Posted on 06/09/2008 11:50:57 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Armonk (NY) IBM is prepared to deliver the Roadrunner supercomputer to the Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The system was development over the past 18 months and is not only the first hybrid supercomputer using Cell processors, but also the first commercial system to exceed a performance of 1 PFlops.
Roadrunner is the NNSAs third IBM-built supercomputer, adding to two IBM-built supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: BlueGene/L, completed in 2005, has 131,072 p5 processors and delivers a sustained performance of 280.6 TFlops. The 12,208 processor ASC Purple is estimated to provide a sustained performance of 75.8 teraflops.
The new Roadrunner, which is currently disassembled and will be shipped to the NNSA within 30 days, according to IBM, was originally described to deliver about 2.8x (3.5x peak: 1.6 TFlops ) the combined processing power of BlueGene/L and ASC Purple. Back in 2006, IBM said that the system would bet more than 16,000 Opteron processor cores and more than 16,000 Cell BE CPUs to deliver on the Petaflop goal.
The final system ended up with less processors 13,896 Opteron cores (6948 dual-core processors) as well as 12,960 Cell BE chips with a total of 116,640 PPE and SPE cores for a combined 130,536 cores. The original design called for about 176,000 cores.
According to IBM, Roadrunner has the floating point performance of about 100,000 notebooks. To describe the horsepower of the system, IBM said that Roadrunner can do in one day what would take the entire population of the world 46 years on handheld calculators, assuming a pace of one second per calculation.
Other interesting facts of the supercomputer, which IBM said cost about $100 million, include a power consumption of about 3.9 Mwatts, as well as a structure that includes 80 TB of memory, 576 miles of fiber optic cable as well as 3456 tri-blades which can deliver 400 GFlops each.
Also noteworthy is that Roadrunner was supposed to become the flagship product of AMDs Torrenza platform, a project which was pitched as an open AMD x86 platform that takes advantage of Direct Connect Architecture and the Hypertransport interface. However, we havent heard much about Torrenza anymore and we dont expect AMD to make a big deal of it.
Either way, I have no idea. :)
and the super computer market, latest one from IBM has a whack of Opterons and Cells...
http://forums.amd.com/forum/index.cfm?forumid=1
Drop on by the forums...
A Theoretical Introduction to Numerical Analysis (Hardcover)
***********************EXCERPT*****************
presents the general methodology and principles of numerical analysis, illustrating the key concepts using numerical methods from real analysis, linear algebra, and differential equations.
***************************
Explains the most fundamental and universal concepts, including error, efficiency, complexity, stability, and convergence. Addresses advance topics, such as intrinsic accuracy limits, saturation of numerical methods by smoothness, and......
Never studied this area of Math,...stayed with Foundations...like Topology...
Thanks...I have some AMD’s/...
Wow....they probably need 350,000 watts just to power the CPUs.
Now the question is: Will Steve Jobs ever build a machine as powerful as this and sell it for $2500?
Per Moore's Law, the answer is probably not but possibly.
Moore's Law tells us that processing power doubles every 18 months. That's a lot of "times twos" to get to 100,000. In fact it takes about 16 or 17 of them so Jobs would still have to be on the job 25 years from now in 2033. That's not likely but possible.
I can't wait. It will probably be running OS XX
No idea.
I turned down a job offer about 6 years ago to work on, if not this very project, a sister project in the same group in Poughkeepsie. Oh, well.
> not only the first hybrid supercomputer using Cell processors, but also the first commercial system to exceed a performance of 1 PFlops
Thanks Ernest.
Client statistics by OS |
OS Type | Current TFLOPS* | Active CPUs | Total CPUs |
Windows | 189 | 198529 | 2043258 |
Mac OS X/PowerPC | 7 | 8536 | 116294 |
Mac OS X/Intel | 26 | 8500 | 50868 |
Linux | 69 | 40433 | 306753 |
GPU | 133 | 1930 | 8605 |
PLAYSTATION®3 | 1510 | 53560 | 535096 |
Total | 1934 | 311488 | 3060874 |
LOL...We b bad.
Proud 2 b foldin'.
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=36120
I’ve noticed that our folding team is slipping a little. I’m sure FR is busier than usual since it is an election year. Maybe we should do another appeal to FReepers to join the team.
Our interconnects are about a million times slower than Roadrunner’s, but our power in numbers is huge. I believe F@H is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most powerful distributed computer, and that’s mainly because of the PS3s.
ping
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