Oak Ridge Lab Supercomputer Doubles Performance

Anonymous Coward writes "The most powerful supercomputer available for general scientific research in the United States has undergone an upgrade that's doubled its peak performance. The Cray XT3 supercomputer at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now perform up to 54 trillion calculations per second, up from its previous peak of 25 trillion calculations. 'It is probably the fifth-fastest machine' in the world, said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director. 'It is clearly the fastest open-science machine in the U.S. today.'"

Maybe they're getting ready

for the Vista upgrade.

Jumping the gun a bit, probably.

Now for a Practical Use

Now that we have all that horsepower, the big decision comes....what to do with it? I have some suggestions that I think would greatly benefit mankind as a whole.

1) Decrypt NSA keys so we can spy on them for a change
2) Develop a fool-proof method of determing what is spam and forwarding it all to Bill Gates
3) Calculate winning lotto numbers and donate the money to random charities
4) Develop an algorythm that decides where to go for dinner
5) Figure out how to make a pad that acutally stays in place AND doesn't stick to my a$$

2 cents,

QueenB

Re:Now for a Practical Use

My christening of a new, uber-machine is normally done with the very very old-style pong. Nothing like multiple Ghz on multiple cores with a projector, TBs of HDD space and it all being used to run classic pong. Especially high-def classic pong.

Awesome

That's awesome. You know what's a shame, though?

I live in Tennessee, not too far from Oak Ridge (45 mins away). Most kids don't even know that there are labs there. The teachers don't mention them in school, and nobody cares.

Honestly, there's not much in Tennessee that's special (I've lived here for all 18 years of my life), so I wish they'd actually TELL us about the awesome stuff we _DO_ have near us.

Re:Awesome

Don't whinge to slashdot about it, phone the labs, phoen the school principal, get a few school trips round there organised. I doubt they'll see much (I understand they don't have any flashing lights and spinning tape drives anymore, which is when computers looked like they were big, powerful and doing important stuff) but I'm sure there'll be scientists more than happy to show them something impressive and talk about what they're up to.

Re:Awesome

Actually, we [bnl.gov] encourage people to visit us. Either during the summer [bnl.gov] or any time they want to schedule a tour [bnl.gov].

Of course, there's no major weapons work going on at BNL. At least, none that I know of.

Re:Awesome

Yes and I'd like to thank you and everyone else at BNL I was a student at Brentwood HS and at 16 around 1997 or so I was allowed to visit BNL once a week for a few months and even had a mentor. I was allowed to see the particle accelerator you have there and witness a lot of the projects that were ongoing. I also learned a lot of simple concepts such as the Norton and Thevenin equivalents, current divider rules, and even got a brief (although confusing at the time) introduction to second order LRC ciruits. The simple exposure to many of these concepts got me started on my path to Computer Engineer as a major. If it wasn't for some of the fine people at BNL I might have never chosen Computer Engineering as a major and made a career out of something that I love to do. Out of curiosity do they still have a mentoring program there?

Re:Awesome

maybe The Oak Ridge Boys could sing a song about the lab to raise public awareness (to the tune of Elvira) :

I'm singin'
El Jaguar, El Jaguar
Five thousand Opterons on fire, El Jaguar

Giddy Up Oom Poppa Omm Poppa Mow Mow
Giddy Up Oom Poppa Omm Poppa Mow Mow
Heigh-ho Silver, away

Tonight I'm gonna ray trace me a big ol' honkin' scene
And I'm gonna give her all the poly's I can, yes I am
She's gonna have lights, shades and fill-ins
'Cause I saved up my last two hundred million
We're gonna go and find that researcher man

According to the law

They have to double it every 18 months.

Imagine!

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

What happened?

Did someone lean on the turbo button?

Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion

In ST:TNG, Lt. Commander Data does 60 trillion operations per second. If they could just squeeze 6 more trillion operations out of that supercomputer, and get the right software and memory access speed, and fit it all into a Mac Mini-sized space, we could have our first sentient starfleet officer ready before Dr. Sung.

But the question on everyone's mind...

Does it use Blue Ray or HD-DVD?

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]

What kind of calculations?

How is the speed measured? Blurb says "54 trillion calculations per second", but what kind of calculations is it? Moving of register content? Multiplication of 64 bit floating point numbers?

In the quest for the answer to the ultimate...

question of life the universe and everything it was not, of course, as big as the Earth. A computer so large that it was often mistaken for a planet. Except by the IAU who saw through the Earth's feeble attempt to be considered a planet and reclassified it as a large pocket calculator...

Whether the inhabitants of Earth's matrix retaliate by reclassifying astronomers as pseudoscientists remains to be seen...

Tribute to Johnny Carson

Johnny: Wow, I tell ya, that new Oak Ridge supercomputer is fast.
Crowd: How fast is it?
Johnny: Awh, it's so fast, it'll do an infinite loop in seven seconds.
MaMahon: Yessss!

Doubles?

It is times 2.16 when going from 25 to 54 trillion, not just times 2. Does that thing run on Pentiums?

Yeah, but will they be....

adding more pipes so the internet can run faster?

Yes, but

(avoiding the obvious)
...was it designed on a Mac?

Turbo?

"Ah, so that's what that turbo button does!"

2 month old news

The original press release:

http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p= irol-newsArticle&ID=873357 [cray.com]

All they do is upgrade to dual-core Opterons, hence the double performance.

Skynet

So this public computer is now processing at 54 Teraflops? In the Terminator series didn't Skynet take over the world when it reached 60?

I for one welcome our new supercomputer overlords.

Yeah, but...

... that's just the minimum recommended system configuration for release 2 of the Windows Vista Home edition.

So it could generate bobbles...

50 times faster than the original Peacer bobbler, and probably with better accuracy.

Not to shabby.

So...

When does it come onto the market? And can I put Linux on it?

They built the system...

... to play doom.

Bush's brain

Maybe they could find Bush's brain with it.Or atlases narrow it to a 100 mile radius.The Skynet Corp. can probally help out at 60 Terafloppies!!!

Re:Yeah--but does it run linux?

Actually, parts of it does. I could tell you more but then I'd have to kill you.