The DOE simulates nuclear testing? Why not the DOD?
My guess is that the DOE will adapt Sequoai to monitor and control our home thermostats.
Oh, except for the one in the White House.
Posted on 02/04/2009 8:30:12 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BM is building the world’s faster supercomputer for the Department of Energy. The machine will have more computing power than the world’s current 500 fastest machines put together.
The machine will be dubbed Sequoai, taken from the Latin name for the Californian redwood. It will have a 1.6TB of memory and be housed in 96 racks, each the size of a refrigerator.
The current world’s faster computer, also made by IBM and used at the DoE, is known as Roadrunner. It was the first to break the one petaflop barrier, meaning it can carry out a quadrillion (one million billion) calculations per second. Sequoai is scheduled to shatter this mark by working at 20 petaflops.
The primary use of Sequoai will be to simulate nuclear weapons testing to check the United States’ stockpile without having to blow anything up. The machine may later be used for tasks such as producing much more accurate weather forecasts, particularly in predicting the behaviour of extreme events such as tornadoes.
IBM will first produce a machine called Dawn which will run at 500 teraflops (in other words, one-fortieth the speed of Sequoai) to help researchers prepare for using the larger machine when it’s delivered in 2011.
(Excerpt) Read more at tech.blorge.com ...
Making it easier for Big Brother to watch all of us even better.
Packed with 1.6 million Power cores
**********************EXCERPT***********************
The big bad box that IBM sold to LLNL and is talking about today is nicknamed Sequoia, and it will be based on a "future Power technology" that IBM is not being specific about at this point. IBM is expected to deliver Sequoia in 2011, and it will pack 1.6 million processor cores, a more than tenfold increase over the Dawn machine that will deliver a fortyfold increase in performance to 20.13 petaflops.
The Sequoia machine, which will have 1.6 TB of main memory, will be housed in a mere 96 racks and take up 3,422 square feet of floor space - a little more than twice the size of the Dawn system. The Sequoia massively parallel machine will consume approximately 6.6 megawatts of juice, which is a lot for a single machine, but given that it will deliver 3,050 megaflops per watt - a nearly seven-fold increase in power efficiency over the Dawn system - the tradeoff seems to be worth it. Provided you have a data center that can handle 6.6 megawatts.
When the company I work for was located in Cambridge, MA there was an interesting company across the street called Thinking Machines Associates. I dropped by at lunch time to drop off my resume and fill out an appilication. I was told there were no openings and my resume was refused. I never gave it much thought after that until I saw the company named in Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. It was an NSA front working on encryption supercomputers. No wonder they were open to the public.
Great ...Maybe a smart computer will tell the Energy Idiots to DRILL HERE DRILL NOW !
I don’t know any Govt. “workers” who can write Code ? Who’s gonna program it ? India ? Or American Contractors too smart to take a Govt. job ?
DoE has it’s finger in way too many pies that are totally unrelated from Energy.
Man makes a powerful computer that needs 3400 square feet, weighs tons, sucks 6.6 MW of power, and requires a massive cooling system. It’s outdated in 10-20 years and requires many people to maintain and fix it.
God makes a brain that can do it in less than a cubic foot, runs on miliwatts, has a compact 1-2 gallon cooling system, and in general is self-repairing.
Hey, maybe they can even get it to predict the weather...
“Making it easier for Big Brother to watch all of us even better.”
Huh? Did you even read the excerpt?
“The primary use of Sequoai will be to simulate nuclear weapons testing to check the United States’ stockpile without having to blow anything up.”
Yeah, but I still can't remember our anniversary without a computer.
The purpose of the Department of Energy is to remove US dependence on foreign energy sources.
Not only is the DoE doing the worst job imaginable at its defined role, it is now getting the fastest computer on earth to do a job that is not, repeat not part of its remit.
I want that to play Cyrsis. Can you imagine the lan party you could run on that thing?
I want that to play Cyrsis. Can you imagine the lan party you could run on that thing?
Yes, but just like a computer, a brain’s only as good as the guy using it.
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