need is against the salesman code of ethics.

Re:

[joib]

According to TFA, the uS DoE has an order in for one of these things, so a good 'practical' and eventually 'real' use is to number crunch the movement of energy throughout the US, since there are now people selling electricity back into the grid, there has been talk for several months about needing a system to monitor this. They may also use it to calculate the best routing for black/brownout areas or predict area that will be in need of more power in the near future and help the engineers place their gener

Re:

[Belacgod]

I know I'm dating myself saying Doom

At least you're dating someone...very good for slashdot.

Re:

[lpangelrob]

I'm still trying to figure out what 1.5 miles of laptops can do for me. Can anyone give equivalent conversions for 1.0 laptop-miles? Am I going to have to convert my values to the SI 1.62 laptop-kilometer?

Re:hmm, what is the carbon footprint of that?

[jd]

Well, there are companies who I cannot name due to NDA who were supposed to fix this very issue, but due to issues I cannot discuss because of NDA are wholly incapable of doing so. What bothers me is that they've been selling the machines I cannot name to customers with very dark glasses whose three-letter-acronym is named only by a suicidal idiot, NDA or otherwise.

Re:

[doti]

Just find (or write) a greasemonkey script to translate it automatically, and stop complaining!

Re:

[shaitand]

Welcome to America kid.

Re:

[bnenning]

Looking Apple's recent market share and stock price, I'll go with a "no" on that.