IBM Cell pushes US military supercomputer past one petaflops
Beep, beep!
THE US MILITARY has experienced some massive flops. Here's one more. A supercomputer, built by IBM, has that broken a computing record to achieve the long coveted goal of being able to process over 1.026 quadrillion calculations a second.
The beast, dubbed Roadrunner, is made up of a blend of 12,960 modified Cell processors and some 7000 AMD Opterons. The design apparenty includes a parallel processing chip used as an accelerator and turbocharger which Sony left out of the PlayStation 3.
The Roadrunner runs rings around IBM’s BlueGene/L, the world’s previous fastest supercomputer, weighing in at one thousand trillion calculations per second, or a petaflops.
Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, told the New York Times that setting the new record was the “equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing”.
Consuming the amount of power it would take to run a shopping centre like Harrods, boffins’ biggest challenge is to now programme well enough to get all 116,640 processor cores to work at the same time. Roadrunner already needs three separate programming tools for its three different processor types.
The $133 million mega machine will be put to use number crunching and problem solving on issues linked to the US’s arsenal of ACME nuclear weapons, global warming and the meaning of life (already calculated a while back as being 42).
Having smashed through the petaflop barrier, IBM does not intend to tread air before falling hundreds of metres down a cliff face, instead the Wiley Coyotes at IBM are already looking towards the next supercomputing record.
The thousandfold improvement in computing represented by the petaflop took 11 years to achieve, so the next thousandfold target, the exaflop and after that the zettaflops, the yottaflops and the xeraflops should be just around the corner. Or included in the next ACME do-it-yourself supercomputers kit. µ
L’Inq
New
York Times
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IBM
predicts the weather
Comments
global warming....
global warming ... maybe if they turned the thing off that might help....Is it a real computer?
Yeah, but does it boot to:READY
????????
Frank von Drashek Be Proud
Frank Started at Rochester IBM & Migrated to Medical Computing (from TV LAN), So Machine Like VerraFlopper are late twenty Years Ago Project. Of Course in Large Universities system Array. We're All In there.YaSure BoSS.Of numbers: 28 Seems most productive, While we squinch that to 58, 42-Lame & 64 ?too Polygamustly Dod. I'm sticking to Straight Eight.
Now that BoTox Zetta is Gone, Maybe 80, NOT 88(Shrinkage) too Much.From recent Updatings.Shirley NOT 98.
At Least CELL Did something Great For Public, err I Mean Pubic.Next Script:Why I Killed Celeste.
TS Drashek
OK
My question is will it run the officially announced Doom 4?Great
"Or included in the next ACME do-it-yourself supercomputers kit"How much does it cost? I would like to pre-order one. ;)
Resistance to anvils?
But what we really want to know is what happens when the 1000T anvil falls on it?Suppercomputer
Maybe if the US military had this supercomputer running earlier it would of been smart enough to tell Bush to fuck off.That's one big Playstation!
That's quite a phenomenal piece of kit but it still won't run GTA IV as well as the 360...=
one thousand trillion is one quadrillion ...Accomplishment Overshadowed by Shameful Treatment of the Birth-town it Left Behind...
Lawyers to look into TCE health claimsIBM also faces questions over handling of chemical
By Tom Wilber • Press & Sun-Bulletin • June 5, 2008
People claiming TCE pollution from IBM wrecked their health and damaged their property are scheduled to answer questions under oath from IBM lawyers trying to discredit their stories.
Meanwhile, lawyers for 94 plaintiffs making the claims will begin interviewing IBM officials, also under oath, about the company's use and handling of TCE and their knowledge of a massive spill polluting hundreds of properties near the company's microelectronics plant on North Street in Endicott.
The process, called discovery, will begin this month and continue through the year as the monumental toxic tort case officially gets under way. The schedule and outline for proceeding with the case, called the Case Management Order, was filed Wednesday afternoon in state Supreme Court in Binghamton.
The timetable for both sides to begin requesting informational exchanges begins immediately, with witnesses scheduled to be questioned in September, October and December.
More than 1,000 area residents seeking more than $100 million in damages are represented in the case. They are being broken down into smaller groups to make it manageable. The discovery process for the first group alone is scheduled to continue through December.
Some information uncovered in the process may be made public as it is filed in court. Some may not if lawyers from either side can provide compelling reasons to keep it private.
Attorneys for both sides will be present during the questioning, to be conducted in a private meeting room. Some clients will be more apt to listen to their attorney's advice than others, said Phil Johnson, an attorney for Levene Gouldin & Thompson, part of a team of seven law firms representing plaintiffs.
"It certainly is a stressful process. It's not something a lot of people have done before," he said.
Attorneys are organizing plaintiffs into about six groups, each representing a cross section of claims. More than 240 plaintiffs have been named in complaints in state Supreme Court in Binghamton, with more to come, Johnson said.
Attorneys began signing up clients in 2003, soon after the discovery by state health and environmental officials that a subterranean plume of industrial solvents -- dating prior to 1979 -- had been forming fumes and entering buildings. They included trichloroethylene, TCE, once used as a cleaning agent. Exposure is linked to illnesses ranging from cancer to brain damage, but levels that pose calculable risks are debatable.
IBM representatives declined to comment Wednesday night. In the past, they said the claims lack scientific merit.
Some errors here
Looney Tunes puns aside, the following has been directly paraphrased from the source article without properly understanding the subject matter, and is thus incorrect:"The design apparenty includes a parallel processing chip used as an accelerator and turbocharger which Sony left out of the PlayStation 3."
The article could obviously benefit from some copy editing as well, but I'll refrain from commenting on specific errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation.
ACME? and Roadrunner?!
But Chris, at The Dose you say you love Bush all the time.