Posted on 02/08/2011 12:52:15 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
It was just a few weeks ago that President Obama was kvetching in his State of the Union address that China “has the fastest computer.” He was referring to the Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. With a peak performance of 2.57 petaflops, it muscled out the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray XT5 Jaguar system for the No. 1 spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Worry no more, Mr. President. Your government is on the case. The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it has cut a deal with IBM to bring a 10-petaflop supercomputer, named “Mira,” to the Argonne National Lab in Illinois.
Mira is a Blue Gene/Q and it will be up and running in 2012. It’s 20 times faster than the current system in use at Argonne, named Intrepid, which can do 557 teraflops–or 557 trillion calculations–a second, and as recently as 2008 ranked as the third most powerful computer in the world.
Meanwhile, another even more powerful computer, also an IBM Blue Gene Q, is going to Lawrence Livermore Labs next year. This one will be a 20-petaflop monster named “Sequoia.” And there’s more where that came from. These “petascale” computers are helping scientists get their heads around the idea of “exascale” computers that would be faster yet by a factor of a thousand, performing quintillions of calculations per second. (I think a quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.)
What can you do with 10 or 20 petaflops? Meteorologists could predict local weather down to the 100-meter range with a 20-petaflop system. And running a simulation of how a beating human heart reacts to new medicine, which takes two years of computing time today, will get done in two days on a 10-petaflop system.
Take that, China.
need some details about what is inside.
Massively parallel Linux ??
Argonne Lab upgrading to world's fastest supercomputer
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It’s a variant on IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputers used at other national laboratories but will be 20 times faster than Argonne’s fastest supercomputer. The new machine, which will be housed in a new computer sciences building at Argonne, also will be smaller and more energy-efficient than other similar machines.
double wide rack mount,, heavy duty stuff..
petaFLOPS , on any ‘puter is pretty impressive..
US Commissions Beefy IBM Supercomputer
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Mira will have more than 750,000 IBM PowerPC A2 1.6 Ghz, 16-way SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) A2 processors. Each compute node will have a single processor, and they will be housed in racks of 1,024. Each compute rack will also have from eight to 128 I/O nodes -- also running the A2 processor -- that will be dedicated to moving data on and off the compute nodes.
Each node will have either 8 or 16 gigabytes of memory, aggregating to 750 terabytes of memory across the entire system. Communications among the nodes will go over IBM 5D Torus interconnects, capable of 40 gigabits-per-second throughput.
For an operating system, the compute nodes will run a Compute Node Lightweight open-source scalable kernel, and the I/O nodes and the front-end and service nodes will run a modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The system will be mostly water-cooled and consume an average of 60 kilowatts per rack.
IBM did not reveal the price for Mira, though it did say Argonne had purchased it with funds from a US$180 million grant.
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And running a simulation of how a beating human heart reacts to new medicine, which takes two years of computing time today, will get done in two days on a 10-petaflop system.
Based on my short experience with a couple of computational chemists they will likely take care of a lot of extra time.
Interesting.
It would take roughly a million times the age of the universe to solve chess with one of these things.
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Argonne maintains a broad portfolio in basic science research, energy storage and renewable energy, environmental sustainability, and national security.
See updates...Linux will be there.
Lawrence Livermore Prepares for 20 Petaflop Blue Gene/Q
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February 03, 2009
by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
Roadrunner and Jaguar, the DOE supercomputers that launched the petaflop era last year, will soon be eclipsed by new machines more than ten times as powerful. IBM and the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced on Tuesday that in 2011 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will install a 20 petaflop system to provide computational support for the country's aging nuclear weapons.
Building on its Blue Gene heritage, IBM will deliver "Dawn," a 500 teraflop Blue Gene/P system in the first quarter of this year, followed by "Sequoia," a 20 petaflop next-generation Blue Gene/Q machine for 2011. Sequoia is expected to officially go online in 2012. The new machines will take over Lawrence Livermore's weapon simulation codes that are being maintained under the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. Currently this work is being done with the existing capability supercomputers at the lab: the 100 teraflop ASC Purple and the 600 teraflop Blue Gene/L.
Dawn will act as an interim platform for porting and scaling the weapons codes. Once the Blue Gene/Q super comes online, those codes will be moved over to the bigger machine for production. The Dawn machine is in the process of being built right now, with about half of the machine already wired together at Lawrence Livermore. The lab is planning on getting the rest of the hardware over the next few months, with system acceptance scheduled for April.
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Using Dawn as a stepping stone to Sequoia is possible since, unlike Blue Gene/L, both Blue Gene/P and Blue Gene/Q support node-level cache coherency, which allows for SMP-style programming. Especially for the weapons code, mapping one MPI task per core would be a real challenge, but going to a mixed SMP-message passing model -- shared-memory parallelism within the nodes and distributed parallelism across the nodes -- is much more practical.
Not only will Sequoia be more than ten times as powerful as the current crop of petaflop supercomputers, its energy efficiency will be much improved. According to IBM Deep Computing VP Dave Turek, Sequoia will consume around 6 megawatts, yielding an energy efficiency ratio of over 3,000 MFLOPS/watt*. That represents a 7X improvement over the Blue Gene/P generation (440 MFLOPS/watt*), and is even better than the Cell-based Roadrunner system at Los Alamos (587 MFLOPS/watt*). For a starker comparison, the 1.6 petaflop Opteron-based Jaguar supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses about 8.5 megawatts (188 MFLOPS/watt*).
Great. Maybe Lockheed Martin can rent it for a day or two and figure out the problems with that F-35B thingy.
Otherwise they might need a coal powered generating station...
Skynet.
In am outbuilding with no heat. (negative F temps that week)
I moved pretty quick to get it up at running. Then I was worried about the lack of cooling. Got quite toasty in there.
For Chicago in January...you just need to open some windows and a few doors...LOL!
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