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Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#21

Post by phreeza »

davegardner wrote: post #14

10 years ago the fastest supercomputer was BlueGene/L which was rated at 136.8 TFlop/s. The current fastest supercomputer is rated at 33,862.7 TFlop/s, or 247 times faster. It seems to me that the aim of taking 10 years to build a supercomputer that is only 20 times faster than the current one might fall a little short if it's aiming to take the top spot.

The extrapolation on the top500 supercomputer list [1] estimates the first EFlop computer in 2019. The math in the article is weird. They say 20x faster, but 20x33 PFlops is quite a bit less than 1EFlop.

[1] http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#23

Post by oaktowner »

graphene wrote: post #9
codewithcheese wrote: post #2

Can 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 node…

Depends on what you mean by a "real" workload.

Capturing and indexing the entire web is certainly a real workload, even if it is massively psrallelizable, so it would probably run equally well on Google's infrastructure as on a supercomputer because those fast interconnects wouldn't provide much advantage, right?

However,when simulating a nuclear explosion or a weather system (maybe that's what you mean by "real" workloads?), the heavy node-to-node communication makes the supercomputer much, much better suited.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#24

Post by bpodgursky »

phreeza wrote: post #21
davegardner wrote: post #14

10 years ago the fastest supercomputer was BlueGene/L which was rated at 136.8 TFlop/s. The current fastest supercomputer is rated at 33,862.7 TFlop/s, or 247 times faster. It seems to me that the aim of taking 10 years to build a supercomputer that is only 20 times faster than the current one might fall a little short if it's aiming to take the top spot.

The extrapolation on the top500 supercomputer list [1] estimates the first EFlop computer in 2019. The math in the article is weird. They say 20x faster, but 20x33 PFlops is quite a bit less than 1EFlop. [1] http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

The extrapolation in the linked graph pretty clearly doesn't track increases after 2012 correctly. Tracking the past 3-4 years puts 2019 at around 600PF.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#25

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

angdis wrote: post #20

I suppose that "supercomputers" are all multi-processor these days, so the colossal FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many processors and one has to coordinate these processors in any application that takes advantage of the FLOP specs. Now I am curious what is the fastest single processor?

Probably an intel xeon (or i7?) overclocked and cooled with liquid nitrogen. There may be a specialized processor with higher performance, but I doubt it.

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#27

Post by phreeza »

A bit more informative is the actual fact sheet put out by the white house [1]. What they are really aiming for is exascale computing, which they define as being capable of applying exaFlops to exabytes. From my limited knowledge, the latter will actually be the bigger deal. As pointed out elsewhere, an exaflop supercomputer will probably come around beforehand.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...

Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer

#29

Post by marvelous »

angdis wrote: post #20

I suppose that "supercomputers" are all multi-processor these days, so the colossal FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many processors and one has to coordinate these processors in any application that takes advantage of the FLOP specs. Now I am curious what is the fastest single processor?

I don't think knowing that is usefull. "Single processors" are all superscalar or pipelined these days, so the colossal single-thread FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many arithmetic units and one has to coordinate these units (mainly avoiding branch mispredictions) in any application that takes advantage of them.
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