Exascale computing: it's the new terascale

Anybody remember when a gigaflop was a big deal? Oh, how far we've come. Researchers are now talking about exascale computing, which means systems that can handle a million trillion calculations per second. To put that in perspective, IBM's BlueGene/L (pictured), the fastest machine running, has a peak performance of 596 teraflops. A petaflop is 1000 times faster than a teraflop, and an exaflop is 1000 times faster than a petaflop. Yeah, that's a lot of flops. Right now researchers are sorting out the most preliminary of groundwork, such as how do you get data to tens of thousands of processors at a time for crunching, but we're sure before a few decades are up they'll finally have built a machine that is powerful enough to cure all human diseases -- or, you know, maybe even play Crysis at 60fps.

[Sergio @ Feb 24th 2008 5:15AM]

Reminds me of the matrix...

[Sergio @ Feb 24th 2008 5:18AM]

if I did the math right, if a PS3 can do 2 Teraflops then 5,000 PS3s run at 1 exaflop. Holy crap!

[jukie @ Feb 24th 2008 5:22AM]

1024 Teraflops = 1 Petaflop
1024 Petaflops = 1 Exaflop

1024 * 1024 = 1,048,576 Teraflops. Divided by 2 gives you 524,288 PS3s.

If a PS3 does 2 Teraflops.

[Alex @ Feb 24th 2008 5:25AM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh1jB4hVJRg

What if you had three PS3s?

[JLTate @ Feb 24th 2008 5:25AM]

Actually, 5,000 PS3s would have a peak performance level of 1 petaflops, not exaflops. That's peak, though, and as such that number mean nearly nothing because you will never get perfect conditions on every single processor in a 5,000 processor cluster.

IBM's upcoming computing giant, Roadrunner, on the other hand will actually _sustain_ that with around 16,000 Cell processors.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner

[Sergio @ Feb 24th 2008 5:35AM]

Ah you're totally right. I failed.

[Sanchez @ Feb 24th 2008 5:52AM]

Epic mathematical fail!

[nh @ Feb 24th 2008 8:19AM]

junkie:
1000 Teraflops = 1 Petaflop
1000 Petaflops = 1 Exaflop
Which gives you half a million PS3s

It's only kilobytes and megabytes where you need to use base 2 arithmetic - it comes from the physical architecture of the hardware. Don't complicate things!

[Flashpoint @ Feb 24th 2008 9:37AM]

Its the GRECCO from Oceans' 13.

Its nice to see SKYNET is almost completed.

[computer.dude.28 @ Feb 24th 2008 12:00PM]

@ Alex

What if you had 4 PS3s?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiYq0v9IeVM

[Sean @ Feb 24th 2008 2:38PM]

I've been working at brookhaven national lab and we had a chance to get in this thing not sure if bluegene is the same thing as bluegene/L but it looks like it was incredible there were servers for all over the place probly equal to the size of a high school cafeteria and all the fans and theres massive air conditioning blasting in and out from all the cracks hot air blasting out what I found most intresting was in the sea of generic IBM servers there was hidden in the back the room half way down a rack was a all yellow google server or something then there was also a 3 cabinet apple machine tucked away in the back very cool stuff. There were techs putting in 120GB? hardrives box the case must of been 50 per case just incredible

[pyro @ Feb 24th 2008 2:45PM]

nh, the SI prefixes(kilo, mega, giga...) are all base 10. The IEC abbreviations (kibi, mebi, gibi...) are all base 2. What has caused all of this confusion is that windows uses the wrong notation. It will for instance call a 1024 byte file 1KB when it is actually 1kibi. 1KB is really 1000 bytes. An easy way to think of it is that all the prefixes for the metric system are base 10 and those prefixes are often used for bytes.

[ZekeSulastin @ Feb 25th 2008 1:07AM]

Pyro, learn computing history.

The whole thing started because eons ago, computer developers noticed that the base-two arithmetic lined up fairly well with SI notation and used it. 2^10 = 1024 = kilo, 2^20 = 1024*1024 = 1048756 = mega, etc. As this is how the computer actually sees the memory, this is how it is shown in just about every OS ever (unless things have changed a bit in the Mac/Linux world). Ever note how MP3 players and hard drives never report the on-box capacity? Taking advantage of the difference by using the technically correct meaning. The whole xx-bi notation thing is actually a fairly recent development - 1998, IIRC ...

Of course, people being idiots and applying it to things that AREN'T binary-math-related is a completely different matter that I HIGHLY doubt adding -bi to a prefix will fix - having had a discourse with someone who thought 1k m^3 = 1 km^3 because "k = kilo = 1000!" I don't believe in anything said to be foolproof actually being so ...

[Sam Winter @ Feb 25th 2008 3:20AM]

PS3 != 2 Teraflops... I own one and love it, but that is all marketing hype. First of all, they are including the GPU, and second, they are talking about the "raw" operations per second without regards to the context of computational task. It's so much more complicated than that:

1) When looking at floating point operations per second, "flops", of supercomputers, they are almost ALWAYS talking about their performance with DOUBLE PRECISION 64-bit numbers. The current CELL BE chips in the playstation 3 are limited to 32-bit single precision. and if they could, the performance would be an order of magnitude lower. More like 50Gflops.

2) Just as importantly, supercomputers tend to use huge arrays of general purpose processors instead of small numbers of special-purpose chips for a reason. This has to do with the architecture of the applications they run. Massive numbers of full-capability general purpose CPUs allow the system to be used on a much more diverse set of computational problems than specialized co-processors that lack standard CPU functions.
For certain applications that are easy to "parallelize" and can take advantage of massively multi-threaded architectures of specialized chips like the CELL BE or a GPU and that don't require the huge memory bandwidths of traditional supercomputers, these specialized processors are the way to go.
IBMs big roadrunner project mentioned above is actually a hybrid of these ideas, using thousands of both standard AMD Opteron x86 cpus and Cell BE processors.

[Poom @ Feb 25th 2008 5:03AM]

ZekeSulastin, you're the idiot.

Pyro is right in saying that the mega, giga, terra, peta, exa, ... are base 10. The base 2 systems are mebi, etc. That is how the ISO has set the standards.

Historically, mega, giga, and so on were used as base 2 as well. This is confusing, as we also use such conversions in base 10 for anything else except computer. Hence, the base 2 conversion uses a diggerent standard. The key word here is "historically". You would be right years ago, but you are wrong now.

Yea, so jukie is technically wrong too.

[Poom @ Feb 25th 2008 5:10AM]

Oh, I'm sorry I forgot to justify something. The SI prefixes are used for other stuff (physics...) before they were used for computers... Computers adopt this notation later on.

Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

It's just that non-physicists only see them in computers. So, you'd think that physicists derived their notation from computer, which is kinda stupid considering that you have electric circuits and such before the ideas of computers were even conceived.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 5:16AM]

everyone talks about how ridiculous crysis is, but it runs at almost 60 fps on high (dx9) on my $600 desktop.

[JLTate @ Feb 24th 2008 5:26AM]

Somehow I doubt that.

[loffel @ Feb 24th 2008 6:07AM]

that just depends on your definition of almost

[LesbianHam @ Feb 24th 2008 6:59AM]

On all the lowest settings, right? And just the main menu, right?

[Homeboy @ Feb 24th 2008 9:45AM]

LesbianHam: Probably. With the polygons the size of big lego blocks.

[computer.dude.28 @ Feb 24th 2008 12:10PM]

http://Carl.Vitullo.justgotowned.com/

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 12:32PM]

no, it's on mostly high, some medium. maybe it's more like 45 tho.
i mean, ati radeon 3850, and an amd x2 64 6000+. object setting to high with no motion blur and it works fine.

i built it myself, so i saved money over buying a prebuilt with xp and everything too. it probably would have been a $1500 desktop on dell or something.

[jeeesus @ Feb 24th 2008 1:00PM]

@computerdude

waaaay to much free time

[o29 @ Feb 24th 2008 1:54PM]

@jeeesus

http://jeeesus.justgotowned.com/

[Abuzar @ Feb 24th 2008 2:56PM]

Yeah really? I have a Core 2 Duo at 4Ghz and a 3850 almost at 3870 speeds and I get ~20 FPS on High.

Don't lie.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 3:00PM]

i don't have any antialiasing on, and it's at 1280X1024 (that's as high as my monitor goes :/)

[Abuzar @ Feb 24th 2008 3:18PM]

I don't have AA on either and I play the the same resolution.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 3:43PM]

oh. that sucks.
2 gb ram? that helps.

[Abuzar @ Feb 24th 2008 4:14PM]

2 GB of 1000Mhz RAM at 4-4-4-12.

Trust me it's not my PC that's bad. You just get those kind of numbers in Crysis. Just admit it you didn't know how many frames you really got and you were playing on medium the whole time.

[Juaquin @ Feb 24th 2008 4:28PM]

Complete lies. I run an overclocked Opty 170 with an 8800GTS 640MB and 2GB RAM, and the game runs about 50fps on medium settings in single player. I have to go to low settings to play online with good frame rates. No way is an ATI 3850 going to run Crysis at playably frame rates on high settings.

[Abuzar @ Feb 24th 2008 4:39PM]

Finally someone who knows the Truth!

It's ok COD4 almost looks as good anyway.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 5:01PM]

you want a video? i'll do it.
it runs hella good.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 5:47PM]

ok, here's a few screenshots and the settings. you can substitute the number in the url, there's 8 shots total.
http://www.geocities.com/carelvi2low/Crysis_4.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/carelvi2low/Crysis_6.JPG
http://www.geocities.com/carelvi2low/Settings.JPG

[Abuzar @ Feb 24th 2008 10:07PM]

Sorry, this GeoCities site is currently unavailable.

The GeoCities web site you were trying to view has temporarily exceeded its data transfer limit. Please try again later.

You're popular...

[ark_v2 @ Feb 24th 2008 11:29PM]

You've got to be kidding right?
We are talking about FPS and you post screenshots?
No..wait, my mistake, those are videos.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 11:30PM]

it shows the fps in the corner, i'm not a retard.

[Carl Vitullo @ Feb 24th 2008 11:33PM]

here, same images.
http://img2.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?262ecb7323.jpg
http://img2.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?ee4dd75f64.jpg
http://img2.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?abbc2de534.jpg

[Jason @ Feb 26th 2008 1:07PM]

ummmm...

no.

[steve @ Feb 24th 2008 5:18AM]

Hook up a couple of ps4's, or 4 720's

(Fanboys argue below)

[AutoTom @ Feb 24th 2008 8:11AM]

loser

nuff said.

[Andrew @ Feb 24th 2008 12:54PM]

Once they build this, they're going to ask it the meaning of life. And it will crunch numbers for millenia. Then it will output 42.

Ahh, exascale computing.

[r3loaded @ Feb 24th 2008 5:19AM]

But will it...

I think that by this point, the system will be so powerful that the data being pumped to it will be slowed down by physical characteristics such as electrical resistance. Maybe they'll go for optical interconnects..

[JLTate @ Feb 24th 2008 5:33AM]

High performance scientific computing works by distributing HUGE workloads (like calculating weather projections, for example) over tens of thousands of processors, each with their own local resources. A computer like BlueGene/L may act like a single computer to the user, but in truth it's thousands working together.

And most supercomputers do use optical interconnects.

[Carbonize @ Feb 24th 2008 5:44AM]

I actually read a more intelligent version of this story yesterday where they quoted the makers as saying that they feel flops are pretty much free from limits now and the only limitations is the travel time between the processors and other such physical limitation on the transportation of the data to be worked on. Also they have to make a way to quickly transfer one processors work if that processor fails.

[steve @ Feb 24th 2008 5:19AM]

In 640 x 480 i get 60 fps too!

[noivo @ Feb 24th 2008 7:48AM]

amazing!

[Oinquer @ Feb 24th 2008 6:09AM]

at 320x200 i get 120 FPS in crysis...
and at 160x200 i get 180 FPS!!!! OMG!!! i have a super computer...

[Yubastard @ Feb 24th 2008 10:22AM]

jaja lol that's so funny! I can only start to imagine Crysis @ 160x200

[Gargantuan @ Feb 24th 2008 10:49AM]

u can do that? i wanna do that! i wanna play crysis at max at 320x240 and the put it up on youtube and make people jealous