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New supercomputer record!

You're going to love this ..

I work on that machine. Over the last two years I've done quite a bit of code, debugging, and some software design on it.

You don't want one. Even though it is fairly compact, it takes a fair amount of electricity to run it.


Mike
 
mbbrutman said:
You're going to love this ..

I work on that machine. Over the last two years I've done quite a bit of code, debugging, and some software design on it.

You don't want one. Even though it is fairly compact, it takes a fair amount of electricity to run it.


Mike
Click to expand...
amazing, you must be pretty high up on the food chain there.
i figure such a big project they only let top level guys touch it.

oh ya, i really dont want one the hardest thing i hit my system with is unreal tournament.
it would be wasted on me as i dont have any massive calculations to do.
i bet they prob have there own mini power plant for it.
 
No, don't make that mistake. Every project has it's grunts. I'm definitely in the grunt class. However, owning some code gives me the chance to use the brain a little bit. My code has been in the operating system.

The machine is based on a 32 bit PowerPC processor, not too different than what you would find in a cable TV set-top box. The processor runs at 700Mhz, not blazing my any standard. It's the ability to put 1024 in a rack and control them that makes the machine special.

The 1024 processors in a rack (called compute nodes) run a custom operating system that is very small. There is no virtual memory, only one job at a time, etc. A few other processors in the rack run Linux, and serve as I/O gateways to the compute nodes.

The system also consists of standard big PowerPC boxes that are used to compile code, load code, and monitor the beast.

This machine is not going to be a good unreal tournament server. It will do a fairly good job at simulating nuclear explosions, protein folding, modelling airflow, etc.
 
Ah, so the Earth Simulator is now down to 3rd place.. interesting. The Blue Gene has a total of 32768 nodes? That probably does not only make it the most powerful, but also the biggest, counting by nodes?

Re processing speed; is any PowerPC known for running at an insane clock frequency? :wink: I'm sure it gets its things done without speeding up the data transfers to the point you can boil an egg on the CPU? (or maybe that is what IBM is doing, boling 32000 eggs for the common morning breakfast?)
 
BlueGene/L has 32768 nodes at the moment. It is still growing.

It is the most powerful, and at the moment it has the largest number of nodes. Previous machines, such as the Thinking Machines CM-2 had 65536 nodes, but those were very simple compared to the nodes in a BlueGene/L.

PowerPCs generally don't run at high clock rates, but per cycle they get a lot of meaningful work done. Remember back in the day when Alpha CPUs had the clock speed records, but had a hard time keeping the pipeline full?


Mike
 
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