Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
1–10 of 179 posts
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#2Can anyone provide back of the napkin calculations on this proposed supercomputers computing power vs Googles compute farm?
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#3Can anyone provide back of the napkin calculations on this proposed supercomputers computing power vs Googles compute farm?
or the Bitcoin farmers?
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#4It kills me every time I read about how the world's nth-fastest computer is just used to simulate nuclear explosions, so it was a delight to see that they're planning on using this one for some good.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#5Press: "What's it for?"
Obama: "Uuuh... NASA."
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#6It kills me every time I read about how the world's nth-fastest computer is just used to simulate nuclear explosions, so it was a delight to see that they're planning on using this one for some good.
It's better than doing the real thing.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#7It kills me every time I read about how the world's nth-fastest computer is just used to simulate nuclear explosions, so it was a delight to see that they're planning on using this one for some good.
I have access to the 6th fastest super computer and I'm pretty sure that it is not used to simulate nuclear explosions.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#8IMHO if you need to break down a task well enough to run on a supercomputer, there isn't a lot more to do to make it run on a regular server farm.
edit: Actually, in the scenarios you'd use a supercomputer for, the added latency and overhead (shoddy servers, network, etc.) would most likely make the run time orders of magnitude higher.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#9Can anyone provide back of the napkin calculations on this proposed supercomputers computing power vs Googles compute farm?
You could compare raw FLOPS (Floating point operations per second) but that would only tell part of the story. These supercomputers are highly engineered for low network latency between nodes, which is necessary for many scientific workloads. Google and other companies are generally able to express their algorithms in highly parallel ways, which means there are much reduced requirements for communication between nodes.
Therefore, even if the raw performance in terms of FLOPS sound similar, the two systems will have widely differing performance on real workloads.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#10Can anyone provide back of the napkin calculations on this proposed supercomputers computing power vs Googles compute farm?
This could be slightly misleading. Supercomputers tend to be used for different types of computations.