IBM has won a deal to build a supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory that will pair more than 16,000 AMD Opteron processors with more than 16,000 Cell processors to try to reach a new computing milestone for the company.
The machine, dubbed Roadrunner, uses a hybrid approach that combines a conventional cluster of Opteron servers with Cell chips that handle some of the calculating grunt work. Each Cell chip, originally designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3 video game console, includes eight special-purpose engines that can rapidly perform physics calculations.
LANL’s sister lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, currently houses the top-ranked machine, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which can perform 280 trillion calculations per second, or 280 teraflops. Roadrunner is designed to nearly quadruple that to a sustained speed of 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or a petaflop.
Roadrunner, which will run [Red Hat] Linux and include software to juggle tasks between the Opteron and Cell processors, will be built using commercially available IBM hardware. That includes System x3755 servers with four Opteron processors apiece and IBM BladeCenter H servers with Cell-based systems.
The rumor at LANL is there will be a backdoor link to World Of Warfare.
This really reminded me of Steven Levy’s Hackers. It’s nice that gaming has become such a huge part of the entertainment industry, for all the harm it’s done to gaming, simply because the field deserves respect for the fact that it’s historically driven innovation in computing since the very beginning.
Whether or not computing has actually improved anything or made anything simpler is irrelevant; it became what it is because it’s cool.
Conversely, the inability to acknowledge how cool it is has also done the most to hold the industry back.
Red Hat. Yup. That’s one big ol’ Quake server, I reckon. Let’s use it to simulate the invasion of Iran; figure if we can work out the logistics on that one, we might even finally get around to predicting the weather.
Somebody needs to start optimizing their code… 250 Teraflops and we still need more? A petaflop? You would think that you would be able to compute everything that ever needs to be computed, throughout the world for a year, in one second flat with that kind of power.
We landed on the moon with computers that had less power than a modern calculator, yet we need 250 Teraflops to tell me that it might rain this weekend?
lol #2… Are they going to try to get it to run Vista with all the eye candy turned on?
Elwood
#2
The Apollo spacecraft Guidence Computer (AGC) was used in real-time by astronaut pilots to collect and provide flight information, and to automatically control all of the navigational functions of the Apollo spacecraft.
It did all of these tasks with 72 kB of Read Only Memory (ROM), 4 kB of read/write core memory (RAM) and a keypad/LED user interface. It ran at 85,000 instructions per second (about 0.000000000085 petaflops). This is somewhat less than the speed, memory and user interface capabilities of my Casio database wristwatch!
Never underestimate what you can do using only what you have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/
Steve
I thought this horse was already dead..