1 exaflop next!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.php

Supercomputer sets record

Quote :

"SAN FRANCISCO: An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. . . The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion. . . To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day. . . Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively. . . By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop."

6/9/2008 8:47:38 AM

Is this why the US Gub'ment ordered truckload of PS3s?

6/9/2008 8:59:27 AM

Quote :

"requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively."

ok...

tools? I would just assume it would need a competent programmer who can parallel program for 3 processors...

6/9/2008 10:11:49 AM

w00t

6/9/2008 10:17:19 AM

Quote :

"Is this why the US Gub'ment ordered truckload of PS3s?"

no mang, that was for the training!

6/9/2008 10:34:36 AM