Echelon Hardware

A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.

TechWorld Article hosted at mirrordot.org because of massive traffic

I used to be among those who didn't think echelon was as powerful as some made it out to be, but after reading this I'm really starting to wonder. If one of those units takes up 3U on a rack, and racks can be as big as 48U, that adds up to about 16 devices pushing past the 3 Teraflop mark. Using those numbers it would take about 13 or 14 full 48U racks to equal what the Earth Simulator set as a peak performance record of 40 Teraflops. What makes that impressive I think is that the Earth Simulator takes up the space of 2 basketball courts, versus 14 racks, which you could toss into any server room. Makes you wonder how many racks the NSA and CIA each have tucked away in various facilities?

Imagine if the stories of vast underground NSA facilities for this stuff is true that would be some amazing computer power. I never knew the Earth Simulator took up the space of 2 basketball courts that pretty huge.

With that kind of computing power u could probably monitor every phone in the US for supposed terrorist keywords and stuff like that.

Man, the Earth Simulator looks like a room full of HALs. The purpose of the ES is to clone the earth in virtual space in order to predict future occurences in natural science.



What are the odds of this computer one day standing up and walking away? "Orange - Elevated."

Zip


[edit on 18-10-2004 by Zipdot]

Originally posted by alternateheaven
A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server

Puts my 4U SMP PII350's into perspective !

More on the TMS SAM-650 here: www.superdsp.com...

Not sure about the website (!), but the quoted power consumption / heat dissipation is as impressive as the rest of the spec too: but I guess it's achievable considering the relatively singular nature of the hardware.

Edited to tidy up the quote format, oops.

[edit on 18-10-2004 by 0951]

No more problems running hi spec games with one of those...

Originally posted by alternateheaven
the Earth Simulator takes up the space of 2 basketball courts, versus 14 racks, which you could toss into any server room. Makes you wonder how many racks the NSA and CIA each have tucked away in various facilities?

I never knew the ES was so freaking big
they could have tons of these things pretty much everywhere

Originally posted by USER
No more problems running hi spec games with one of those...

Some views would assert that this is *exactly* what is happening with it anyway.


If the performance of the custom DSP chips in my Yamaha A5k sampler are anything to go on then this must truly be a monster.

Texas have been developing solid state SAN's for high throughput applications in the enterprise too. Compelling technology really, massive bandwidth, fast, low heat, low power, high density, quiet ... (compelling unless you lose the power I guess & you still need HDD's to back up on).

www.superssd.com...

Wow. , does anyone know where they get the funding to get that much computers? I think that they don't need supercomputers for this, but they could get a hub so then not only would they be able to have ultamite computer power, but it would increase the speed by a huge amount, and would possibly be more effective. I don't remember where I've seen this, but in one discover article I've read that if you hook alot of computers up, you can have the power equivalent to a Super Computer... but that power which the NSA and Echelon has is absolutely amazing . Thank goodness they don't have quantum computers (really fast computers, which are being developed) yet...

after they have terrrorrr attacks, they raise funding for projects like these under the guise of national security. wat is a DPS? ES is a research project, but could eventually be used to predict almost anything our life giving planet has to offer. so we can fully exploit every aspect of mother nature. Echelon seems more like a big brother implementation then something beneficial... i want to live underground in computer land

qauntum computers are gonna be frekin sweet

Originally posted by NWObringer
Wow.

, does anyone know where they get the funding to get that much computers? I think that they don't need supercomputers for this, but they could get a hub so then not only would they be able to have ultamite computer power, but it would increase the speed by a huge amount, and would possibly be more effective. I don't remember where I've seen this, but in one discover article I've read that if you hook alot of computers up, you can have the power equivalent to a Super Computer... but that power which the NSA and Echelon has is absolutely amazing

. Thank goodness they don't have quantum computers (really fast computers, which are being developed) yet...

I wonder if you are thinking about:
Grid computing - looselycoupled.com...
Clusters - www.wordiq.com...

I'd hesitate to suggest that the hardware described in this thread is *that* expensive - the second link above, and this one: www.wordiq.com... give an indication of the price of building clusters using off the shelf hardware - Texas have RAM SAN products available to buy commercially, so maybe it follows that these are likewise cheap (relatively cheap)...

You can't really think of the performance of this hardware in quite the same way as you can do for your PC - but yeah, clustering may help.

For one thing - you'll find these boxes have very much leaner, very much tighter hardware specific OS code, written for their distinct job, rather than a big loose resource heavy OS that has to cope with any amount of stuff (like PC OS's - and that includes MSWin, *nix, and such).

Think about the firmware in, say your home hifi, your TV, your car stereo whatever - it does one job, so it can be stored and executed really quickly, and with very high stability - these boxes will operate under similar principles.

Just as an aside - how do you know they don't have quantum computers ..... yet ?



[edit on 24-10-2004 by 0951]

Here's a good link for quantum computingwww.qubit.org...
A few years back they were talking of making DNA computers that would be as fast as quantum computers.
I think the main problem with both systems is the programing.

some techno babble is baffling. i can see how massive arrays of computing would probably take hordes of code, quantums will be really expensive for a really long time