A Computer With 400 Terabytes of Memory
NEWPORT, R.I.—The Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will start to take delivery on a computer at least as three times more powerful than any now in operation.
The system should be operational by 2008, according to Thomas Zacharia, ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences. Zacharia spoke at the High Performance Computing and Communications Conference this week in Newport, R.I.
Cray Inc. of Seattle will supply the system, named Baker. It will run approximately 24,000 2.6 Ghz quad-core Opteron processors made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The nodes will be housed in 187 liquid-cooled cabinets. The system, which is still in early stages of design, will have either 187 or 400 terabytes of working memory (depending on the cost of memory modules) and from one to 11 petabytes of storage.
Such a computer, if operational today, would be considered the world's fastest; it may even be the first to break the 1 petaflop limit. A PFLOP is 1 quadrllion floating-point operations per second.
According to the Top500.org list, today's most powerful computer is the Blue Gene/L, run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, another Energy Department outfit. That system currently runs at about 350 teraflops (350 trillion floating-point operations per second), though the lab and IBM Corp. plan to expand its capability to 1 PFLOP, also by 2008.
The laboratory will rely on the Tennessee Valley Authority for the power needed to run this behemoth. The power company is building a 170 megawatt substation to support this and other ORNL projects.
Like current ORNL systems, this one will be used by some of the country's best scientists to further explore the limits of their fields. Researchers must demonstrate the need for using the computer, and the lab will look for those jobs that are too large for other systems.
"We're entering new realm of scientific discovery, where we are looking at things at a much smaller scale. Computing expands upon our understanding of the natural world," Zacharia said. "Greater computer capacity allows researchers tackle more complex problems."
Read the Entire Article here
posted by Shan @ 11:04 AM
26 Comments:
Bet they'll be putting it to good uses like playing Pong!
It will bring a whole new dimension to playing online video games such as Doom
Moron its designed for calculations not playing shit. It brings ZERO "New dimensions" to any game.
all video games are a bunch of calculations.
Ill be in more detail if you wish
Almost all super computer are designed for numerical calculations not general multi tasking. Add that to a custom memory hierarchy and its not made for gaming.
In other words its not made for transaction processing.
No problem
Designed for Solitare 2.0
how many digits does a PFlop have??
Why must it be a debate over whether or not it'll play video games, who gives a fuck.
Yes it's a super computer yes its made for complex calculations of a numerical value but all in all it's a very high powered computer consisting the same types components as your moms hewlett packard, it does the same thing, throw a different OS on it and it'll do a different thing. Granted, video processing would need to be comparable to processing ability but yes it'll play games, no it wasnt built to, and it doesnt matter one way or another so why get your panties in a wad?
Why must it be a debate over whether or not it'll play video games, who gives a fuck.
Yes it's a super computer yes its made for complex calculations of a numerical value but all in all it's a very high powered computer consisting the same types components as your moms hewlett packard, it does the same thing, throw a different OS on it and it'll do a different thing. Granted, video processing would need to be comparable to processing ability but yes it'll play games, no it wasnt built to, and it doesnt matter one way or another so why get your panties in a wad?
They should run a simulation of the world in terms of weather and pollution sites and see what it'll be like in 10 years.
For the games thing, I dont see why they dumb down the processors like suggested, im sure they'd want a functional machine that could run software written elsewhere, it would be a big hunk a steel if it was just a pure calculator, it would need threads and multitasking etc.. for complex formulae. If I was in anyway part of its presentation id run a game on it to show it off, i mean it would easily outrun any 7800gt with software rendering.
doesnt matter how fast n wot not the computer is, it will still run windows n therefore it will be crap :D
they are only scientists they'll proboble try to process reality and then well have to vait 5 to 10 years for programmers to create kick ass virtual reality games like virtualboy
Bet it still won't run Battlefield 2
anonymous said...
doesnt matter how fast n wot not the computer is, it will still run windows n therefore it will be crap :D
Heh no, it will be, at the very least, running a unix type OS (linux, bsd.) It may have some sort of OS that the general public can't use, due to the fact its a supercomputer with MUCH different hardware to normal desktops.
And being able to just 'throw in' a different OS? Not likely. I highly doubt they'll have an x86 compatibility so that you can run DOS or windows on it ...
Linux/BSD maybe, because you can customize it for your hardware.
Take it from someone who knows PCs, and doesn't feel the need to prove it to a 'Forum Troller'.
I 'Lol' at most of your pseudo-viciousness, and how you attempt to get angered at someone, trying to prove you know something about what you are on about.
As i said, im not gonna 'prove', just going to state fact.
"Almost all super computer are designed for numerical calculations not general multi tasking. Add that to a custom memory hierarchy and its not made for gaming."
Do you even realize what you speak about? That is a typical load of carefully disguised horseshit. 1: of course SCs are for calculations but... 2: they are ALSO for 'multi tasking' (yes cupcake, even general lol), Pushing limits and specs, NOT to mention a nice way for a company to show-off. Kasaparov VS IBM (Deep Blue) = Example.
"Moron its designed for calculations not playing shit. It brings ZERO "New dimensions" to any game."
Yes. It will play games, although not geared. It doesnt bring nething new FX/SFX wise, but if you got this running a game? you'd fully enjoy it. LOL it'd do whatever you would want it to. It takes nothing (5 mins) to gear it for gaming. So yeah, to the 'Anon'... Don't you look foolish now? (Come rhyme some stats off to me fool and get this whole office-block reading over my shoulder laughing).
As for you nubs arguing over the OS. LOLOLOLOLOL x50. a OS is a OS is a OS is a OS, just cut the unwanted parts, as does any company/corp with a custom os. (Yes custom OS's exist LOL)
The reason im typing this (i would of normally laughed and kept on searching) is because you (like most forum trolls) slam someone on a honest statement, He wasn't a moron, it t'was a legitmate question. One that you decided to denounce because you believe you harbour some shred of intellect. Let he who is without sin... *you probably think CRT is a variation of a ECG*
All in All, you've failed and caused someone to step in and make you out to be a fool.
Anywho, i'll just continue to laugh with others.
PS
To the people laughing out there reading this, you are not alone! Rofl and these are the people I teach. Career change in order, no?
N pwned.
amen to the long ass message above. I mean, I get into technology, but I guess I'm not HARDCORE enough to be one of the whiny nerds who get on here and slam each other over system architecture or wanting a SC to play videogames. I find it mind boggling that technology has made it THIS far with people still acting like inane fan-boys. god bless.
I work on computers of all types and let's just say that I work for the government(so it is safe to assume that I am throughly trained) and leave it at that. I am also a "hardcore" geek (if thats not an oxymoron) and I have to say I must thank you Anon 1030 for laying down a big 'ol rick james bitch slap. I hate it when people try to sound like they know everything about computers when in reality they don't know shit, that shit is contagous, some other putz will read a few word of it and try to convince some of his friends that "You couldn't load windows on that system because the acoustic coupler is misaligned" or some other BS.... Anyways thanks again for laying the smack down, and I'm sure everyone in my office will also be laughing at them... Peace...
Ok people...we live in the Land of Free! Osama Biladen is our #1 priority. Here, have a shmoke and a pankake then take sip on my beer and chill =)
im an intlectual in a instatoot
LOL
nob jockeys
I own this machine and it runs elite just fine....
"He and one or two others are actual intllectuals like I from an institute who would make use of this machine someday.
it's different archeitecture, not x86 NO WINDOWS."
LOL the fool cant even spell
I wonder why the computer is being built with Opterons, instead of RISC processors (like IBM's PowerPC). Wouldn't it make more sense to use RISC processing when you have tailor-made software to do calculations?
wow, x86? nope, this thing is using opterons. 64bit processors. Quad core 64 bit processors. Yeah, it'll run the x86 stuff, and yeah, doesn't take much to run an OS on it. Most of the time though, the OS's are tailor made, and then the techies run through and program their own applications to run in it in order to get the calculations they're doing. No it's not an overgrown calculator. More of a multi-dimensional simulator. Why they don't use RISC's? the power pc is going down. Why do you think MAC has gone to intel? Not what it use to be, The RISC's are also more modeled to embeded systems nowadays anyways.
ok so this isnt a post that is going to slam anybody, but i would think that if you were to run windows on a system like this it would only know how to access the limited address space of the node that its running on.
Kind of like how dual core doesnt mean double the power, it is my understanding that core duo for instance would be good for multi-tasking as one application can run in one core, while another in the second core etc.
And lets consider that running x86 on 64 bit processors usually requires a fallback solution. I might be wrong, but last i read when running x86 on an ia64 type architecture it uses fallback circuits to run the x86 instruction set, at a greatly reduced clock speed (compared to todays standards).
I thought most clustered solutions used custom software running on top of an OS for supporting clusters, so that workloads can be distributed to the nodes, sometimes via a small internal IP network or similar transit route, to which a manager node governs the whole operation.
Its a theoretical maximum number of flops, but this doesnt mean that you can slap doom on it and use the power of all those processors and distributed memory modules. Perhaps some kind of virtualisation software could distribute the x86 emulated instruction set amoung the cluster... but meh who really cares.
Well done AndrewC, you know more about it than I do. All I know is that Opterons are x64 not x86. And yes, it's possible to program it to play games, you can program it to do almost anything. And yes, an OS can be applied. Custom, or not. And RISC have limited capabilities, and used more in embedded applications than anything else now. The computations at comparitive speeds is minute in comparison to a 64 bit processor. And these multi core systems, only are true multicore IF and only IF each core as it's own set of Threads. Otherwise, you're just getting better sharing from a single processor, a suedo-core if you will. Power PC, last thing they'll probably be able to do is the XBOX, you won't see much of them anymore past that.
Give it 20 years and this thing will be in our houses. I dunno if we can get a power substation built in our backyard though. hehe
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