IBM Planning New Supercomputer

[Jimmy 2004]

Computing giant IBM is planning yet another supercomputer, with this one set to take the performance crown away from its very own BlueGene. The computer is being built for the Department of Energy and will be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, costing $110 million to construct. Named Roadrunner, this new hybrid will use a unique design combining 16,000 conventional AMD Opteron Cores alongside 16,000 Cell processors (yes, the ones in the PS3), with calculations being shared between the two. According to IBM, the Cell processors will act as the workhorse, completing the major floating point calculations, whilst the Opterons will act as the system interface processors and the transactional backbones between the nodes. Once the machine is finished it ought to run at one petaflop - that's one trillion calculations each second, more than capable of belittling BlueGene, which is capable of a mere 280 teraflops.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[C.Ash]

Teraflops-Meraflops, how much does it get in F.E.A.R?

 

[Eric3988]

GD, that sounds like overkill if you ask me. I mean will they ever need to do 1 trillion calculations a second?

 

[Thermopylae_480]

Yes, they will. When you're dealing with complicated chaotic systems like in Nuclear Physics you can push these things to the max. Computers like these are often used to model global climate and other system with to many variables to count.

Look at the things DOE does. You will see the many ways they can use this computer. There will be a waiting list a year or more long just to get a small bit of access time.

 

[WarEagleAU]

Rofl C.ASh. Im sure in Fear the thing runs like its on a mixture of High Energy drink, expresso, Crack and cocaine. ::ROFL:: Probably couldnt really play any game as it will race by like nascar.

 

[Alcpone]

60 million million calcs per sec.. Not bad

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6384481.stm

This was announced in the uk last week, got me thinking about the thread I started with some audio of a definition of a quantum computer, now thats what im waiting for

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=25958&highlight=quantum+computing

 

[Completely Bonkers]

It's an odd machine. With the architecture described, it is designed for multi-node access. So although it describes a trillion calculations per second, NO SINGLE NODE OR PROGRAM will achieve anything like that performance.

It's designed for multiple INDEPENDENT maths calculation thread... not unlike Google is designed for multiple independent database searches.

 

[Completely Bonkers]

@alcpone,

That link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6384481.stm is interesting.

My thoughts:

1./ What a complete waste of taxpayers money!!!!
2./ They are replacing a super computer with another one ONLY 3x more powerful
3./ But, according to Moore's Law, if power triples every two years, (or doubles every 18 months), then they are replacing a machine with another one that is only 2 years more advanced
4./ And then they want to make it last until 2014
5./ But in 2014, a supercomputer for the same price will be about 30x more powerful

This sounds like political/economic vested interests.

The whole deal needs investigating/audit.

 

[Alcpone]

@alcpone,

That link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6384481.stm is interesting.

My thoughts:

1./ What a complete waste of taxpayers money!!!!
2./ They are replacing a super computer with another one ONLY 3x more powerful
3./ But, according to Moore's Law, if power triples every two years, (or doubles every 18 months), then they are replacing a machine with another one that is only 2 years more advanced
4./ And then they want to make it last until 2014
5./ But in 2014, a supercomputer for the same price will be about 30x more powerful

This sounds like political/economic vested interests.

The whole deal needs investigating/audit.

I will point them in your direction

 

[kakazza]

Teraflops-Meraflops, how much does it get in F.E.A.R?

You may want to look at this:
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=618&p=3

F.E.A.R. is a game not limited by the CPU. I mean maybe you're interested if you're not just saying useless stuff like WarEagle to raise your Posts/day.

 

[magibeg]

Systems like this are extremely useful in this day and age. With all this talk of global warming and the like we need powerful computers like these to calculate simulations of what could happen or might happen. Mother nature is a complicated beast to calculate.

 

[kakazza]

magibeg - Yeh, and the power produced to run the monster ruins nature more ;P

 

[ex_reven]

you could use it to break encryptions
brute force attack *drools*

 

[kakazza]

Rather to calculat rainbow tables

 

[AshenSugar]

cant wait to see what is built using r600 cores and k10 cores, hopefully cray will be the ones who make that beast, the demo of the barcelona on 690 chipset with 2 600 cards was able to do a teraflop by itself.......imagin that times a few hundred or more!!!

 

[Easy Rhino]

3dmark2006 score = 766587685456433525467576587698787987876765754

 

[AshenSugar]

3dmark score=300
superpi 32m time=.2 seconds

 

[Deleted member 24505]

ashen,its .17859962 seconds actually.

 

[Easy Rhino]

3dmark score=300
superpi 32m time=.2 seconds

im talking PC marks