Science supercomputer tackles first questions

Science supercomputer tackles first questions

www.newscientist.com

n the real world, a newly built supercomputer that is the most powerful ever dedicated to science will be tackling questions about climate change, supernovas, and the structure of water.

Jaguar is located at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, and has a peak operating performance of 1.64 petaflops, meaning it can perform more than a million billion mathematical operations every second.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Peak performance supercomputer Jaguar, established by the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, is 1.64 petaflop. Previously regarded as the most powerful supercomputer IBM Roadrunner, with a capacity of 1026 petaflop.In a supercomputer is the 45 thousand AMD Opteron processors and 362 terabytes of memory.Scientists plan to use the Jaguar, for example, to simulate climate change.Also supercomputer will be used in such areas as renewable energy sources.Prior to the 2009 Jaguar will be in the testing stage.It has already been used for the test calculations that require the performance of over 1.3 petaflop.Currently, only the power of one supercomputer over one petaflop - that IBM Roadrunner.It was launched in June this year and is used by U.S. military.In early September, it became known that IBM has signed a contract to build supercomputer Blue Water with greatest capacity.

www.newscientist.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Damn, Terminator! You scary!!!

What if the first answer it spits out is 42?

I am more interested in Wolfram Alpha coming in May.

It will be a web search engine which is capable of answering questions.

It truly researches the data off the internet, interprets it and independantly answers the question.

The first question I am going to ask it is "List three questions you can answer which would have major impact to humanity, and the answers are currently unknown to man.

WolframAlpha

Let me point out that raw "petaflops" is a pretty meaningless indicator of processor performance, nowadays.

A "flop" is a "Floating-Point Operation", or one mathematical operation (eg, addition, multiplication, etc) on a real-number approximation.

What's far more important, in the modern fancy electronic computing devices, is data space addressability and data marshaling.

See, each of these computing elements in the supercomputer has access to a large range of data, but the data that each element can access is separate from the data other elements can access. There's no "unified address space".

Well, there is - but moving data back and forth between different processors, and determining what data needs to be moved, is a task thousands or millions of times more time-consuming than a simple "floating-point operation".

So, how these processors move data around, and the particular types of computation tasks where the addressable data sets can be predicted and efficiently pre-cached, is the real limiting factor on their efficiency.

Tasks where exactly what piece of data is needed next is determined directly by the results of the previous stage are the least efficient - almost none of those much-touted 'petaflops' are actually used when computing such jobs.

Just a little rant I thought I'd share.

This is amazing. Just think, a computer this powerful is capable of so much. It is just a matter of rules of computation and quality of input information.

It is also a given that home PC's will have this speed and capacity in about 20 years time. And it will fit on a dime.

I am looking forward to hooking this capacity up to a graphics processing unit for Full immersion virtual reality. Just think, our grandchildren might not have to commute to work, they will only plug in and virtually work in the future virtual reality internet. I can hardly wait.

reply to post by Ian McLean


Yes that's important, but fine grained parallelism is probably the wave of the future thanks to your common everyday graphics processor. I've got a teraflop at my disposal via Nvidia GPU processors.

In that model you have the same instruction running on multiple data sets in parallel (SIMD). Well Nvidia allows you to branch your threads so they call it SIMT. Most of those physics applications that simulate PDE's can be easily parallelized this way.

I like the whole "Britney Spears of Supernovas" term and how everyone is jabbing fun at it.

Where can I get one of these? And I thought my processor was bad ass...

Sounds creepy...what is the ratio compared to human thought process. Do they have any info on that?

I can't wait until they ask it the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everythig and it yells out 42!
edit: darn someone beat me to the punch line

[edit on 4/10/2009 by darklife]

Originally posted by sunny_2008ny

Science supercomputer tackles first questions

www.newscientist.com

n the real world, a newly built supercomputer that is the most powerful ever dedicated to science will be tackling questions about climate change, supernovas, and the structure of water.

Jaguar is located at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, and has a peak operating performance of 1.64 petaflops, meaning it can perform more than a million billion mathematical operations every second.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Since man first began to walk upright, he has never been able to work out the mind of a damn woman. I`ll bet this super-duper computer can`t either.

Originally posted by darklife
I can't wait until they ask it the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everythig and it yells out 42!
edit: darn someone beat me to the punch line

[edit on 4/10/2009 by darklife]

I must of missed that thread? What would 42 being it's answer mean to you?

reply to post by midnightbrigade


No, the answer that it will give is that it cannot compute the meaning of life but it can help design a computer that can.

Those damned mice!

reply to post by way2slo


As the official Keeper of the Awesome Secret here on ATS, I can tell you that I cannot tell you!

Seriously though, the number 42 is the ultimate answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, from "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". Classic Sci-Fi geek stuff.

Funny, the TOP500 list shows the Jaguar Supercomputer to be second place:
TOP500 List

"Road Runner" at Los Alamos runs @ 1456.7 Teraflops (1.46 Petaflops) while Jaguar runs @ 1381.4 Teraflops (1.38 Petaflops).

Can someone confirm this is the most powerful supercomputer?

[edit on 10/4/09 by The Godfather of Conspira]

reply to post by The Godfather of Conspira


Hmm, thought Blade Runner was supposed to be top-secret. It's mission surely is.

reply to post by Perseus Apex


Simulating nuclear explosions isn't really that secret (we all know what happens), I guess what would be though is where they're simulating the detonations taking place. Hmm.

And it's sure as hell cheaper and less damaging than the real McCoy.

Apparently it's capable of 1.7 petaflops, but has yet to attain it.

reply to post by The Godfather of Conspira


We should hope no detonations take place anywhere near the underground tunnels des de fault zones; ie. Max Zorin, Silicon Valley. LTK What was the Coors motto again?



[edit on 10-4-2009 by Perseus Apex]

reply to post by Perseus Apex


Actually you're probably not far off.

I'd bet they've tested what would happen to New York, Washington, or L.A. if a few airbursts went off overhead, dozens of times. The biggest population centres would be duty opportunities in any Nuclear war.

As would sensitive military sites. Groom Lake has probably taken it's fair share of virtual Nuclear assaults too. As has NORAD and who knows what other crap they've got lurking under ground.