The IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just got a fresh dose of steroids. Its number-crunching speed has been pumped up to a phenomenal 183.5 trillion calculations every second. That’s 183.5 teraflops in geek-speak — double the 92 teraflops world record that BlueGene set just six months ago.
subject says it all…….
RE: off-topic guest
you realize others submit but Eugenia right? Yeah, guess not with that statement…………..
Eugenia is away for the weekend.
Now if BlueGene was sentient, than that would be the end of human kind.
I for one take umbrage at describing the issue in terms that give a positive connotation to steroid use, even as the crap is hitting the fan in US with regards to pro atheletics.
Cultures get crepulent one contribution at a time: Don’t be part of the problem… especially in practicing journalism, or journalism clearinghousing, or whatever OS News does…. (I’m a huge OS News fan, by the way).
“Now if BlueGene was sentient, than that would be the end of human kind.”
Yeah but it dosent have any legs or arms, we could just huck rocks at it until it catches on fire and explodes.
Humanity +1
183 trillion calculations per second. I can do that.
You know, steroids may ehance performance for a short while as you make millions.
but down the road it will kill your health and may eventually kill you. this dpending on the type.
oh yeah, sometimes the offspring can develope health problems (like holes in the heart).
Is there a parallel here? Or is this article author not relize that steroids are not good for you? Now all the children reading that article will think steroids are actually good for you!
“That’s 183.5 teraflops in geek-speak”
Don’t know greek but having PC with that power could do real time nuclear explosion simulation in FPS games.
Hey maybe George Broussard is waiting for that baby so he can finaly release Duke Nukem Forever. Then again it would require windows all-your-base-are-belong-to-us edition and DirectX 90.0b/OpenGL 2.1 so you’re gonna have to buy another BlueGene cluster just for virtual memory.
Who cares! What’s my FPS in Doom 3 on BG?
“Now if BlueGene was sentient, than that would be the end of human kind. ”
Do not underestimate the human brain, it blows any supercomputer’s socks off hands down on: associations, intuition, creativity …
I don’t think sentient would fill this gap
Is it just me, or did the article fail to describe what, exactly, was done to BlueGene/L to increase its FLOPS? I’m guessing they just added more processors, but the article seems pretty insistent that they injected it with male hormones.
Does anyone know if they actually use this for anything?
Read the linked article.
They double the processors. The previous score was made with only one quarter of the final processor count installed. The final machine should have a theoretical max of 360 Teraflops.
After giving up a Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry (http://www.mpqc.org/) geometry optimization, of a 10 heavy element molecule at the STO 6-31G** level, after several days of processing on my single CPU desktop 😉
after several days of processing on my single CPU desktop
poor kid.
Ahh just the kind of thing to run when I finally get my cluster built.
Awesome news. Now its got double the speed to process those genomes faster, assuming this is the machine that does that.
“Eugenia is away for the weekend. ”
“Thank Goodness!”
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people feel she is not entitled to an opinion.
Bill
That’s a lot of flops per second! I can only get up to 5/s before I lose some control and hit the coffee table. Help, I’ve flopped, and I can’t get up!
just imagine how much complicated cooling system it might be needing
from what I’ve read, the selling point of IBM’s design was that it consumed much less power than other supercomputers, and it also produced much less heat.
with the size of this machine, and the cooling system, the fact that this machine takes less power saves millions of dollars per year! (compared to the Itanium and the Japanese super computers)
(well, that’s what I’ve read)
Is there a parallel here? Or is this article author not relize that steroids are not good for you? Now all the children reading that article will think steroids are actually good for you!
Oh noes! Won’t someone please think of the children! The children who are in the habbit of reading articles on IBM supercomputers, that is.
“Now its got double the speed to process those genomes faster, assuming this is the machine that does that.”
Nope — it exclusively does nuclear weapons simulations…
Notice how it runs Linux, and its superior more mature multi-processing capabilities; and not the nearest competition Solaris.
Also note that Solaris doesn’t run on PowerPC.
It only runs linux on the I/O Nodes.
The compute nodes run a custom OS.
The compute nodes run a custom OS.
No it dosn’t.
Even more ipressive than the 183.5 teraflops mark now, which is unbelievable by itself… the speed is expected to double later this year again when new hardware is added, bringing it up to an estimated 367 terflops! It wasn’t very long ago the Earth Simulator in Japan was crushing everyone for years with 1/10 that power.
You might want to read this because Z11 is right:
“All nodes are created equal, but 1024 of them have a more important task than the rest. These input-output (I/O) nodes are designed to run an instance of Linux™ and assign calculations to a bank of 64 processor nodes. The
underlying nodes run, not Linux, but a custom operating system stripped to its essentials. When they have to perform a task they are not equipped to handle, the underlying nodes can pass the job up the chain to one of the I/O nodes.”
This paragraph is from an IBM document discussing Blue Gene:
http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/ourwork/casestudies/files/bluegene…
Only a little time ago was Virginia Tech’s PowerMac G5 (now Xserve G5) cluster being described as the future of super computers, being extremely cheap and coming very close to the much more expensive Earth Simulator champion. Now, that gap has grown tremendously again, with IBM laying the true smackdown on supercomputers. Damn.
a speed jump like that is cranium crushing. Like you can perform calculations at that speed, huh?
lovin it
Warp speed’s too slow.
Warp speed’s too slow?
Prepare ship, for ludocrous speed!
Holy sh*t! It’s spaceball one, they’ve gone to plaid!
Most super computers run Linux in one form or the other because its I/O and multi-processing capabilities are way more advanced than Solaris.
Thing is useless just a big scam top get the US back above the earth simulator. Which although smaller is a usefull super computer. This thing is a linpack test system. It is horrible for most common codes and is overated at best. This is why they aren’t being bought all over the place. ASCI is a big mess. It is going to fail and we will have to start blowing up bombs again….
It is sort of like a top fuel dragster. It has little or no use. Where as a big catipilar tractor and actually move dirt.
>.Thing is useless just a big scam top get the US back above the earth
>simulator. Which although smaller is a usefull super computer.
>This thing is a linpack test system. It is horrible for most common codes >and s overated at best. This is why they aren’t being bought all over
> the place. ASCI is a big mess. It is going to fail and we will have to start
>blowing up bombs again….
>It is sort of like a top fuel dragster. It has little or no use. Where as a big
>catipilar tractor and actually move dirt.
if what you say is true, then why are 8 of the top 25 supercomputers IBM systems. (and one more is an Apple system, which uses IBMs processors).
Not true, Solaris is more advanced to run on multiple CPUs. I would also argue that IBM’s OS’s as well as Unicos are all better OS’s to run than linux on a huge computer with many CPUs. I think Linux is almost there, and ofcourse it beats all the BSDs when it comes to scalability on many processors (Big Giant Lock)