Posted on 02/08/2011 12:52:15 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
It was just a few weeks ago that President Obama was kvetching in his State of the Union address that China “has the fastest computer.” He was referring to the Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. With a peak performance of 2.57 petaflops, it muscled out the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray XT5 Jaguar system for the No. 1 spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Worry no more, Mr. President. Your government is on the case. The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it has cut a deal with IBM to bring a 10-petaflop supercomputer, named “Mira,” to the Argonne National Lab in Illinois.
Mira is a Blue Gene/Q and it will be up and running in 2012. It’s 20 times faster than the current system in use at Argonne, named Intrepid, which can do 557 teraflops–or 557 trillion calculations–a second, and as recently as 2008 ranked as the third most powerful computer in the world.
Meanwhile, another even more powerful computer, also an IBM Blue Gene Q, is going to Lawrence Livermore Labs next year. This one will be a 20-petaflop monster named “Sequoia.” And there’s more where that came from. These “petascale” computers are helping scientists get their heads around the idea of “exascale” computers that would be faster yet by a factor of a thousand, performing quintillions of calculations per second. (I think a quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.)
What can you do with 10 or 20 petaflops? Meteorologists could predict local weather down to the 100-meter range with a 20-petaflop system. And running a simulation of how a beating human heart reacts to new medicine, which takes two years of computing time today, will get done in two days on a 10-petaflop system.
Take that, China.
Here were some suggestions for the possile "what"
can you do with 10 or 20 petaflops? Meteorologists could predict local weather down to the 100-meter range with a 20-petaflop system. And running a simulation of how a beating human heart reacts to new medicine, which takes two years of computing time today, will get done in two days on a 10-petaflop system.
Somehow I think we will be doing less productive things.
I am sure the research scientist are lined up to get time on these future machines.
Can you screen all cell and telephone communications for key words and spit out the non-PC offenders names? ; )
Could handle an awful lot of pron on a machine like that! :)
ping
Peak teraflop ratings on LINPACK or SCALAPACK or whatever or nice, but if the bulk of your code relies on algorithms that aren't parallelizable, or your data partitioning isn't friendly, you get bit on the ass by Amdahl's Law.
Haven't heard much about robust numerical methods which map to these architectures -- but of course theoretical chemists would just *love* larger basis sets, even with the returns limited by the non-linear scaling.
Cheers!
Maybe they can set up some solar energy fields just outside of Livermore to power the new computers.
Otherwise they might need a coal powered generating station...
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Heck yeah,, they have acres of wind turbines nearby at Altamont Pass.. I bet birds would be glad to see them go away..
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