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HenryTo
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 Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 6:42 pm Post subject: Supercomputing |
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Cray's supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) upgraded (doubled) its performance to 119 teraflops - putting it number 2 on the world's Top 500 list of supercomputers:
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1370386.html |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2009 12:43 am Post subject: |
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Cray discusses its short-term and long-term roadmap - and emphasizes that it is on track for the 2 petaflop upgrade for the Oak Ridge "Jaguar" supercomputer by the end of this year:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/04/cray_super_upgrades/
| Quote: | When you add it all up, the Jaguar boxes - which can be clustered to share workloads - are basically neck-and-neck with IBM's Roadrunner hybrid Opteron-Cell Linux cluster over at Los Alamos National Laboratory, yet another DoE lab. Both machines have broken through the petaflops barrier and both vendors are now pushing up to 10 petaflops and beyond.
Under the deal Cray has inked with Oak Ridge, the XT5 machine will be upgraded to the new six-core Istanbul chips, boosting the core count to over 224,256 on the compute nodes. The upgrade is expected to be completed on the XT5 partition on Jaguar by the end of the year and boost its peak performance to more than two petaflops. Neither Cray nor Oak Ridge said which Istanbul chips would be put into the XT5 partition of Jaguar, but it will probably be one of the standard Opteron parts announced in June, not one of the low-power or high-clock speed variants announced in mid-July.
The price difference between the 2.6GHz Opteron 2435 and the 2.4GHz Opteron 2431 is pretty high - $989 a pop versus $698 when buying in 1,000-unit quantities, or a 41.7 per cent price premium for an 8.3 per cent bump in performance - so you would guess Oak Ridge would go with the 2.4 GHz Istanbul chip. If it does, that would give the XT5 part of Jaguar a peak performance of 2.07 petaflops; boosting to the 2.6GHz Istanbul chip pushes the performance up to the 2.24 petaflops level. This upgrade is apparently worth just under $20m. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2009 12:32 pm Post subject: |
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Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, aims to create a model (at the cellular level, not the molecular level) of the human brain within the next ten years. Note the following presentation was made at the TED Global Conference:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm
Following is the interesting FAQ:
http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page18924.html
| Quote: | Do you believe a computer can ever be an exact simulation of the human brain?
This is neither likely nor necessary. It will be very difficult because, in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today. Mammals can make very good copies of each other, we do not need to make computer copies of mammals. That is not our goal. We want to try to understand how the biological system functions and malfunctions so that this knowledge can benefit mankind.
Is the brain like a computer?
In some ways yes, but in most ways it is not at all like a computer. The brain performs many analog operations which cannot be performed by computers and in many cases it achieves hybrid digital-analog computing. The most important feature of the brain that makes it different from computers is that it is constantly changing. If the resistors and capacitors in a computer started changing, then it would immediately malfunction, whereas in the brain such equivalent properties change constantly on the time scales of milliseconds to years. The brain is more like a dynamically morphing computer. We are still far from understanding the rules that govern the brain's genetically and environmentally driven self-organization in response to external stimulus.
How will you be able to replicate the complexity of neurons and neurotransmitter actions?
We have built 3D computer models of most of all the main types of neurons and can simulate their individual behaviors with great detail and very accurately. At this stage we can capture the complexity of the fast neurotransmitters very accurately as well with phenomenological models that we have built. A more difficult issue is the slow neurotransmitters and the neuromodulators as well as hormonal effects. These will take a while longer to model, but there is no major obstacle to this.
The Blue Gene is one of the fastest supercomputers around, but is it enough?
Our Blue Gene is only just enough to launch this project. It is enough to simulate about 50'000 fully complex neurons close to real-time. Much more power will be needed to go beyond this. We can also simulate about 100 million simple neurons with the current power. In short, the computing power and not the neurophysiological data is the limiting factor. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 9:53 pm Post subject: |
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After stunning the supercomputing world with the debut of its "Earth Simulator" in 2002, Japan has fallen off the map in terms of global supercomputing power. With this machine, Japan will attempt to regain a small toehold back into the global supercomputing arena:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/20/japan_nuke_supers/ |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 10:17 pm Post subject: |
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New semi-annual "Top 500" list of the world's fastest supercomputers is released:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/06/press-release
| Quote: | The entry level to the list moved up to the 17.1 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 12.64 Tflop/s six months ago.
The last system on the newest list would have been listed at position 274 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This turnover rate is gain just above average after the TOP500 recorded the highest turnover in its history one year ago.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 22.6 Pflop/s, compared to 16.95 Pflop/s six months ago and 11.7 Pflop/s one year ago. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:36 am Post subject: |
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The University of Toronto fires up the most powerful supercomputer in Canada - and putting it at number 12 on the "Top 500" list of supercomputers worldwide:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/652745 |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2009 1:39 am Post subject: |
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Building the "exascale" computer - what it means and how do we get there:
http://www.pcplus.co.uk/node/3072/
| Quote: | | One exaflop is 1,000 times faster than a petaflop. The fastest computer in the world is currently the IBM-based Roadrunner, which is located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Roadrunner runs at an astounding one petaflop, which equates to more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer has 129,600 processing cores and takes up more room than a small house, yet it’s still not quite fast enough to run some of the most intense global weather simulations, nuclear tests and brain modelling tasks that modern science demands. For example, the lab currently uses the processing power of Roadrunner to run complex visual cortex and cellular modelling experiments in almost real- time. In the next six months, the computer will be used for nuclear simulation and stockpile tests to make sure that the US nuclear weapon reserves are safe. However, when exascale calculations become a reality in the future, the lab could step up to running tests on ocean and atmosphere interactions. These are not currently possible because the data streams involved are simply too large. The move to exascale is therefore critical, because researchers require increasingly fast results from their experiments. |
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 3:27 am Post subject: |
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The latest trends in the supercomputing space, courtesy of Top500.org:
http://www.top500.org/blog/2009/05/20/top_trends_high_performance_computing
| Quote: | Introduction
If we calculate the performance predictions for the TOP500 list, then we will see a 100 Petaflops system most likely in the year 2016. In the past we had a performance increase within 11 years from Gigaflops (Cray2 in 1986), via Teraflops (Intel ASCI Red in 1997) up to the Petaflops ( IBM Roadrunner in 2008 ) by a factor of 1000. Despite these performance improvements the HPC arena will more and more be defined indirectly via the highly compute-intensive applications. They are coming from a variety of areas, involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and improved seismic processing for oil exploration for continued supply. For most of these applications detailed results may only be achieved with systems in the Petaflops range. And hopefully Exascale Systems will be seen first in 2019.
But what are the trends in the nearest future which will form the basis for all these performance predictions. The major challenges to all processor requirements for HPC systems now and in the future will be: low cost, low power consumption, availability of support for parallel programming, and efficient porting of existing codes. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 12:23 am Post subject: |
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Germany unveils the fastest supercomputer in Europe - and the third fastest in the world:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gR8XY_dducd-C_KFpWxRTeBQh1Cw
| Quote: | The "Jugene," capable of 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, ranks behind the "Roadrunner" and "Jaguar" computers in the United States, said Kosta Schinarakis from the Juelich research centre, where the computer is located.
Jugene will be used for a wide variety of operations, including research on fuel cells for electric cars, weather forecasting and the origins of the universe, the centre said.
The machine is no ordinary PC, requiring 295,000 processors located in 72 lockers each the size of a telephone box. |
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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Aside from modeling our nation's nuclear stockpile and various astrophysics projects, the most powerful of them all is also assisting with other projects such as those that deal with alternative energy, protein folding, etc.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/supercomputers-2/
| Quote: | Jackie Chen of Sandia National Laboratories is using 30 million processor-hours on Jaguar to simulate the combustion process of alternative fuels, like biofuel and ethanol. Her modeling of flames, ignition and turbulence can influence engine design, allowing for higher-efficiency and lower emissions vehicles.
“To understand the underlying physics of what’s going on in the internal combustion engines with alternative fuels,” said Chen, “we need some of the world’s largest calculations.”
Other ongoing projects seek to understand how proteins misfold in neurodegenerative diseases, develop thermoelectric materials to capture wasted heat from tailpipe emissions and create high-resolution climate models. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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IBM's Blue Gene to compete on ‘Jeopardy!’:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/27jeopardy.html?ref=technology
| Quote: | Eric Nyberg, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is collaborating with I.B.M. on research to devise computing systems capable of answering questions that are not limited to specific topics. The real difficulty, Dr. Nyberg said, is not searching a database but getting the computer to understand what it should be searching for.
The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed.
In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:45 pm Post subject: |
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A glimpse of the next International Supercomputing Conference in June - from talks to exhibits to technologies:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Bigger-and-Better-ISC-Moves-to-Hamburg-41842587.html?viewAll=y
| Quote: | HPCwire: The 33rd TOP500 list will be unveiled in Hamburg. Can you tell yet whether there will be any big surprises?
Prof. Meuer: At last year's conference, the 31st edition of the TOP500 list was topped by the first-ever petaflop/s machine, the IBM supercomputer installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory and named "Roadrunner," which carried out more than 10^15 floating point operations per second running the Linpack benchmark. In the 32nd list that we released at the SC08 conference in Austin last November there appeared a second petaflop/s machine -- the Cray XT5 "Jaguar" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which placed just behind Roadrunner at the top of the list. I expect that Jaguar will top the next list, and that Roadrunner will lose its top ranking. I've seen several indicators pointing to this change, so it won't be a big surprise if it happens. But to know for sure, we will just have to wait for the ISC'09 opening session. |
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 12:09 am Post subject: |
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A real-world adoption of the Nvidia Tesla GPUs in place of traditional CPUs:
http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=19711
| Quote: | The new platform replaces more than 500 traditional CPU cores consuming 25 kW, allowing a 100 fold increase in the amount of calculation achieved per Watt. The overall reduction of response times is a factor of 15, contributing to a reduction in total cost of operation.
BNP Paribas CIB says overall electricity consumption will be reduced by a factor of 190, significantly cutting the bank's environmental impact.
Stéphane Tyc, head, GECD quantitative research, BNP Paribas CIB, says: "We are extremely pleased with these performances, which significantly exceed our initial expectations. We hope to transfer more calculations to the GPU architecture in the near future." |
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