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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: Fri Aug 15, 2008 1:52 am Post subject: |
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IBM to build Canada's fastest supercomputer at the University of Toronto:
| Quote: | In a joint effort, IBM (NYSE:IBM) and The University of Toronto SciNet consortium are creating Canada's most powerful supercomputer, capable of processing up to 360 trillion calculations per second and storing 60 times more data than the Library of Congress Web archive.
The supercomputer is expected to be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world, 30 times faster than the peak performance of Canada's current largest research system, and the second largest system ever built on a university campus, according to IBM. The project will be started immediately, and is slated to be fully operational by summer 2009. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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The Secret lives of Supercomputers, Part 2. BTW, the information on the computing power of the "Googleplex" is very dated (2004). For a more current estimate, simply multiply them by a factor of 10.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/64082.html
| Quote: | Bringing supercomputing to industry is just what the Blue Collar Computing program at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) was designed to do. Launched in 2004 with the support of the Ohio Board of Regents, the collaborative program seeks to provide easy and affordable access to advanced computing technology. It offers resources, hardware, training, software and expertise to business clients so they can be more competitive, Jamie Abel, a center spokesperson, told TechNewsWorld.
Under the program, advanced computer technologies provide companies with innovative tools that allow virtual development of products such as cars, pharmaceuticals and financial instruments. Virtual modeling and simulation provide companies with a competitive edge through improved manufacturing processes that can reduce the time, labor and cost needed to bring products to market.
Simulation simplifies the choice of alternative processing methods. It offers better analysis and documentation of capabilities that boost efficiency, while improved factory and workflow layouts increase productivity , Abel explained.
For example, OSC recently developed an online weld simulation tool with Edison Welding Institute, Abel said. It uses OSC supercomputers to let welding engineers evaluate the changes in temperature profiles, material microstructures, residual stresses and welding distortion to reduce the extent of experimental trials during the design of welded joints.
Another case in point is Honda's design of the Accord through computer simulations without constructing a single physical prototype, Abel added. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:56 pm Post subject: |
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The Secret Lives of Supercomputers, Part 1:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/The-Secret-Lives-of-Supercomputers-Part-1-64076.html?welcome=1218228455
| Quote: | Once-Pricey Calculations
In 1997, the year that Garry Kasparov beat IBM's Deep Blue in chess, the cost of processing 1 million operations per second -- one megaflop -- was US$50. Deep Blue performed about 11.38 gigaflops, more than 11 billion calculations per second, at a cost of $550,000, according to Corrado.
"Today one mega[flop] costs 10 cents, or $1,100 for the same capacity that Deep Blue needed $550,000 for. The technology is becoming more prevalent, more ubiquitous, the processors are becoming multi-core and more able to do it. And you've got people that have been doing this for a while and are riding this price performance curve. As the price of supercomputing power comes down, it's interesting what even experienced users are doing with their systems," he said.
Time sharing amortizes the cost of the largest supercomputers, Halfhill said. There are also options for organizations for which 10 cents a megaflop is still steep. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:03 pm Post subject: |
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Oops, you're correct - looks like "Leopard" also provides native support for 64-bit applications, so it is definitely close to a "pure" 64-bit OS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.5
Thanks for pointing this out.
Henry |
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diesel
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 6:18 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Henry,
I think MAC OSX is now mostly 64 bit.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html
The main problem I have with windows on laptops is with its window management, particularly when dealing with small screens.
Heres a quote from Anandtech:
| Quote: | | As the MacBook Air is the only ultra portable Mac around, in many senses it doesn't really have any competitor. Sony, Dell and more recently Lenovo all have similarly equipped notebooks but none of them run OS X. When I first reviewed OS X on a notebook I talked about how many of its strengths really came in handy in a cramped screen environment, which is what you get with a notebook. On an ultra portable machine like the MacBook Air, especially one with a fairly low screen resolution, the window management strengths of OS X grow even more important. |
Regards,
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HenryTo
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diesel
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 5:15 pm Post subject: |
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Yes my enthusiasm sometimes gets the better of me. BTW, have you read about reversible logic gates? Amazing!
I really like the semis at the moment. Have been averaging into this sector over the last few weeks. Very strong positive divergence and also a very unloved sector IMO.
I am also looking at replacing my laptop soon. I have a Lenevo T61p at the moment but are unimpressed with Microsoft Vista. Looking to move to Apple macbook pro or air with the SSD option.
Regards,
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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Diesel,
Appreciate the thoughts on nano-computing. My personal first step (probably this time next year) is to get 64-bit windows and a SSD in my new laptop - then we can start talking about optical and then quantum computing. 
In the meantime, the UK's Met office is set to obtain a supercomputer from IBM - one that is set to hit the petaflop barrier by 2011:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39457156,00.htm
| Quote: | | The computer will also be used to make calculations based on a finer grid around the globe. Currently the Met Office uses a global grid with a "coarse" 75-kilometre lattice, but will work to refine that down to a 25-kilometre grid. |
Once we hit the exaflop barrier, we will able to further refine that global grid into one with a one-kilometer lattice. |
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diesel
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 4:51 am Post subject: |
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I am reading about the limits of nano-computing at the moment and to put today's supercomputers in perspective an MIT professor named Seth Lloyd has shown that the potential computing capacity of a kilogram of matter equals pi times energy divided by Planck's constant. Since the energy is such a large number and Planck's constant is such a small number, this equation generates an extremely large number: about 5 x 10^50 operations per second.
If you were to use the figure of 10^16 cps that many believe is sufficient for the functional emulation of human intelligence, the ultimate laptop would function at the equivalent brain power of five trillion trillion human civilisations. Such a laptop could perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (that is, ten billion human brains operating for ten thousand years) in one ten-thousandth of a nanosecond!
Food for thought...
And these numbers are just with nanotech. Picotech, Femtotech and bending the speed of light offer computers of an order of magnitude more powerful than this.
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 1:50 am Post subject: |
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Stanford's Folding@Home project's current performance surpasses two petaflops. The recent jump (it was consistently under two petaflops just a week ago) is mostly due to the jump in GPUs' participation, which are immensely more powerful than CPUs in folding proteins. More importantly, note that the number of "active GPUs" are only 5,000 - suggesting that this could ramp up very quickly over the next 12 months. In fact, I would not be surprised if Folding@Home surpasses a sustained performance level of over 10 petaflops in 12 months time.
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:47 pm Post subject: |
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Supercomputing at the petascale:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080612140031.htm
| Quote: | On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to eventually achieving human-like cognitive performance in electronic computers. PetaVision only requires single precision arithmetic, whereas the official LINPACK code used to officially verify Roadrunner's speed uses double precision arithmetic.
"Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science at Los Alamos National Laboratory," said Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos. "Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago."
Based on the results of PetaVision's inaugural trials, Los Alamos researchers believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex--arguably a human being's most important sensory apparatus.
The ability to achieve human levels of cognitive performance on a digital computer could lead to important insights and revolutionary technological applications. Such applications include "smart" cameras that can recognize danger or an autopilot system for automobiles that could take over for incapacitated drivers in complex situations such as navigating dense urban traffic. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2008 11:15 am Post subject: |
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IBM, in conjunction with Los Alamos, finally breaks the petaflop barrier:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
| Quote: | The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”
The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.
Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively. |
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