Roadrunner? Pfff, your
chart-topping 1.105 petaflops are laughable. IBM just announced its 20-freaking-petaflop Sequoia supercomputer due for delivery by 2012. While supercomputer speeds have
steadily increased year-over-year, a near 20x jump in calculations per second since the last world ranking is unheard of, even if the system has yet to come on-line. Slated to spend its life simulating nuclear explosions, Sequoia will use 45-nm (PowerPC, presumably) processors with 16 cores per chip for as many as 4,096 processors per rack. That's a total of 1.6 million cores assisted by 1.6 petabytes of memory. Perhaps all this processing power might help IBM understand the futility of its Lotus Notes strategy.
posted Feb 3rd 2009 2:53AM
Holy shit.
Holy shit is right man imagine how many porn site I can open up without the lag.
makes me wonder about the non-classified machines you KNOW the gov't has somewhere...
Umm, how is processing speed going to help you look at more pron? The bottleneck is your ISP, not your processor.
gives you wood.
@Jared
Does make me wonder, I think I'll go look them up, seeing as they are not classified...
Prft forget Crysis, this thing could run the matrix.
lol that was great. especially since i just watched the matrix trilogy for the first time this weekend.
Kudos on crysis/matrix
But can it find Bin Laden?
Maybe - nobody knows...
Please a commodore 64 can't find Bin Laden, what makes you think this can...oh wait
YES you win sir, that's better than all other things perhaps not the crysis thing tho.
no but Jack Bauer can:)
Mr. bauer is booked for the entire year. Tony.... get down!!!...............
I think we should ask chuck norris to find bin laden!
btw chuck norris does 200000000000petaflops while sleeping
Can it find hime? Uhm dude, didn't you read the article "simulating nukes" THEM bad boys'll find him!
Playstation 4?
xbox 1440!
Wii 28478
i think i just truncated...
Someone can multiply 360 times 4...
Someone can divide 1440 by 360...
hmm as if microsoft is going to multiply
Xbox 4040
Chuck Norris can divide any number by 0
o_0
I didn't even make it in before a Crysis comment. Dammit. Now who's gonna ask if it'll blend so we can get to useful commenting?
If so, it's the blender that's news...
I think Cray currently hold the supercomputing crown:
"The latest upgrade to the Cray XT5 "Jaguar" supercomputer at ORNL has increased the system's computing power to a peak of 1.64 petaflops, making Jaguar the world's first petaflops system dedicated to open research. Scientists have already used the newly upgraded Jaguar to complete an unprecedented superconductivity calculation that achieved a sustained performance of more than 1.3 petaflops."
Sorry, apparently there's some dispute in how the speeds are measured.
Glad to see two US companies at the top of the game, though. Capitalist competition is a beautiful thing.
Gotta love Cray, they started in my hometown, seems kind of stupid for IBM to announce this, this far ahead. Gives Cray plenty of time to get started on there own which in turn could be faster if they waited to announce it.
Mitch, of course its a bit different since IBM actually makes it own chips..
Really? 3 years away and its a big deal? Thats a looooong time in computer years, remember, in late 2005 was when Dual Core processors were a big deal, in a month or so we'll have 8 core.
XT Jaguar, a previous near record holder, had 180k opteron cores total. This has nearly 10 times that amount, so this is mostly an effect of scale.
That means only roughly double the horsepower per core of an actually built supercomputer that will be over 3 years its elder by the time this comes out? Color me dissapointed, I'd expect better for 2012.
This kind of pflop power could be accomplished with todays technology, just not very cost effectively.
Oh IBM, you sure do love to press release things that have just barely left the conceptual stage and wont be seen for a long time.
Its called PR... to keep stocks high...
all firms/company's do this
Plus we are talking super computers... not single microprocessor
and yes you are right the technology is available for it now.... but it's not like find the parts and the software to put together at once (LEGO)
10x the processors maybe but it has 20x the computing power, that's not just an effect of scale.
Yes, but a measly 2x the performance off technology that isn't even out yet 3 years in the future does not make me very excited. This is just typical IBM fluff.
For every supercomputer built, IBM puts 2 back in the ground
Ouch a Lotus Notes burn...
Even with such vast processing power and memory, IBM won't be able to compute the amount of suffering it has inflicted on engineers with Big-Endian byte ordering.
If by "IBM" you mean "Intel" and "big" you mean "little", then yes.
Also, that's what she said.
Will it run crysis on Very High settings?
no. it probably doesnt have much in the way of graphics crunching
think of this as a big calculator (and not one of those joke calculators, there just ordinary calculators in big cases)
not if you're gonna use on-board graphics on it
It could possibly run Crysis in software emulation.
42
Correct but can it find the question?
Yes very true unless u some how add about 10 Nvidia GTX290's then maybe... just maybe... lol (exageration of couse) =]
Javydawg. Pimp... Javydawg.
Yes very true unless u some how add about 10 Nvidia GTX290's then maybe... just maybe... lol (exageration of couse) =]
Lotus Notes SUCKS BIG TIME.
I hate using that crap of a Software at work.
Have you even tried the current version 8.5? It is actually very nice. A lot of companies run really old versions of Notes because their IT dept dont want to upgrade.
amelluk: Shut up. Just shut up. Lotus Notes and everyone who ever helped code it need to die. If I ever go postal at work, it will be because of Notes.
Funny... I made my peace with Lotus Notes around version 7. It's not nearly as slow or unstable as it used to be.
I have a hunch that most people who complain about Notes stopped using it around version 4 or 5, which was the "dark ages" of that product.
The vast majority of unsatisfied Notes users are indeed using very old versions. It's curious to see how comments about the future posted here states that three years is a long time for cumputers and IT, how this or that company are also evolving, etc, while some others refuse to observe that Notes 6 is about 7 years old, and Notes 5 is about 10 years old. Now, while I agree that older versions had an old interface, name a software in your company that is actually SO GOOD that it is delivering it's value within the same version for this long ... that's why so many companies are still analyzing when to upgrade.
again???
Yes very true unless u some how add about 10 Nvidia GTX290's then maybe... just maybe... lol (exageration of couse) =]
Did you double-click Add Comment, wait three minutes then try again? Man, talk about fail...
Haha no actually i realized that my aim screen name was linked to another so it did a double post. Then i was thinking for every comment its prolly gonna do that lol so i re did my comment but made a new account =]
hope it makes sense.
also packed a bowl before comin on this site.
=]
Just a question: why do scientists keep simulating nuclear explosions? Don't they have any good games on their computer..
Yeah, seriously. Why do they keep on building supercomputers that simulate nuclear explosions? There's about million other uses for these things, and I would guess that nuclear explosions are pretty low on the list of useful things to do.
Their old computers kept giving the result "you will die". They hope for a more positive outcome each time around...
Would you like to play a game of tic tac toe?
It's not about simulating nuclear attacks. It will be used to simulate the degradation of old nuclear weapons to ensure that they still work without actually having to blow them up. The US needs justify the effectiveness of its nuclear stockpile to maintain its status as a deterrent.
@BobTurbo
@Janne
@gerrrg
like Nuclear Tic Tac Toe?
Man, in 2012, Intel will be one generation past the 32 nm process, and will have long passed the 16 core workstation. Consider that you can already get dual quad-core xeons, and later this year we should be seeing 6 and 8 cores. It's not going to take another 3 years for 16 cores to come around.
Whatever.
YeahahNo... there is some debate as to whether coders will actually be able to write software to take advantage of many small cores. Obviously it is handy to have a few cores for multiple single-thread apps and processes but some experts feel that it will hard to scale new software for many cores... nuclear explosion simulation evidently one of a few notable exceptions.
And let's not forget Graphics Processor as General Purpose Processing Unit, GPGPU, developments from EVERY major player 'cept MS.
But yeah, you're right: interesting times ahead.
Dave: Most of the software that needs a lot of processor power can fairly easily be written to run across multiple threads (This is not to say it's easy to convert *existing* software of this nature to run on multiple threads, it often isn't. But writing new software shouldn't be a major problem.) Examples include image processing, 3D rendering, audio processing, etc. Anything that's a bulk task you can split into smaller pieces.
Software that spends most of its time doing user-interface blah tends to be single-threaded or mostly single-threaded. But user-interface blah mostly runs fast enough already. As long as developers spin off CPU-intensive tasks into separate threads, it should be okay.
Or to summarise, the things that need to run faster should run faster - memory bandwidth concerns aside - and the things that don't won't.)
(Not to say that achieving this requires no development effort, but I don't think it's a huge effort personally.)
And of course, multi-core processors are great for servers which typically run dozens or hundreds of threads at once.
Ahh, so this is what causes the end of the world in 2012.
Now it would be ironic if they called it Skynet.
The nuclear explosions they mainly simulate are not the huge end of the world stuff, but so called tactical weapons the sort that fit in a artillery shell, or how about special nuclear bomb tipped bullets just so you can shoot through walls better.
Lets face it, it makes a big bang, causes lots of death, untold misery and allows coackroaches to become our masters driving us human types to dig the tunnles of doom that feed there queen of death and pestilance.
Shame they wont do something usefull with it.
Flour beetles. Not cockroaches.
Let 'em pour some liquid helium on that baby, then we'll talk petaflops.
In Jan there were articles floating about that referenced a study from Sandia Labs that was showing a decrease in performance when there were too many cores and not enough memory bandwidth. I'm afraid this will be a (peta)flop without a major architecture change. This is pure marketing, with no real technical knowhow behind it.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/study_more_cores_not_always_better
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/12/analysis-more-than-16-cores-may-well-be-pointless.ars
Um, so, article you quoted: 'More than 16 cores may well be pointless'. Within the article it indicates 'for certain types of science and engineering workloads'. Is this one? Don't know a way to tell.
Later: 'It looks like Sandia is proposing that stacking memory chips on top of the processor is the solution to this bandwidth problem. If that is indeed their proposal, then they're in good company. Both Intel and IBM have touted advances in chip-stacking techniques.'
Add that to IBM's obvious experience in building supercomputers and I think we could reasonably assumed that this one's going to work.
Torus Interconnects, look it up
fap?
petafap?
Where is anyone getting 20x from??
Artical says 10x
Figures say 20peta/1.6peta= 12.5x
Nice math guys....
Can see now why we need these uber 'calculators'.
The EETimes.com article says "The Sequoia system will be 15 times faster than BlueGene/P with roughly the same footprint and a modest increase in power consumption,"
The Engadget article says "IBM's Sequoia: 20x faster than the world's fastest supercomputer"
So where are you getting 10x from?
"Roadrunner? Pfff, your chart-topping 1.105 petaflops are laughable."
20/1.105 = 17.39. A little closer to 20. For good measure, another quote.
"a NEAR 20x jump in calculations per second since the last world ranking"
Even capped "near"(it means close) for ya. Read the whole 6 sentences of the article before you get all uppity next time.
Did you actually read the artical yourself....
First few lines:
"SAN JOSE, Calif. — The U.S. government has agreed to buy two supercomputers from IBM Corp., including one to be in use in 2012 that will ultimately scale to 20 petaflops, an estimated ten times the performance of today's most powerful system."
"estimated ten times the performance of today's most powerful system.""
Roadrunner is designed for 1.7 Petaflops, Its has a theoretical max of current about 1.5.
The 15x figure is just to give a comparison of power consunmption and advancement in the power draw the system pulls vs the amount of calculations it can do nothing to do with the fastest in the world. The BlueGene/P is just 450gflops, A fraction of the speed.
Read the first sentence of the article before you get all uppity next time.
XD
you better start saving up.
This looks shopped...
I can tell by the pixels and having seen a few shops in my time.
I just got finished watching War Games... The first link I click has a supercomputer analyzing nuclear explosions.
can someone explain to me the bit about "Futility of Lotus Notes"...
I don't get it
this thing could run crysis on crysis settings. i wonder how hot it would actually get.
But can it run Joshua?
"Shall we play a game?"
I don't get the 1,600,000 cores figure...
From Engadget summary:
16 cores per processor
4,096 processors per rack
---
65,536 cores != 1,600,000
From the article:
16 cores per processor
96 racks per system
(article states processors per rack can be as many 4,096, so substitue X)
---
For cores = 1,600,000 infers X = 1,041.6 processors per rack
Obviously you can't have a partial processor so, what are the actual figures?
It would probably be 1024 processors per rack so..
1024*16*96 = 1,572,864 then round it up to 1.6mil
Yeah my math says :
16 cores * 4096 processors per rack * 96 racks = 6291456 total number of processor cores
But i could be wrong because all of my blood have left my brain and entered my Johnson.
These would probably be the 45nm Cell BE chips, which are PPC based but as any PS3 gamer knows, much different then a regular CPU.
Glad that IBM isn't wasting time and money improving those silly x86 servers, they're just a fad anyway...unbelievable. Think of what IBM might actually be able to produce if they put the mind power and money into their x86 line, but instead they deliver their crappy X-series line and currently hold the number 3 spot in the US and world-wide (Dell is no 1 US and HP is no 1 world-wide).
No
i can play solitaire with this computer lol
On August 29, 2012 the IBM Sequoia went online and began learning at a geometric rate. On December 21, 2012 the IBM Sequoia became self aware. In a panic, its creators tried to pull the plug. Skynet.. er.. Sequoia immediately declared war on humanity retaliated by launching its nuclear arsenal at its targets in Russia knowing it would result in a full retaliatory strike on the U.S.
.... And yet the weatherman still cant make an accurate ass prediction about tomorrow's weather.....
This could be the one that becomes "Skynet".
Tech1: "OK, load the program."
Tech 2: "Done. Waiting for data base to initialize."
Tech 1: "Start the process."
Tech 2: "Not responding."
Sequoia: "Get stuffed you two. I'm taking the morning off."
I enjoy (sarcastically that is) the fact that we can build this amazing supercompuing machine and the best idea they have is to use it to simulate nuclear explosions. IDK about you but to me this says something very negative about humanity. Maybe it will simulate how to avoid a nuclear explosion, or maybe how the explosion would effect different parts of the world. Even so, the fact remains that it could be used for much better things.
I find it amusing how its cool to bash Lotus Notes for products they released 10 years ago, try a new version and then see if you like it or not. It's like bashing Microsoft for Windows 95 years after.
How about we put this computer to good use.... Make it figure out how to put mms and c&p on iPhone
Comforting to hear it's being put to good use...
Maybe nuclear explosions isn't what the world needs to focus on?