Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of scorners.
Prov.28:9
He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law.even his prayer shall be abomination.
Chess: “Engine”
“Rolls-Royce” “Swiss Watch” “cathedra”
“RoadRunner”"Swiss Army Knife"
“RoadRunner” Roadrunner is a supercomputer
built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico, USA.
Currently the world's fastest computer, the US$133-million Roadrunner is
designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, achieving 1.026 on May 25,
2008,[1][2][3]
and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It is a one-of-a-kind
supercomputer, built from commodity parts, with many novel design features.
Military Supercomputer Sets Record
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 machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
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 I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory,
based in Los Alamos, N.M. 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.
Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.
To
put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P.
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.
The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer
products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that
computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen
as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer
computing.
The high-performance computing goal, known as a
petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long
been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and
scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing
group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.
By
running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time —
compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers
— petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally
alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers
can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can
perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.
“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.
Each
new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to
faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software
and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest
of the computer industry for consumer and business products.
Technology
is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented
computing began dominating research and development spending on
technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that
trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.
The
Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that
are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel
processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
“Roadrunner
tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon,
associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer
electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of
cellphones and embedded electronics.”
The innovations flowing
from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result
from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s
hardware.
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.
“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,”
said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new
way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”
Solving
that programming problem is important because in just a few years
personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even
hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new
techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts,
however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will
provide useful examples.
“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try
to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from
this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief
scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.
Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.
Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.
Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception
in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the
title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion
mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer
created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The
Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration
to reinvest in high-performance computing.
“It’s a sign that we
are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of
Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real
competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the
machines.”
Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is
already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do
these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will
push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be
the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice
president.
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.
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