BOINC Exceeds 2 Petaflop/s Barrier 114
Myrrh writes "Though an official announcement has not yet been made, it would appear that the BOINC project as a whole has exceeded two petaflop/s performance. The top page features this legend: '24-hour average: 2,793.53 TeraFLOPS.' According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)."
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
BOINC finally has enough computing power to handle Vista Ultimate and a few applications!
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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I think you mean Crysis with graphics set to maximum.
Now all I need is for every BOINC user to download the HertzaHaeon plays Crysis project.
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I think you mean Crysis with graphics set to maximum.
On windows vista?
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could Professor Farnsworth use it? (Score:2)
but can it render hentai anime ultraporn?
Missed opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
We could make T-shirts saying "Computer scientists BOINC faster", but I not sure that sends the right message.
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BOINCing computer scientists: now petaphiles x2!
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Most women who've slept with computer scientists would agree that they are pretty fast ;)
On the plus side, they know how to press the right buttons. Or, so I'm told.
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"Grid volunteers do it in groups of 571,534"
That'll do Bionic (Score:3, Funny)
Wait a minute... (Score:4, Funny)
Emacs.... (Score:2)
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?? The article is clearly talking about super computers not operating systems, silly.
I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 output.. (Score:2, Interesting)
A good question to ask is how many kWh were consumed for that computing output.
Since they know what CPUs are running on every BOINC client and the thermal power of them are generally known, it should be possible to calculate...
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Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing. BOINC requires no CO2 to operate.
It could just as easily be run on computers powered by nuclear or solar power, producing no CO2 (past initial construction).
Why does CO2 have to be the end-all-be-all of everything? Why not ask how much coal dust or mercury is now in the atmosphere thanks to the plants that power most of those computers.
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I think the main point of the OP is BIONIC is using idle time, which means every second that BIONIC is running is a second your PC could be sleeping in S3 suspend.
Frankly I wonder if everyone running BIONIC relaisezes this... as if they live in an average US State it is basically costing them $10+ / month to run the thing for every PC it is on 24/7.
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad. So was the coming overpopulation and world famine. And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....
There are more important questions. Much of this energy would be used anyway, but it would be in centralized supercomputers. This way though it's cheaper for the scientists so we can get more research done, even though it's slightly less efficient.
I'm just really tired about CO2 being discussed attached to everything. "Should I buy new shoes?" "Well, the CO2 produced from rubber is... and.... but...".
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Duh, we're not getting skin cancer because we actually fixed the problem.
1. We discovered a problem: The ozone hole. We found it before it got large enough to start causing really big problems.
2. Predictions were made of what would happen if it continued getting bigger, and the potential consequences were unpleasant.
3. Actions were taken to correct the situation.
4. That made things a lot better. It's not been eliminated, but at least it's on th
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I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
Fair enough, the answer has such a large range of possible answers that it is meaningless.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad.
Well there were a few papers [realclimate.org] on the subject. But it was more speculation than accepted scientific consensus. Would you rather all scientist in a field focus on one thing, or explore every conceivable angle?
So was the coming overpopulation and world famine.
Well I can't easily believe the Earth can harbour 6.7 billion people with the level of affluence that the west have. Something has to give, either quality of life or population.
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Plus in colder climates the cost of electricity for running the computer is directly offset by the amount saved on using other sources of heat, whether they be electric, oil-based, or gas-based.
At my parents' house in New Hampshire, my bedroom regularly got to 45 degrees in the winter if the door was closed and no electronics were on, because my room was across the house from the furnace. I'd turn on my computer, overclock my video card, and play games until my room temperature was closer to 60F. Overnight,
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I can hear it now.
"Back when I was a kid I had to play video games to keep warm"
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Maybe for solar, but in both cases that initial construction is not an insignificant caveat, and in the case of Nuclear, cleanup and waste storage bears significant costs.
CO2 is the end-all-be-all because the science is well established and reasonably convincing. Also, most things that generate coal dust or Mercury tend to generate CO2 as a byproduct.
Personally, I tend to just straight
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It doesn't matter than nuclear energy has possible waste disposal issues. My point is that discussing the CO2 output caused by this project is useless. The question is how much energy is wasted, not how much CO2 is created.
We just happen to be on a kind of energy that frees previously trapped CO2. We could be mostly on one that produces radioactive waste, or one that uses up silicon (solar), or ones that cool down the earth (hydrothermal, to the teeny-tiny degree it does).
If we are going to discuss the ener
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If anything's a waste, it's the electrons you used in your post.
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I'm arguing on the theory that it's causes more waste (i.e. CO2, nuclear waste, coal ash, etc.) than if the computer was idle.
I don't think it's neccessarily a waste. In this comment [slashdot.org] I mention that this "waste" may mean scientists can get more research done for the same money and in less time, which may be a net benefit to society.
I don't really think it's that wasteful. I used to run SETI@Home on all my computers. But if someone complains about the excess CO2 released due to software like this, I figure th
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Since they know what CPUs are running on every BOINC client and the thermal power of them are generally known, it should be possible to calculate...
That only counts CPU usage. It doesn't count I/O, which would at least include memory I/O, disk I/O, network I/O.
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Insightful)
I can guarantee that several orders of magnitude more kWh are consumed by computers that are needlessly on and idle.
Running BOINC on a computer that's sitting idle helps improve its energy efficiency. It may be consuming electricity, but at least then it's doing something.
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Makes me wonder...
As far as I know, typical CPU's consume energy in steps; there is no difference between a CPU that's idle (i.e. just running the OS) and one that's doing just a tiny bit more than idle.
Wouldn't it be possible to create a grid computing client that just does as much processing as possible without the CPU going into the next "step"?
It'd be very low performance compared to current clients, but then again it would consume no additional energy whatsoever.
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BOINC pretty much ensures the processor isn't idling, its using the processor constantly, which is drastically different than an idle state, but thanks for looking at it from a completely ignorant point of view.
My PC doing nothing uses less electricity than my PC running BOINC, please explain to me with that in mind how it 'improves efficiency' of what you are calling idle processors. You can't, a processor running BOINC simply isn't idle.
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if i use 100 watts and produce NOTHING, i am LESS efficient than if i use 1,000,000 watts and produce ANYTHING.
of course you could argue that an idle machine saves you boot-up time, etc...
but something thats left on overnight of for several hours while you're out for a long lunch - having the machine achieve ANYTHING is that time is hugely more efficient than something that produces NOTHING.
and yes, i agree with you, energy use wo
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wisdom_brewing said pretty much everything I would, but I'll add a car analogy:
A Ferrari F430 is not a terribly efficient car, but if you use up a whole gallon of gasoline going to the store 2 miles away, that's inefficient, but still more efficient than pouring only a pint of gasoline on your driveway and lighting it with a match. Less consumption does not equal better efficiency.
Here's a rewording of my original statement, to counteract your sarcasm:
"Running BOINC on a computer that would otherwise be s
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:5, Funny)
Surely we can reduce the inefficiency, and POOT less.
Why are we using a distributed system of energy-inefficient comPOOTers?
The big question is, how many cow farts would we need to harvest to produce one POOT of energy?
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Haven't you heard? The POOT is out as a measure of energy. People in the know(TM) these days are using the FART. (Free African Republic of Tonga)
I understand that Taco Bell has chosen to support the FART as well. Something to consider. The POOT's reign has come to an end. Long live the FART.
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Just goes to show...
Even on a decidedly intellectual discussion site, a decent fart joke still blows them away.
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Considering a spherical cow: 140 tons/hour CO2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets say a typical computer running BOINC contributes 1 GFlop at 100W (1e2W). So at 2e6 GFlops, tats 2e8W or 2e5 kW.
According to the energy department, we can assume that 1.4 pounds of CO2 per KWh, so that says BOINC is at ~3e5 pounds/hour of CO2, or about 140 tons/hour of CO2.
I get a very similar number if I back of the envelope what a coal plant should be based on ~500 tons/1 GW.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2report.html [doe.gov]
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CO2 ratings like this are retarded. As long as I keep seeing measurements in the form of weight rather than mass, I'm going to continue to think of everyone who talks about it as blabbering idiots.
140 tons where? At the surface of the planet or higher up in the atmosphere where it 'weighs' less? A cubic (insert whatever measurement you'd like) at sea level weighs differently than one in Death Valley or one on the ISS.
I might start listening when you start using proper forms of measurement for what you ar
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CO2 ratings like this are retarded. As long as I keep seeing measurements in the form of weight rather than mass, I'm going to continue to think of everyone who talks about it as blabbering idiots.
140 tons where? At the surface of the planet or higher up in the atmosphere where it 'weighs' less? A cubic (insert whatever measurement you'd like) at sea level weighs differently than one in Death Valley or one on the ISS.
I might start listening when you start using proper forms of measurement for what you are m
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The irony that climate models usually require super computers to run in a timely manner is not lost on me.
Re:I wonder what BOINC's contribution to CO2 outpu (Score:4, Interesting)
Once that's done, we can do a comparative analysis of CO2 of all the machines machines running WoW (factoring in the increased power draw of a machine with a higher end video card, plus increased disk & memory I/O compared to a machine running BOINC). I'd be willing to be the BOINC 24x7x365 number works out to be smaller, or at least on par with a WoW machine going 4 hours a night several times a week.
Waste is, and will always be, a relative term.
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The amount of energy consumed by 'comfort' degrees of heating and cooling would be far larger (That is, people don't really need to heat their house to 75 F in the winter and cool it to 70 F in the summer, but they do).
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And if it *is* a server, what else would you do with it? Small business requires streaming video feed so that manager can check up on store performance, we do that through webcams and VNC and thus need the computer. Yes, there's better solutions but this one's the cheapest.
Since said computer must be always on, we thus set Folding@Home to run on it so we may as well use the spare CPU cycles.
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Actually I run the Linpack HPL here at the lab, once with two clusters (one 228 nodes 4cpus x 4cores each x 4 float ops per cycle, and one 1152 node cluster of the same AMD configuration) we hit 1.069 MegaWatts and I started peeling the paint off of a huge transformer in the basement. I had to do one at a time. Linpack is a power pig with double precision floating point if your cpu/thread/mpi balance is correct.
Still far behind... (Score:5, Informative)
Folding@home [wikipedia.org], which has passed 5 petaflops on February. Note that Folding is a single project, while the Petaflop measurement for BOINC are the aggregate total for that platform, which runs many independent and often unrelated projects.
Getting that thing bundled on PS3 was brilliant.
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Botnets (Score:4, Interesting)
How cost effective is this really? (Score:3, Interesting)
BOINC uses 571,534 computers. The indirect cost of supporting and maintaing the software, hardware, etc is borne by the volunteers but it still has to be paid.
Additionally, they claim it uses between $3 and $8 a month extra in energy in the US*, and double to triple that in Europe.
* This number is poorly derived. They based it on an 'average' electrical rate in the US, e.g. it looks like they added up all the rates and divided by 50. The average American however pays more than the average rate, because the majority live in the dense states where electricity costs most. Florida, New York, Caifornia, etc vs the relatively tiny populations in North Dakota where electricity is cheap.
Further, I'm confident that the skew is weighted towards broadband users, which further skews things away from rural North Dakota where electricity is cheap.
Further, they fail to account the extra cooling required as a result of generating more heat. Granted in -some- places where you need more heat this will offset your heating bill in your favor, but again, most people are clustered in areas that require more cooling than heating.
So, bottom line, I'd say their assessment of electrical costs is on the low side.
For the sake of argument, lets say it averaged out to 10$/mo. (Including europe.) What kind of computing power could you build and run with $5.7M/month.
Especially when you have the freedom to install it where you want, and factoring in that industrial electricity is cheaper than residential. With a $68M/year budget, could you beat boinc?
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Do you think you could get more than half a million people to pay to you $10 per month each?
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You easily could, but you're not the one paying the (processing, at least) electric bills, and the huge cost is spread out over hundreds of thousands of contributors, so while it really uses a huge amount of electricity and money, the average user running it is only going to see a relatively small increase in cost of electricity, making it that much more likely that they'll contribute, whereas you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a way to get 68 million for any reason.
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I think people are more likely to contribute to BOINC and spend 10$/month extra on electricity and cooling than actually pay 10$/month to contribute to research. I bet a lot of people who contribute to BOINC didn't even think about the higher electricity bill.
Your arguments are all valid, it's just that from a marketing point of view I think BOINC has an advantage.
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it's just that from a marketing point of view I think BOINC has an advantage.
I agree. But I find it ... unethical. People wouldn't pay for this if they were presented a dollar amount up front that said "this is what it costs, please pay it." but they will pay it if you can have it silently lumped in with there electricity bill, where they can't see it.
On an ethical level, how can these 'volunteers' really be giving informed consent, when most of them are unaware or barely aware that they are being charged o
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Their claim that the cost is between $3 and $8 is in a *wiki page*. If you have better figures to share, then instead of ranting in slashdot, go ahead and share them in the wiki talk page, or in BOINC mailing list.
If they'd like me to write their documentation for them then they can pay me.
Grid computing != supercomputing (Score:5, Informative)
According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)
Sigh...why do these projects (BOINC, *@home, etc.) insist on comparing their performance to superpercomputers on the TOP500 list? Of course BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack. If it was, the performance wouldn't come close to anything at the top of the TOP500 list. A bunch of workstations running a grid client and talking to each other over the internet is never going to have the same type of message passing bandwidth as a supercomputer using something like locally connected infiniband.
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Worse, for all we know, some of those TOP500 computers *are* part of BOINC... making BOINC ineligible for comparison.
BOINC is the software, not the computer.
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And if you actually find someone from a project that does make a claim of their total floating point performance, please ask them how they calculated the number of floating point calculations their application does. Chances are that their number is high by a factor of 10. (See my post elsewhere in this discussion titled "Not really 2 PetaFLOP/s")
Why is this being compared to top500? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is NOT a supercomputer. This is a cluster, and a very slow cluster at that. It seems like people think that anything fast is a "supercomputer" and as techies, we ought to know better.
What makes a supercomputer "super" is its internode communication. You have extremely fast links so that, in theory, any node can access the memory from any other node as it would its own local memory. Now in reality there are some performance penalties, but still. Basically you really have created one large computer, rather than tons of small ones.
This is a cluster, which is as the name implies just a bunch of little computers networked in some fashion working on the same problem. That's great, but not the same thing. The nodes do not have high speed communication, some may even be on modems and only connected occasionally.
Now, why does this matter? Well it depends on the problem you are trying to solve. Some problems need very little communication. A good example would be cracking cryptography. You just divide up the keyspace among all your nodes. There's also very little data to send back and forth. You send you the problem, consisting of the encrypted message to the nodes, and then all the communication from this on is:
Node: Didn't find the key.
Controller: Ok try this range.
Node: Ok.
As such link speed of the cluster can be very slow. Well other problems still work in a clustered environment, but need higher link speeds like gig Ethernet. 3D rendering would be an example. All the nodes can act independent, they are just divided up on frames to render, or parts of a frame or whatever. However since the problem and results are much larger in this case, they need faster communication to make it practical. A modem won't cut it for transferring images that are 50MB each when you are rendering thousands.
However, there are other problems where there is heavy inter node communication. A particle simulation would be like this. Since what happens with one particle affects all others, nodes have to chat continuously. For this, you need a supercomputer. The bandwidth of links must be extremely high and the latency must be extremely low, or else processor power will be wasted just waiting on getting the data that is needed.
So just because something has a lot of CPUs and can crunch a lot of numbers, doesn't make it a supercomputer.
Re:Why is this being compared to top500? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no reason "supercomputer" needs to only refer to monolithic machines with high-speed interprocess communication, merely because it has primarily meant that in the past.
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So just because something has a lot of CPUs and can crunch a lot of numbers, doesn't make it a supercomputer.
There's no reason "supercomputer" needs to only refer to monolithic machines with high-speed interprocess communication, merely because it has primarily meant that in the past.
Yes there is.
Ok but that makes it a meaningless term then (Score:2)
If any cluster is a supercomputer, then just get rid of the term supercomputer and be done with it.
Also there IS a reason, and that is because, as I mentioned, only certain kinds of problems can be solved by a cluster. Thus it becomes an important distinction. Is this a cluster or a supercomputer? If your application requires a supercomputer, you don't want to get duped in to buying a cluster that is being called a "supercomputer" that won't handle your app.
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82% solution (Score:2, Insightful)
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So just because something has a lot of CPUs and can crunch a lot of numbers, doesn't make it a supercomputer.
Actually yes it does. The type of computer you're talking about is a "general purpose supercomputer". Boinc, Folding@home and Conficker are all "special purpose supercomputers". Any cluster of computers that can act on a single dataset, perform a quadrillion calculations per second, and give coherent results is a "super" computer - at least today. In two decades it might be a cellular phone, but that's a different question.
And because you asked, Mr. AC, the majority (282) of the top500 use gigabit ethe
Homeless/Unemployed People On Treadmills... (Score:1)
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A fit human can produce somewhere between 150 and 300 watts continuously, with perhaps the occassional excursion to higher. (In contrast, one horsepower is approximately 750 W.) So, in a day, a person might be able to pump out 1-2 kWh, which on the wholesale electrical market might fetch a whopping $0.10. If the company is clever, they'd store and release that power during peak demand, in which case they might get twice that. Could you live on $0.
Boinc Podcast on how it works (Score:1, Informative)
I will have a podcast with the creator of Boinc out this Saturday at midnight (EDT) at http://rce-cast.com
Obligatory Calvin & Hobbes (Score:2)
Barrier? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think not: 2 petaflops is just a matter of recruiting enough computers and having them running BOINC at the same time. If it has achieved this mark, then it couldn't have been that much of a barrier, could it?
Flop/s?!! (Score:1)
Not really 2 PetaFLOP/s. (Score:2)
Most projects grant credit by multiplying the run time of an application by some benchmark scores done by the application run time. The benchmarks are small and fit easily into cache. The applications tend to have a large memory footprint, and so end up spending a lot of processor time in c