Installation of Blue Waters Petaflop Supercomputer Begins 86
An anonymous reader writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is finally getting the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer installed. After IBM walked away from the project after 3 years of planning, Cray stepped in to pick up the $188 million contract. Now, in around 9 months time, Blue Waters should be fully operational and achieve performance of 1 petaflop or more. As for the hardware... who wouldn't want access to 235 Cray XE6 cabinets using AMD 16 core Opteron 2600 processors with access to 1.5 petabytes of memory (4GB per chip) and 500 petabytes of local storage."
When can I get one on my desktop? (Score:2)
That's the real question.
Re:When can I get one on my desktop? (Score:5, Informative)
At a gigaflop per watt that's 24 MWh a day, $1.3 million a year in power bills at $0.15/kWh.
Re:When can I get one on my desktop? (Score:5, Informative)
And on a related note, the building housing Blue Waters has been certified LEED Gold [datacenterdynamics.com] by the USGBC in an effort to minimize the energy and cost impact of operating the new facility.
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When you spend that much for today's fastest computer, you're foolish not to run it at peak capacity all the time. If you can't schedule enough jobs to keep it busy, why have one?
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If you can't schedule enough jobs to keep it busy, why have one?
This one's easy: to get the next one. Let me explain.
Supercomputers are an easy way to get government grants. Like any computer, they can do all sorts of useful things that are (or can at least be portrayed as) in the public interest. Combine this with the competence of a typical government, and it is rather simple to convince a government that since bigger is better, a bigger computer can obviously do more for the public. This is a blatant lie
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I'm sorry, but to claim that getting the money for a project like this is both easy and simply a way to keep people living the high life shows an absolute lack of understanding of how research happens.
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UIUC runs their own power plant, and I used to live in an apartment on campus not too far from it. That thing put off so much steam that every morning fog was rolling across the street in front of where I lived. If I remember correctly, they also use the steam to heat a lot of the buildings on campus as well, via steam tunnels under the streets. They leak a lot, so there were always a few places you could stop on the sidewalk to warm yourself up before walking the rest of the way to class. Most of this
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Well, they can finally get to the south side of campus, the new petascale building is by Lot E14.
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About seven years. That's the almost clock-work timing of supercomputer to laptop, desktop should be a bit sooner.
Re:When can I get one on my desktop? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's look this up. 7 years ago #1 on the Top500 was an IBM BlueGene/L at 70 TFLOPS. I can't see that performance anywhere close on the desktop or even on the notebook market.
Assuming you're running a good SLI systems and that your GPUs actually deliver the performance the manufacturer is claiming them to have, you'd get in the best case something around 1.5 TFLOPS which corresponds roughly to a 1998 ASCI Red [top500.org].
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SLI is absolutely useless for CUDA-based (Cray's uses NVIDIA GPUS) GPGPU.
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Nope... (Score:2)
You can get an 64-bit Rpeak of about one teraflop out of about 4 of nVidia's top-end (C/M2070) GPGPU cards and 4 beefy Intel processors.
You quoted the 32-bit Rpeak, which is not particularly relevant to the discussion. GTX 580 64 bit Rpeak is about 168 Gigaflops.
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Let's look this up. 7 years ago #1 on the Top500 was an IBM BlueGene/L at 70 TFLOPS. I can't see that performance anywhere close on the desktop or even on the notebook market.
Whoosh...
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Depends... (Score:5, Funny)
How big is your desk?
That number ... 2600 (Score:2)
It rings a bell for two things: Atari and the hacker magazine.
I wonder if there's a connection somewhere ;)
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Very likely there is a subconscious connection as it's really an Opteron 6200, the 2600 is a typo.
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who wouldn't want access? (Score:1)
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well, it can run Crysis at about 42 fps...
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Um, me (Score:5, Interesting)
If the Cray architecture selected for Blue Waters is akin to that of Cielo then UIUC is going to rue -- RUE! -- the day they got in bed with these Cray con-men. The uptime and filesystem stability of Cielo is an absolute dog (as in, at least 2 FS rebuilds per week with data loss accompanying 2 in 5).
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You raise an interesting point. The usual level of Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers usually isn't much above the level of jokes about Crysis and pissing matches between AMD ARM and Intel fanboys. Slashdot generally misses those little trivial details like... does it actually work doing something other than a meaningless Top500 benchmark.
Re:Um, me (Score:4, Funny)
You raise an interesting point. The usual level of Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers usually isn't much above the level of jokes about Crysis and pissing matches between AMD ARM and Intel fanboys.
Back in my day, the Slashdot "commentary" on Supercomputers was about Beowulf clusters and Natalie Portman and hot grits.
Damned kids running around on my lawn again...
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Different file systems - Cielo is running Panasas (pfs) and Blue Waters will be running Lustre...
Ironic CAPTA: painless
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We were notified last week that Those Who Run The Machine are throwing in the towel on Panasas and are securing a Lustre-based farm for Cielo.
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Re:Um, me (Score:5, Insightful)
No they have not. Take a look at multicore spec test at http://electronicsnexus.com/articles/Opteron-Xeon-Benchmarks-2012-01.aspx [electronicsnexus.com] where the 4x6282SE Opteron is the fastes 4 processor system testet. Or to quote
"For example, note that the top-end 16-core 6282SE Opteron is a match for the top-end 10-core Xeon on floating point, and is not far behind it on integer either"
Oh and the opteron cost less then half the price of the 10-core Xeon chip. So I think that slightly better floatingpoint performance, for less then half the price, make opteron the obvious choice, assuming you can split the workload so you can really use all the cores. Something I assume they master, since they are going to run their code on more then 1000 cores at a time.
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In all truthfulness, the 10-core Xeon's (Westmere architecture still) aren't Intel's shining star of FP performance. Intel's strength is in their 8-core Xeons (Sandy Bridge) that are only recently coming into the market (not lagging Interlagos much at all). HPC has rarely been about the expensive high-end Xeons (massively expensive and generally 'last-gen' compared to the middle-tier Xeons with the main historical benefit of getting you to 4 sockets in one 'system', which is largely a moot point in HPC wh
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On an unrelated note WTF are they using 4GB DIMM's? 8GB DIMM's have been the sweet spot for servers for the last ~18 months. The only thing I can think of is that they don't have the internode bandwidth to effectively use a glo
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No kidding - Seymour may be rolling in his grave over having his name attached to anything massively parallel. His entire design philosophy was to have just a few uber processors cranked up as fast as possible, although I wonder if by now he'd have changed his mind. Multiple processor servers were expensive when he passed away and the multiple core race we have going on now wasn't even fantasy.
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No kidding - Seymour may be rolling in his grave over having his name attached to anything massively parallel. His entire design philosophy was to have just a few uber processors cranked up as fast as possible, although I wonder if by now he'd have changed his mind. Multiple processor servers were expensive when he passed away and the multiple core race we have going on now wasn't even fantasy.
The number of processors isn't the issue. The degree of connectivity is the issue, and IBM, Cray, and Seymour would all get it, even if the current "Cray" and UIUC aren't going to admit it. This version of Blue Waters is just another in a long line of massively parallel jokes. The version of Blue Waters proposed and abandoned by IBM would have been worth talking about.
Flops are nearly free. Connectivity is expensive. That's why flops, irrelevant though they may be, are advertised.
Typo (Score:5, Informative)
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While I agree that Opteron is a suboptimal processor for this nowadays (now lagging Intel equivalent flops and memory), the feat of efficiently putting that scale of processors to productive work is still non-trivial. That's pretty much why Cray has been stuck with Opteron so long, they pinned all their efforts on hypertransport based technology while most competitors pinned it to more processor agnostic infiniband via pci express. They have reaped some benefits (a theoretically better IO architecture ini
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The next generation Cray (XE7?) will attach to the processor via PCIe, so they can use Intel or AMD. They're definitely not going to use IB when their Gemini interconnect is better.
there is nothing flop about it you idiot. (Score:1)
with the patch microsoft put out for windows 7, there has been 10% performance increase in dozer chips. and moreover, some people have seen over 28% performance increase in games like bf3.
its just that you were too impatient and short sighted to perceive that new platforms require new software and updated old software to shine.
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Ahh Unity100 just waiting for your moronic comments about how the entire world just isn't "worthy" enough to be blessed by AMD's God-Like perfection. P.S. --> You are full of crap with those numbers, go a real site like.. uh.. AMD's own marketing blogs and they'll quote you 1 - 2%. You're 28% is pulled from your backside, which does not count.
Please do tell us all about miracle software patches for Windows in an article about supercomputers that will never see a single Windows installation. Please tel
whats moronic is (Score:1)
lying in wait for someone to post a certain post in a particular thread.
that's what you have been doing. keep it up.
Cray? (Score:1)
Obligatory (Score:1)
Yes, but does it run .... oh forget it
Ahem, NVIDIA? (Score:4, Informative)
It is very nice that AMD Opterons are mentioned and petaflops are celebrated, but aren't those petaflops mostly delivered by NVIDIA's Kepler Tesa cards?
From the TFA:
Cray XK6 blades with NVIDIA(R) Tesla(TM) GPUs, based on NVIDIA
(NASDAQ: NVDA) next-generation 'Kepler' architecture, which is
expected to more than double the performance of the Fermi GPU on
double-precision arithmetic.
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Hardware Moves Ahead, Software...not so much... (Score:2)
Hardware compared to, say, 1970? Mammoth progress. Room-sized state of the art then is dwarfed by a low-end laptopnow.
Software compared to, say, 1970? We've moved a little, but really it isn't all that much different. Things are more GUI, some fads have come and gone, but as Robert Martin puts it [youtube.com], it's still just sequence, selection, and iteration.
Re:Hardware Moves Ahead, Software...not so much... (Score:4, Informative)
Dear afabbro,
You are largely correct. Most software has not sped up much since the 1970s, and it could even be argued that developers write such sloppy code these days that even our improved compilers can't compensate, especially in applications where performance is no longer critical.
On the other hand, since about 2006 there have been some tremendous advances in algorithms. One optimization problem I work on, Basis Pursuit Denoising http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_pursuit_denoising [wikipedia.org], has had on the order of a 10-fold increase in real-world speed on constant hardware every year for the past 5 years (see http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5940245 [ieee.org] for my contribution).
These advances are not just academic games; they are actually worth doing. They could eventually lead to computers with sensory processing routines that have a mote of common sense to them, able to perform some real-world tasks we currently need humans for.
While I agree that by and large, most software is getting fat and lazy, there are a few problems where today's algorithms on 2002 hardware mop the floor with 2002 algorithms on today's hardware.
Best,
LeDopore
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One optimization problem I work on, Basis Pursuit Denoising , has had on the order of a 10-fold increase in real-world speed on constant hardware every year for the past 5 years
Great, so how about making OCR on noisy scans work next? The archive.org desperately needs something that works....
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There's been some really promising work in the direction of OCR-like problems lately. Here's an algorithm that can efficiently learn a small dictionary of symbols (like letters) and decompose a signal into elements that fit within this "low-rank" dictionary plus sparse noise (bugs squashed on the text?) plus Gaussian noise: https://sites.google.com/site/godecomposition/ [google.com].
It's not literally magical, but it's super-duper awesome (an no, I'm not an author of this one) and it should contribute to the minor revo
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