I think one of the primary motivations for doing this is to break cryptographic keys, and using that for surveillance and to hack into Chinese websites.
Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
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Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#62Why not just use commodity spot instances?
Haha.. AWS?
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#63IMHO 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.
This is not remotely true for a wide range of codes that matter to the supercomputing industry.
And by "codes", you mean specific legacy software artifacts written in FORTRAN (note that I'm not even spelling it as Fortran)? Of course that's a problem.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#64It looks like they are explicitly saying they want to make a machine that works for both types of HPC -- classic low-latency high-bandwidth internode communication (physics simulations) and modern Internet-driver high-bandwidth storage/node communications. This is because the supercomputer community has long ignored the Internet-style of computation (MapReduce etc). But most of the new generation of scientists are ad…
And it's not like there isn't precedent. I remember a couple years ago when Google showed off gene mapping at I/O (Urs' demo to visualize how easy it was to scale GCP From 1 to 10 to 1000 to 100000 cores), and now they've partnered with the Broad Institute to apply this more generally. http://www.broadinstitute.org/google
I was the person on stage with Urs who ran the demo (I'm a computational biologist who went to Google to help them build this kind of infrastructure, because DOE wasn't doing it). Read more about the demo here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/io
I also helped create the original idea for the Broad collaboration. It was pretty obvious that standard HPC was a waste of money and not designed for high throughput biology, while Google published numerous papers (MapReduce, GFS, Bigtable) that demonstrated they were building infrastructure that was perfect for a wide range of computational biology programs.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not remotely true for a wide range of codes that matter to the supercomputing industry.
And by "codes", you mean specific legacy software artifacts written in FORTRAN (note that I'm not even spelling it as Fortran)? Of course that's a problem.
Where to begin?
There are many existing valuable codes written in FORTRAN. They work, it's not worth the investment to replace them with something else.
Second, many of the codes are in C++, not FORTRAN. Not clear that's any less of a problem.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#66It 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.
99% of the compute time on this will probably be used for weapons, combat and civil emergency wargame simulations - but that doesn't make for good PR so of course they don't mention it in this sycophantic fluff piece.
However, since the US military recently labeled climate change as the #1 national security threat to the US or something like that, maybe we could hope for some climate science on the side? ;-)
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#67Press: "What's it for?" Obama: "Uuuh... NASA."
I find it odd that a president would sign an executive order for a new kind of computer (even if the new kind of computer is technically impressive). Call me cynical, but I'll bet that there's a number of quid-pro-quo arrangements with big party donors (or soon to be donors) -- regardless of which party is in office.
It's not that sinister, it's just PR. This project likely would have been in the budget, anyway, and the executive order is just a way to get the President's name behind it and his image in front of it.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#68It 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.
My perspective: I'd rather haven them spend money on simulating bombs in fancy computers, than having actual nuclear tests.
Yes, a world without nculear weapons would be nice. Unfortunately that ship has sailed.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#69I think one of the primary motivations for doing this is to break cryptographic keys, and using that for surveillance and to hack into Chinese websites.
Is this in the realm of feasibility for modern crypto?
And what about past/current transmissions using older crypto.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#7010 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.
I think this do not advanced more just because of economic reasons. I have have read last 10 years that Processing is a lot more cheaper did by network of computers and clusters, instead of a expensive supercomputer that also demands an appropriate building and infrastructure.
Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters, but with much more advanced network topologies and technologies, shared storage, etc. It's not just one monolothic machine.
However, the types of computation performed by the top supercomputers are rarely the "embarassingly parallel" programs you can easily distribute via an @Home-style program, or something like Hadoop. They do depend heavily on very reliable, very low latency, high bandwidth networks.