Supercomputers with 100 million cores coming by 2018

CW ^ | 16 Nov 2009 | Patrick Thibodeau

[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.

[kosciusko51]

It doesn’t matter how fast the computer, the old adage remains the same: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

[RckyRaCoCo]

Finally, a computer that can handle Flight Simulator X

[Reeses]

Throughout history the classic way to master a new technology is to have the military use it to create new and better ways of killing annoying people. If we assigned the military the task of figuring out how to use weather as a weapon the days of wild unmanaged climate change would be over. The same goes for inventing biofuel replacements for petroleum.

[Lx]

Imagine how fast DOS 5 and Word Perfect would crash!

Or games like Castle Wolfenstein or Duke Nukem, awesome!

[Syntyr]

“Great, but will they play EVE?”

Nope... Solitaire and Minesweeper...

[zeugma]

The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems

You mean we'll finally know why a piece of bread always falls with the buttered side down?

Cool!

[loungitude]

What do you suppose would happen if the computer crunched all of the data and came back with “climage change does not exist”?

My guess is they’d switch to a Mac.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Or keep shoveling tax dollars at ‘research’ until it says otherwise.

[VeniVidiVici]

Great. I’ll have to buy a new case fan.

[antiRepublicrat]

The answer will be...

42

[LexBaird]

operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius

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.

Simple. Just insulate it with a few kilometers of the earth's crust. Al Gore said so.

[steelyourfaith]

"There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change ...

Garbage-in/garbage-out

[Straight Vermonter]

Ping

[killermosquito]

Just imagine the size of a computer that we will need to understand women.

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from November 19, 2009. Thanks BGHater. Related to this new one:

• Advances Offer Path to Shrink Computer Chip

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks,....been away a bit....but new video card works right .

[SunkenCiv]

How many cores in the new GPU?

[aruanan]

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.

...and why people were stupid enough to vote in Obama and his minions.

[aruanan]

The Jaguar uses 7 megawatts of power or 7 million watts. An exascale system that used CPU processing cores alone might take 2 gigawatts or two billion watts, says Dave Turek, IBM vice president of deep computing. "That's roughly the size of medium-sized nuclear power plant. That's an untenable proposition for the future," he said.

Why? If the government's going to build the thing, then just take out of mothballs one of the nuclear reactors that have been shut down or not allowed to start up and proceed. It's not as though it's being used for anything else now.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

My card ,...a Gigabyte HD5450 has 80 stream processors and other stuff...that is the low end in the latest Radeon line....

One of the monster gaming processors XFX HD-597X-ENFN Radeon HD 5970 BLACK 4GB has.... Stream Processors 3200 (1600 x 2) Stream Processing Units

and goes for $1,199.99.

And nvidia has their new line out...Fermi with this workstation card :PNY VCQFX5800-PCIE-PB Quadro FX 5800 4GB 512-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI Supported Workstation Video Card
having Stream Processors 240 Processor Cores but they do more I guess....

Was: $3,199.99 Now: $3,099.99.

[SunkenCiv]

Wasn’t there a Radeon demo some months ago showing one card driving 16 monitors?