Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer

Junky191 writes: "Just came across an informational page for the Earth Simulator computer, which provides nice graphics of the layout of the machine and its support structure, as well as details about exactly what types of problems it solves. Fascinating for the engineering problems tackled- how would you organize a 5,120 processor system capable of 40Tflops, and of course don't forget about the 10TB of shared memory." Take note -- donour writes: "well, the new list of supercomputer rankings is up today. I have to say that the Earth Simulator is quite impressive, from both a performance and architectural standpoint."

base 10 measurement of memory

[SlugLord]

I guess this is a *little* off-topic, but this really bugs me. They're building this really cool supercomputer, and they list the memory with base-10 prefixes instead of the standard base-2. I mean I can almost understand when dell does that with hard drives (it pumps up the number for advertising purposes), but it's just silly in a scientific arena.

Re:algorithm development

[Oily Tuna]

simulating something as small as cigarette smoke

Ah .... but they're simulating big things. Big things are easier to simulate than little things, not harder.

alright now.

[domtropen]

i'll freely admit that i'm a little freaked out by this. (so much so that i'm delurking.) directed at the discussion about whether it can be a practical machine, does it really matter? it seems as if it was built for one sole purpose, and it appears that it will do it well. can we just give them that?

Re:algorithm development

[hype7]

While this does a nice job of crunching numbers, how do they know that their algorithms are any good at doing what they do? Or are they trying to simulate things that aren't continuously kicked around by chaos theory?

This is an extremely insightful comment.

What's being suggested here is akin to this - sure, they've got the most powerful car in the world, but to get from LA to New York, you've got to head east. Heading North won't help much, no matter how powerful your car is.

This is what gets me about all these global warming "earth is going to heat up and cool down and rain and drought and..." predictions. How can they be sure they're even in the ballpark?

One variable out, they could throw their predictions out by a massive amount. Their simplifications to allow for the computer to do predictions may not take into account the nuances and subtleties of the real world.

That's why, in many instances, I look at these computers with perhaps more cynicism than most other people. They're great for testing theories, and for allowing scientists to compute algorithms that they possibly otherwise wouldn't be able to do. But just because it's come out of a billion $$$ computer, doesn't mean it's a golden egg.

It's like that old saying that came out when word processors were first invented - shit in, shit out. Just because it's been through a fancy (or expensive) machine it doesn't make the outcome any more valid.

-- james

Re:"Advantages" of ES

[fb]

>you'll see significantly more IBM machines
> across the board then NEC

As widely known and publicly acknowledged also by one of the authors of that list (Prof. Meuer), the linpack benchmark used to build the top500 list is biased against vector supercomputers, like NEC's.

Supercomputer performance cannot be measured by a single number, really.

Re:Not a Beowulf cluster comment, but...

[NeoSkandranon]

Flops aren't everything. Until the SETI@home network has the bandwith that the Earth Sim has between processors (someone said 1Tb/sec?) until then one supercomputer will have it beat for anything that requires data to be compared (has this chunk of data been processed by one of the other 4999 processors yet?)

Re:Not a Beowulf cluster comment, but...

[Leperflesh]

So if they were to install Seti@Home on the earth simulator, when it was not busy simulating Earth, Seti@home's speed would double...

-Leperflesh