Blue Gene's supercomputer dominance isn't fading at Livermore lab
A computer used to simulate the turbulence following an H-bomb blast has retained its title as the world's fastest computer, bringing honor to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it runs around the clock, and glory to IBM Corp., which built that colossus of calculation better known as Blue Gene.
The victor's wreath in what is arguably the Olympics of computing was handed out Monday in Reno, where number-crunchers from around the globe gathered to hear which industrial, academic and government labs made the Top 500 Supercomputer List, compiled by academic research groups.
Of course these rankings lead to the question of how fast these computers are, and that takes a bit of considering.
On the face of it, the Top 500 List measures speed in trillions of calculations per second, known by the shorthand, "teraflops," and by that reckoning the Blue Gene machine in Livermore clocked in 478.2 teraflops, while the second-placed IBM supercomputer, which works in Germany, came in at 167.3 teraflops.
That means nothing without a frame of reference to appreciate such speed and, here, Sonoma State University math Professor Rick Luttmann said the trick is to think about the speed of these computers in relation to the speed of light, which takes about eight minutes to travel the roughly 93 million miles between sun and earth.
With that in mind, Luttmann said, a 1-teraflop computer can do 1,000 calculations in the time it takes light to travel a foot. Multiply that by the number of teraflops and the next question is: How do they make computers capable of solving problems that fast?
That's a cinch, said Mark Seager, the director of the 50-person staff at Lawrence Livermore that uses Blue Gene to simulate things like the dispersal patterns of nuclear fallout, and whether the material used to build H-bombs is likely to give the anticipated bang for the buck.
He described the $100 million Blue Gene thus: Imagine 104 refrigerated cabinets, stuffed full of 106,496 tiny processors, relatively dumb chips of the same family that IBM puts in cable television boxes or in the braking systems of cars. Wire together that horde of processors. Add the requisite software to assign tiny bits of monstrously huge problems to each of those 106,496 processors. And Blue Gene will simulate the hellish conditions that would follow if the unthinkable ever occurred.
"We're talking about keeping the weapons safe and reliable," Seager said.
Though IBM won the first and second spots and dominated the Top 500 list overall, the third-speediest machine turned out to be an $11 million system built by Silicon Graphics and commissioned by the state of New Mexico to solve civilian problems like water conservation.
Hewlett-Packard placed fourth and fifth, with two supercomputers built for customers in India and Sweden, respectively. HP supercomputer guru Frank Baetke said the machine in Pune, India, will help the research arm of industrial giant Tata design products from nanotech to aerospace, while the other machine is for a tight-lipped Swedish government agency.
This authoritative speed list reflects the growing strength of European supercomputer installations, with 149 of the Top 500 systems, although the United States remains the volume leader with 284 entries on the list. Asian nations accounted for 58 of the earth's fastest machines.
Most of the supercomputer users don't have dramatic problems to solve, said HP's Baetke. The Top 500 organization keeps track of the types of supercomputer users and 57 percent fall into the "industrial" category, which he described as tasks such as:
-- financial modeling by banks, insurers or hedge funds interested in predicting currency, stock or risk trends;
-- data mining by corporations that want to look for patterns in the information they gather;
-- product simulation for faster manufacturing; and
-- computing intensive tasks like oil and gas explorations that involve probing the Earth and constructing 3-D visualizations about what might be buried underneath.
"The geologists today are not out in the field any more, they're sitting behind computer screens," Baetke said.
The Top 500 list is kept by supercomputer experts at Germany's University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and is updated twice a year.
IBM's Blue Gene Pulls Away from the Pack
IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer sprinted to a new world record as it continued its four-year domination of the official TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list. The world's fastest computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is now nearly three times faster than the rest of the pack.
Move Over for 'Roadrunner' in 2008
Rounding out IBM's petaflop portfolio will be a computer nicknamed "Roadrunner," a hybrid design that blends thousands of PC-type processors from AMD, and the Cell Broadband Engine, the graphics processor at the heart of the Sony Playstation 3. Roadrunner, planned to be delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in summer 2008, will be capable of speeds exceeding a petaflop. By combining the two styles of microprocessors, Roadrunner will slash typical power consumption to offer a highly energy-efficient operating environment.
IBM's petascale hardware initiatives are matched with corresponding investments in software, including application support and development tools, to increase productivity, ease of use and commercial viability. For instance, IBM will expand Blue Gene application support next year with a new open-source developers' program with Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the first site in the U.S. to field a Blue Gene/P next year.
Based on IBM's POWER Architecture, the IBM System Blue Gene Solution is optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems. A variety of industries are using Blue Gene systems to advance their research capabilities for life sciences, financial modeling, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, astronomy and space research and climate modeling.
The "TOP500 Supercomputer Sites" is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can be viewed at http://www.top500.org .
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