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.
posted Feb 24th 2008 5:05AM
Reminds me of the matrix...
if I did the math right, if a PS3 can do 2 Teraflops then 5,000 PS3s run at 1 exaflop. Holy crap!
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh1jB4hVJRg
What if you had three PS3s?
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
Ah you're totally right. I failed.
Epic mathematical fail!
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!
Its the GRECCO from Oceans' 13.
Its nice to see SKYNET is almost completed.
@ Alex
What if you had 4 PS3s?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiYq0v9IeVM
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
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
everyone talks about how ridiculous crysis is, but it runs at almost 60 fps on high (dx9) on my $600 desktop.
Somehow I doubt that.
that just depends on your definition of almost
On all the lowest settings, right? And just the main menu, right?
LesbianHam: Probably. With the polygons the size of big lego blocks.
http://Carl.Vitullo.justgotowned.com/
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.
@computerdude
waaaay to much free time
@jeeesus
http://jeeesus.justgotowned.com/
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.
i don't have any antialiasing on, and it's at 1280X1024 (that's as high as my monitor goes :/)
I don't have AA on either and I play the the same resolution.
oh. that sucks.
2 gb ram? that helps.
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.
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.
Finally someone who knows the Truth!
It's ok COD4 almost looks as good anyway.
you want a video? i'll do it.
it runs hella good.
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
Sorry, this GeoCities site is currently unavailable.
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You're popular...
You've got to be kidding right?
We are talking about FPS and you post screenshots?
No..wait, my mistake, those are videos.
it shows the fps in the corner, i'm not a retard.
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
ummmm...
no.
Hook up a couple of ps4's, or 4 720's
(Fanboys argue below)
loser
nuff said.
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.
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..
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.
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.
In 640 x 480 i get 60 fps too!
amazing!
at 320x200 i get 120 FPS in crysis...
and at 160x200 i get 180 FPS!!!! OMG!!! i have a super computer...
jaja lol that's so funny! I can only start to imagine Crysis @ 160x200
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
My palm plays Crysis at 60fps at 320x240 :-D
Crysis.mkv, that is..
If it would look like that on the PC, it would definitely be playable, just forget about covering your whole screen... (and about sitting more than a few cm away from the monitor)
im so lost...
so the fastest computer is like half a petaflop..
and were talking 1000 petaflops already?
im so confused..
but if we say go by moores law
1/2 a petaflop 2006
1 petaflop 2008
2 2010
4 2012
8 2014
16 2016
32 2018
64 2020
128 2022
256 2024
512 2026
1024 2028
yeah i know it was supposed to be void in 10 years but.. its not going to happen in the next 5 years, and i think this is therefore not news.
moores law isn't directly related to speed... only technology in general...
It cant do anything that us readers are interested in. Like Crysis. Most things which we want to run fast only have a couple of threads. A desktop PC would PWN that at Crysis.
Get the net running on a bunch of those Exaflops and it would be termed an organism.
ahaha, when i first read that i thought it said turned into an orgasm.
...ohh the possibilities. In retrospect.
do you ever want to hurt yourself?
play Crysis? But does it play doom?
No. No it does not.
You beat me too it...
Btw, I can't type. I meant you beat me to it.
Poorly executed meme. Come on man, get your life together!
1000 exaflops = Manu Ginobili
I think they should tone it down a bit. Terraflop sounds so much cooler than exaflop.
TERRORFLOP
thanx to modern technology all these obscure names for numbers are actually being used.excaflops, terrorflops, internets
But will it blend?
It will accurately simulate blending to atomic scale in real time if you program it properly.
While the race is on for this super computer, another race is on to make a blender big enough to engulf said computer.
""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.""
That's being optimistic, the Crysis part. And to the guy who said he's getting almost 60fps, well 5 isn't an almost. neither is 24. To get 60fps I have to set the quality down to Far Cry levels. Still good, but no where as spectacular as the slide-show performance of High and Very High
Don't let the people step in the computer flop, they will track it into the house!
how do you get data to tens of thousands of processors at a time for crunching
I know, but I should have patented the idea long ago.
and it uses 1.21 gigawatts of power...
You pronounced it wrong. It's "one point twenty-one jiggawatts".
Lmao man you just got owned
And then the god damn commenting system owned me..
Nice to hear that something might be able to run crysis in a few years - i was a bit scared there for a moment... i really believed that nothing would ever be able to run in! Thanks for the reassurance Paul!
What are these super computers doing? they should be doing some noble cause like curing cancer or something... or do they just play chess.... If that is the case will they play Global Thermal Nuclear War with me?
Maybe he was talking about running Crysis entirely on CPUs:)
Is all this a precursor to SkyNet? If so, someone needs to more closely watch the machines.
how's this go from flops to FPS in crysis? Anyways. All i want to know, how would this giant condom dispenser play COD4?
does more flops than the Duke men's basketball team
www.top500.org lists the top 500 supercomputers in the world...im looking at number 27 as I write this.
Nothing created by anyone on this, or any other planet for that matter, can ever match the performance of my Quantum Super Computer which runs at 8.97*10^2353205723095731257024534435693470967 yotaflops. For those of you who don't know what exactly a yotaflop is go look it up no0bs. You and your pathetic exucese of a device that you so dare to call a computer can go emo in the corner for all I care. Now its time to go play Tetris 3000. MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Pwned.... You:- -_- >:O Me:- XD