Posted on 11/19/2009 6:27:41 AM PST by BGHater
The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems
There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.
Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless "what-if" scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough -- and a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system.
Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops.
But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The U.S. Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful -- an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The later project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the U.S. is co-developing.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
My work computer came in at a respectable number nine on the list, I see.
world’s most important problems, including climate change
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
And that’s the end of the story.
Great, but will they play EVE?
"I was just wrestling with that problem yesterday. Gave up on it for now, but I figure I'll go back to it later when I have a clear head. "
I just look at the latest news and my blood boils...does that count?
What is a “bio energy product” that requires computing at this scale?
Humans.
Maybe this super-computer will be able to figure out where all that stimulus money went and how many jobs were created or saved in fictitious congressional districts.
I can see them modeling decomposition, what plants aided by what chemicals under what environments best degrade into something that can be useful.
How do you solve a problem like Maria?
“needed for high-resolution climate models”
What a waste!
not sure how computing power is going to solve climate change since it isn't a problem to start with. Likewise not sure how computers are going to extend battery life or allow violations of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics which would be necessary to create "biofuels" that don't consume more fossil energy than they produce.
I don’t think you really need a supercomputer to solve all of those problems. For example I ran a simulation on a Pentium to solve climate change and it produced the following results....
“The inventor of the internet is a bozo.”
rendering chess playing and stock day trading pointless pastimes.
No credibility awarded to the author because of this phrase: “some of the world’s most important problems, including climate change...”
Complete and utter BS.
POLITICIANS and PAID-FOR ‘scientists’ go for that crap and the money around it, but NO real real scientist is there anymore.
There are legitimate papers on pollution and man’s effect on climate, but not the agenda of “climate change” as a social agenda.
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