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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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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 6:49 pm Post subject: |
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Current (and potential) applications on "supercomputing desktops." The following article provides a good summary of what's already possible out there:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/hardware/want-supercomputer-you-may-already-have-one-your-desktop-661?page=0,0
| Quote: | Today, doctors know how to administer anesthesia-inducing drugs, and they know the effects, but they do not actually know what the drugs' molecules are doing when the patient drifts off to sleep. This analysis requires intense computational power to see not only when the anesthetic enters the respiratory system, but also how it starts making changes.
At Temple University, researchers have developed models that measure the effects of applying anesthesia on molecules within nerve cells. The models currently run on a supercomputer, but plans are underway to perform the calculations on an Nvidia GPU cluster with four nodes. This will both save money and give researchers more flexibility to conduct tests when they're ready to do so (instead of having to wait for their scheduled time to use a supercomputer).
In that scenario, each GPU has the computational power of a small HPC cluster. GPU calculations involve mathematical calculations on the scale of those normally used to, say, render pixels in a video game. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:50 am Post subject: |
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IBM launches the Power7 chip:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10449663-64.html
| Quote: | "While Intel is talking about a 2x [two-times] performance boost per chip, IBM is talking about almost an 8x [eight-times]," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64. "IBM has gone from two cores to eight cores per (chip). And each of the cores is roughly twice as fast as the [prior-generation] Power6," according to Brookwood, adding that IBM was already ahead of Intel to begin with.
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Power7 has another leg up on Itanium: it is already being used to construct what may be the fastest supercomputer in the world at the renowned National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, a credible claim, considering the center's history--and IBM's, whose chips in the past have powered the world's fastest supercomputers.
The Blue Waters project supercomputer, housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus, will theoretically be capable of achieving up to 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. (A petaflop is 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, a key indicator of supercomputer performance.) |
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 12:03 pm Post subject: |
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The latest list of the world's top 500 most powerful computers is unveiled. Hightlights are as follows:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/11/highlights
Some notable excerpts:
| Quote: | The upgraded Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory took the No. 1 spot from Roadrunner with 1.75 PF linpack performance.
Intel Core i7 (Nehalem-EP) increases its presence in the list with 95 systems compared with 33 in the last list.
In the TOP10 only the No. 4 and 5 systems are installed outside the U.S. – in this case in Germany and China.
The entry level to the list moved up to the 20 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 17.1 Tflop/s six months ago.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 27.6 Pflop/s, compared to 22.6 Pflop/s six months ago and 16.9 Pflop/s one year ago.
In the performance category, the manufacturers with more than 5 percent are: Cray (15.9 percent of performance) and SGI (6.6 percent), each of which benefits from large systems in the TOP10.
The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 277 of the 500 systems (down from 291). The European share (153 systems – up from 145) is still substantially larger then the Asian share (50 systems – up from 49).
Dominant countries in Asia are China with 21 systems (unchanged), Japan with 16 systems (up from 15), and India with 3 systems (down from 6).
In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 45 systems (44 six months ago). Germany and France share the No. 2 spot with 2 systems 27 systems each. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 1:17 am Post subject: |
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http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/13/faster-supercomputers-your-tax-dollars-at-work/
| Quote: | On Monday, researchers will release a twice-yearly list of the 500 biggest computers in the world. The latest rankings should provide some new clues about high tech’s relentless speed race, and how it’s being funded.
A favorite to come in as No. 1 next week is Jaguar, a massive system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory built by Cray using AMD’s Opteron chips. The system, which ranked No. 2 in the list last June, was originally built using models that each had four processor cores (think of each core as one calculating engine). Over the past few months, technicians at the Tennessee lab have been replacing many of those chips with newer models that have six cores; the upgraded portion of the system has 224,256 cores, the lab says.
AMD showed a video of the upgrade process during a meeting with analysts in Silicon Valley Wednesday. Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s products group, said it thinks the upgraded Jaguar “is going to rank pretty high up there” when the Top500 list is announced.
Jaguar was already in rarified company, being one of few systems to top a petaflop–a thousand trillion calculations per second. The system, at 1.059 petaflops in June, ranked just behind the No. 1 Roadrunner system at Los Alamos National Labs, which logged in at 1.105 petaflops.
Thomas Zacharia, deputy director for science and technology at Oak Ridge, says the upgrade took Jaguar to 2.3 petaflops of peak performance. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 7:02 pm Post subject: |
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Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims to utilize Nvidia's GPUs to build a 10 petaflop supercomputer. Note that as recent as 2 1/2 years ago (see first post in this thread), a 100 teraflop supercomputer (i.e. just 1% of the speed) would've gotten you into the number two spot.
http://www.governmentvideo.com/article/88372 |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 2:48 am Post subject: |
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory to use Nvidia's latest GPU in its next major supercomputer:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10364534-64.html
| Quote: | Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced plans today for a new supercomputer that will use Nvidia's next-generation GPU architecture, codenamed "Fermi."
The Oak Ridge and Fermi announcements were made at Nvidia's GPU Technology developer's conference, which kicked off Wednesday in San Jose, Calif. The Fermi chip integrates three billion transistors, about three times the number of transistors in Nvidia's most powerful graphics chip now on the market. In the future, the chip will also find its way into Nvidia's GeForce product line for PCs.
Oak Ridge's supercomputer will be used for research in energy and climate change and is expected to be 10 times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputer, according to a joint statement from Oak Ridge and Nvidia. The architecture would use both graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvida and central processing units (CPUs), according to Nvidia. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, among others, make the CPUs. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2009 1:02 am Post subject: |
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UCLA Neuroscientists Get $19 Million From NIH for Supercomputer, and via the Obama stimulus package:
http://www.dotmed.com/news/story/9965/
| Quote: | UCLA neuroscientists said this week the government has given them approximately $19 million in NIH stimulus funds, via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress this year, to study brain disease.
"The grant is designed to help accelerate investment in science in a way that would not only move the field forward but would have positive economic consequences," Arthur Toga, director of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, tells DOTmed News.
He says the government gave UCLA the money so scientists could buy the newest generation supercomputer, which is able to interpret brain image data faster and better than ever before. |
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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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