Japan's Petaflop Supercomputer

slashthedot writes "Japan has built the fastest supercomputer in the world. While the BlueGene/L contains 130,000 processors, Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips, and it cost just $9 million to develop."

Wow

Making that computer must have been harder than getting a story from MSN posted on the main page of Slashdot!

Re:Apparent source page for device data

but I thought Japan already had a lot of studys on protein?

I've seen the videos of it a few times and stumbled across entire collections of them! they call it something like bukkake.

Progress

It now costs 15 dollars per gigaflop. In the early 90s, a million dollars per gigaflop was normal.

machines like this

should be used in conjunction with the topic from the previous article. Creating coutless means by which, to not only find vulnerabilities in things like Javascript, but equally, construct fixes to those vulnerabilities. Once it creates an open door, it generates the fix for closing it and keeping it closed. Machines like this can think thousands of times faster than your average black-hat-crackah, so why not use them as a fight fire with fire tool?

Every one is so concerned with internet safety, on would think that at some point massive resources with be set forth in order to effectively deal with the flaw finding few out there making it difficult for the rest of to simply enjoy the benefits of the internet.

Re:machines like this

Having a computer do something very very fast is only of any use if you have the software to do what you want done very very fast. As far as I know, the hard part of what you suggest is writing such capable software, not running it.

Re:machines like this

If the resources are available to crack rc5, to do distributed based work on a cure for cancer, and crunch data captured from radio antennas in search of little green men from mars, then I think we have the know-how necessary get some thing like this up and running.

Well the examples that you mention are not really the same as "attempting to break software and search for problems long before release." If I understand these issues correctly: (1) (with apologies to crypto specialists) RC5 cracking required lots of CPU time to factor a big-ass number, (2) projects like Folding@Home aren't "looking for a cure for cancer," they're running (I think) quantum chemistry simulations to find out how certain molecules can act in certain situations, and (3) SETI@Home is looking for specific patterns in signal data. In all three of these cases, there's a few common (maybe not so simple) operations that need to be applied to a large set of data or initial conditions, and that's why they need lots of machines, or fast machines.

Figuring out how clever people will take advantage of a particular implementation of a web browser or TCP/IP stack is a completely different class of problem IMHO. Yeah, maybe there's some clever AI techniques that may simulate attack attempts, and maybe they could come up with attacks that nobody has thought of yet, but a really fast computer will not somehow magically solve these kinds of problems for us. There's a lot of hard science and software engineering that needs to be done first.

Efficiency

The article says that this machine is much more efficient than other supercomputers. Is it actually cheaper to run large programs like SETI@HOME on a supercomputer? Electricity isn't cheap.

Re:Efficiency

To put that into perspective, consider that the Blue Gene/L has 65536 processors. seti@home has over a million hosts and folding@home has a couple hundred thousand more.

Try comparing active hosts to active host. SETI "active" means anyone they have ever seen, and always has. Just compare TFLOPS. Folding@home has been larger for a very long time, tho SETI may be catching up, depending on how much you bend their stats.

Of course, if you compare USEFUL results, it's Folding@home: lots (over 50 papers), SETI: 0

The Japan box will be faster for a little while then Folding@home, but will also likely produce RESULTS instead of just alot of global warming.

Incorrect chip count

The original article seems to be unreachable, so I can't read it, but the precis has the wrong chip count: It does have 4808 LSI chips, but it also has 19,122 Xeon processors.

Re:Incorrect chip count

This article here from Riken themselves has some more technical details:

http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.p hp [riken.jp]

Purchasing Advice

Will this run Vista at a decent speed, or should I wait for the Rev B and SP1?

Uses a large walk-in closet?

If this petaflop supercomputer really only costs $9 million and only occupies the space of a large walk-in closet, why don't they mass-produce it and sell it. No, not to individuals but to corporations and governments. Folding@Home and Seti@Home could suddenly be like, sorry guys we don't need you anymore - we got something better. Having hundreds of copies of this super computer could quickly solve problems across the globe that much slower supercomputers are currently having trouble with!

Not just a flop

NOT what the VP of Marketing wants to hear:

"Not just a flop, but a flop a million billion times over."

cheaper and more efficient

the supercomputer is quite cheap. they can probably sell a lot of these machines and will sweep the top500 list. however, it mentioned that the processor is specialized in doing astrophysics calculation. i am not sure if this will be useful for other fields.

but the good think about it is that it is more energy efficient. it seems the trend in desktop/servers right now are also going to the supercomputers. maybe they could include a performance per watt ratio in the top500 list as well.

Say what?!?

Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips...

FLOP = floating operation [per second].

PETA = 10 ^ 15, or "a quadrillion".

(10 ^ 15) / 4808 = about 207,986,688,852, which would indicate that each chip is running at several hundred TERA-hertz [and, even then, the machine would have to possess an operating system so efficient that it could consistently perform one floating point operation per clock increment, which seems extraordinarily unlikely].

Or is this an "analog" computer and are these "analog" FLOPS?

And no, I did not RTFA.

Re:Say what?!?

The Cell processor can do ~200 GFLOPS - not IEEE quality FLOPS however, however they're 'good enough single precision FLOPs' for it's target uses. This is probably why this new supercomputer won't get into the Top500 list, because it's very specialised and thus probably nowhere near as good at IEEE conformant calculations.

The Cell processor is not running at 200GHz. There's this concept called 'parallelisation', it's how your graphics card can do dozens, if not hundreds, of operations per clock cycle. In Cell's case it can do 8 (number of SPUs) * 4 (128-bit registers, SIMD) * 2 (units) = 64 SP FLOPS per clock cycle, and that's not including the PPU which has VMX128 and an FPU itself.

However make the Cell processor calculate IEEE conformant FLOPS, and it gets a double precision score of around 20GFLOPS. Still good though.

The above was from memory, details may vary, figures are roughly correct, YMMV, etc.

Re:Say what?!?

Yeah, it's a bit obvious that you didn't.

Quoting another link you can see how they reached these numbers (which I take issue with):

The following figure shows the block diagram of the MDGRAPE-3 chip. It consists of 20 force calculation pipelines, a j-particle memory unit, a cell-index controller, a master controller, and a force summation unit. The force calculation pipeline is the most important part of the chip which performs calculations of two-body forces such as Coulomb and van der Waals forces. Each pipeline performs 33 equivalent floating point operations per cycle when it calculates Coulomb force. Thus, when it operates at 250 MHz its performance will reach 165 Gflops with 20 pipelines. The chip also has the j-particle memory unit, which corresponds to the main memory of the CPU. Therefore, no extra memory is needed to attached with the chip.

- http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.p hp [riken.jp]

With that answered, I'm confused. Another poster sent along that link which explains what Riken will do. I'm confused about that actually. Reading the page, based on the verb usage, either someone didn't understand future and past tense (possible, but unlikely), or they haven't built the entire box yet. Perhaps I'm reading a bit too much into it... it's quite possible that someone simply hasn't updated the website.

Based on the webpage, all of the calculations to reach 1 petaflop are based on theoretical peak performance measurements, extrapolated from the theoretical peak of a single special-purpose ASIC which has been built, but may or may not have been actually placed into a fully configured system. Nothing talks about measured benchmarks, and the OP's article contains the same theoretical extrapolated numbers.

Anyone know if they've actually built it?

~ Mike

giga not tera

(10^15)/4808 = 207 986 688 852, i.e. ~208 billion flops, i.e. if the chip executed only 1 instruction per clock, it would be 208GHz (not THz as you imply). Except of course the chip does more than 1 instruction per clock. Modern x86 chips do multiple flops per cycle. A Cell should be able to do at least 9 per cycle. I imagine that a dedicated vector processor, of the sort that NEC used to make, can do tens of flops per cycle.

Furthermore, many processor architectures have instructions to do several basic floating point instruction in one step. For instance, PowerPC has a one-cycle multiply-accumulate instruction (multiply and add in one step), so for marketing purposes, a PowerPC has twice the flops. Now, imagine if you have a vector processor that has a highly-optimized instruction for taking square roots or doing trig in one cycle. A square root operation will translate into dozens of basic flops (add, multiply, subtract). Such a processor might therefore be rated at 208 gigaflops even though its operating frequency is <1GHz.

Petaflop?

Does that mean its a giant cluster of unwanted aibos?

9 million?

Great. 9 million dollars to build the thing, 15 million dollars to build the infastructure to power and cool it, probably.

Our penis so small, your american penis so large..

Nuff said.

Where are the really neato results we should be getting from these? I'm tired of "Country X builds massive TeraWatt computer system." I want to read about "Country X mapped the cancer genome" or some such.

Besides, these are relatively not impressive. Sure in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s we were maturing the technology. Inventing new technology, analyzing it, etc. Now it's more of the same. Huge budget, lots of space and infiniband connections...

Show me the MFlops/Watt rating of this? Are they improving it? Are we wasting less resources? The irony of this is they pollute by wasting tons of energy, all so we can predict global warming or whatever.

Tom

Re:Our penis so small, your american penis so larg

"Show me the MFlops/Watt rating of this?"

No problemo!

The number of flops: (10 ^ 15) / 4808 = about 207,986,688,852 flops per chip, - from a previous poster.
The number of watts: 300,000 - from the manufacturers' site = 62 watts/chip
207,986,688,852 / 62 = 33,546,240 flops (33 MFlops) / watt.

Re:Our penis so small, your american penis so larg

Oh, please. This machine only uses 300kW - that's maybe the equivalent of 150 American homes. These folks are building a specialized (as in not "more of the same") machine to support a particular bit of science (molecular dynamics simulations) that isn't gonna make for flashy headlines, and I say more power to them. I'd rather there were more scientists out there doing basic research that may actually be useful, than have them chasing after stuff for headlines that will make you happy.

And if you're trolling, yeah, you got me, so congratulations.

4808 chips -- Alas, it is still bottlenecked by...

...its Geforce MX 420.

Vector Processing?

"the machine may be ineligible because of its specialized hardware"
What specialized hardware? I would really like to read a more technical article about this machine. I would guess that the Japanese focused on vector processing like they did in the design of the Earth-Simulator [wired.com].

The best supporting evidence I have for this conclusion is the comparison of Japan's last two supercomputers:
Sun Fire X64 Cluster [top500.org]
Earth-Simulator [top500.org]

Sun Fire has 10,368 processors with a Rmax(GFlops) of 38,180.
Earth-Simulator has 5,120 processors with a Rmax(GFlops) of 35,860.
That's 49% less processors with 94% the processor power*.

Here's the original article link:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2 006/gb20060726_150659.htm?chan=topStories_ssi_5/ [businessweek.com]

*Only comparing one aspect of performance.

Weather Predictions Expalined!

From the article: Meteorologists use supercomputers to predict climate patterns decades into the future by analyzing huge databases of statistics.

It all makes sense now. When they predict 90% chance of rain three days in a row and we don't see a drop, they relly meant that it will rain sometime between now and thirty or forty years from now.

"Computer" ?

From the article it sounds like the whole thing is based on a large collection of specialised processors designed only for protien folding calculations, so while it may be able to do those at a petaflop rate it probably can't do anything else at nearly that rate (just as the WWII Colossus computer could beat a 486 at Enigma cracking it certainly wasn't faster terms of actual computing speed)

Oh just...

9 million, sign me up, where I can get one.

glxgears

Japan has managed to create the first Petaflop supercomputer, called MDGrape-3, with just 4808 chips, and it cost just $9 million to develop.

Wow! I bet it gets loads of fps in glxgears!

Not even close!

You've all been had by a reporter with an overactive imagination talking to a researcher selling his own shit. The MDGrape is a specialized processor (you can actually buy it commercially as a separate board for your computer) that does exactly one thing: particle simulation using traditional laws of physics. This will allow it to do computational molecular dynamics on the small scale or universe modeling on the large scale. All it understands is data input in the form of particle positions and will output the new positions in the next time step. Can you place two numbers in a register and ask it to add the results? No. Can it do any piece of the HPL benchmark required to get on the supercomputing list? No. It does one thing, but it does it well. This whole article is like comparing the rendering capabilities of your new Nvidia GPU and the latest AMD CPU, then concluding AMD is full of idiots who can't engineer because the Nvidia chip renders more polygons.

MadDog Grape is my favorite flavor too!

Of all the MD 20/20 varieties...grape stands out as the best.

Does this deserve Top 500?

I guess it would depend on the definition, whether it has to be capable of general purpose or only specialized. Technically, it should be possible to easily get petaflop performance by putting a few million into a computer using chips designed only to run LINPACK.

Personally, I don't think it should qualify. Otherwise the EFF's $250,000 Deep Crack, which could only crack DES (although faster than tens of thousands of regular computers at that time), would qualify too.

New Blue?

How many petaFLOPS will IBM get out of a new Blue Gene made from Cell processors?

Yes but........

......will it run linux??

Not comparable

Though the theoretical performance of this computer is higher than that of BlueGene and may have higher realworld performance too, you can't compare this supercomputer with BlueGene and other TOP500 supercomputers since it can't run LINPACK. It's just too specialized for its use.

Darn algorithms!

If you can just take their n^3 algorithm (with quantum it's more like n^8), and make it n^2, you can do all that on your desktop :)

Not all progress needs to be brute force. But brute force is much more fun to brag about.

-

flops don't replace skill

From TFA:

Experts believe that the nation with the most machines near the top of the ranking generally has the most competitive economy.

Oh come on - were these American experts by chance? How about flops/head? But lets think for a moment. Do raw flops count, or is it what you do with them? Once you have a big computer, it's easy to generate lots of numbers. The art of science, though, is to abstract your question, so you can make some useful predictions. Otherwise you might as well just measure the world that's out there, in all its complexity.

More tech specs

Tech specs for MDGRAPE-3 [riken.jp]

This is the future for supercomputing.

What from the article it looks like they did special purpose asic that solved their problems, and those are controlled by standard cpu:s. Depending on algorithm you can get multiple orders of magnitude performance advantage for doing a special purpose chip instead of general purpose computing chip.
Lets do order of magnitude computations here, pair of general purpose cpu cores use about 100M transistors not counting cache. An adder takes 1000 transistors. So with cpu:s transistor budget you get 100000 adders running in parallel. In overall the performance difference would be 1000x for the asic design over general purpose solution. As for not counting cache is important since you probably want the ondie storage for the temporary values, and caches transistor density is far higher than logics. And thats not the best case not worst case scenario but more or less what to expect in general rule if you don't saturate the memory in which case you should add more or faster memory channels or change algorithm for less bandwith limited, still can make trade offs that no off the shelf CPU could reasonably make. In overall you still get atleast 10x performance increase over going for standard cpus. So expect 1000x to 10x on code that runs EXTREMELY optimally on general purpose chip. Of course you CAN construct a case where general purpose computer beats the special purpose one. But more than often that case cannot use lots of processors as once you can parallerize the special purpose wins.
The problem with special purpose is that you cannot do everything, you can do one thing and that thing VERY WELL.
You just change the control logic to a logic solving the problem.

AI

hmm...here's what I see with this...
With such great power and such few processors, this will cause other (but not all) computing technology to migrate in that direction.
I can see the average PC doing 15 Terra flops with in the next 5 years. This, if I am accurate, would put the home PC in the processing realm of the human brain. Is it possible that an AI which could pass the Turing test with near 100% of the subjects is not long behind? Humanoid robots and robotic transportation? ...And then...there's the military...

Should we put a "Three Laws Treaty" on the international table?

Better Anime?

Does this mean that the animation of Anime will be better? If not, so what.

Precision?

Already the article suggests it may not be capable of running linpack, the other question being, are these 32-bit precision operations or 64-bit precision? Linpack explicitly measures 64-bit precsion. This is one reason why despite some clustered deployments that are inevitible with the cell processor, those won't be impressive top500 wise despite the cries of 'OMFG, cell has uber gigaflops'. Cell brags on the gigaflops, but the state of Cell as it is announced today is only interesting 32-bit precision wise. 64-bit precision won't blow away the conventional Power/PPC chips which are impressive Linpack wise.

Comparison MDGrape-3, BlueGene/L & Earth Simul

I compiled some quick facts which compare those three supercomputers and added pointers to other resources for your convenience:
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ITnomad?id=126 [bloglines.com]

Cheers, Alex.

It's the topology, sillypants!

To triple previous speeds with so few processors some radical engineering took place; strangely enough, the bus tolopogy closely resembles that of a four-dimensional domo-kun.

It is theorized that a complex tolopogy resembling a four-dimensional Hello Kitty will run roughly twenty times as fast.
~

Idiotic summery.

This computer, like all the previous (md)grape generations, is a central force potential calculation accelerator.

it does nothing but calculate 1/sqrt(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2)*variable, but really really often.

Grape 6, 5 years or so ago, was already running at 200Mhz, had a throughput of one force calculation per pipleline and 6 pipelines on once chip. So it counts as 1.2 billion force calculations, each being (1* inverse, 1 sqrt, 3 adds, 3 squares, 2 fmul, ect).
A lot of flops, but totally useless as general purpose computers.

Singularity

For the first time, I have become worried about an unbalanced singularity. If one country reaches the singularity first, the power they would gain might allow them to prevent a singularity in other countries. The US should invest in technology to speed and guide the development of singularity technology here at home. We can't afford to let the singularity happen somewhere else first.

Google's facility qualify as a super computer?

I wonder if the Googleplex machines and its distributed systems have a throughput near this and if so, does it qualify for a supercomputer?

It did not cost $9m to develop.

The article is badly written. It cost Riken $9m, because NEC (as SGI Japan) paid for most of the hardware, and because Hitachi and Intel provided all but three of the workers.

In short, Riken had almost nothing to do with the process, except for the design of the single custom chip involved, and even then, most of the work was done by outside firms who wanted the press. And even then, it still cost the host organization $9 million!

It is petaflops not petaflop

FLOPS is not the plural of FLOP. FLOPS is FLoating point Operations Per Second. Man, it drives me nuts when clueless journalists think they can just call one petaflop. I know it sounds funny to say one petaflops, but that is exact what it is. Quit propagating erroneous acronyms - please.

From the article..

Should the U.S. government or researchers be worried that a Japanese supercomputer will soon be crowned the world's fastest computer?

No, but they should be worried when a 'technology magazine' sees the need to explain that 298 is a larger number than 250.. Yes, this might be shocking, but after you substract 298 from 500, you are only left with 202. And no, 202 is not larger than 298, even if you take the whole of it. So, yes, if you have 298 apples of a total of 500, noone will be able to have more than you. Next, we will have a closer look at the letter 'G'.

cluster

Hmm, and with a cluster of these, local news stations may now be able to accurately predict the weather six days in advance.

Re:Yeah

Not unless that is what they are going to use to render the tentacle porn; it IS a Japanese Supercomputer, after all.
Y'know, I have a feeling I should really post this as anonymous coward.

Re:Imagine...

>Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

With a side order of hot grits!
A tip: if you can fit your message in the subject line, then do it, particularly when you /know/ that you're going to get modded down.

I remember back when that comment would have gotten +5 "Whoa duuuuude" mods.

Yet you can still get good mods if you say:
  "A petaflop that fits in a closet for just $9M for the first one? You could make more for a couple million, at least by the time you got your [impressive knowlegeable-sounding ultra-tech adjectives] cluster interconnect together - why not spend a quarter of a billion and push the limits of computing out another couple orders of magnitude? This thing can do protein folding, so it can likely do bomb physics and a bunch of other big-money problems that can be represented in similar math."

Which translates to:
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"

Re:bullshit alert!!

Some info about the chip. (Note: the article is old) http://news.com.com/Japan+designers+shoot+for+supe rcomputer+on+a+chip/2100-1008_3-5322558.html/ [com.com] From the original posting: "How do experts rate the MDGrape-3? Alan Gara, chief architect for BlueGene/L at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., had this to say: "It's an unusual architecture. In BlueGene/L all chips can communicate with each other. In our largest BlueGene we have 65,000 nodes, with 130,000 processors. They didn't need to do that. [MDGrape-3 has 4,808 chips.] "They also built a processor that did only the type of calculations they need to do in astrophysics. So they built a specialized processor and a specialized network. It's a good example. It shows how cost- and power-efficient you can be if you build for a specific applications. We can learn from it. They've set a benchmark of power performance." While Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computing sciences at Berkeley Lab and editor of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites, weighed in with this: "When we say 1 petaflop, it's just a number. It's the same as if you were to run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. But it does mean something because it's a barrier to break through. The fact is we've reached the petaflop threshold. Others will follow. In computing, a matter of three to four years can change things."" Although specialized, this supercomputer deserves the credit.

Re:bullshit alert!!

I take it you haven't been keeping up with CPU developments in the last few decades.

Firstly, it has been a long time since processors only managed to do one instruction per clock. Modern chips do about 8. That alone means that 200GFLOPS equates to about 25GHz.

Next, you get SIMD instructions. This lets a single instruction work on multiple data elements in parallel. Most modern CPUs have 4-way SIMD, but 8-way is not unheard of. This brings it down to 3.125GHz.

Now, factor in the fact that you can get 2-4 cores in a single chip. This brings it to between 800MHz and 1.5 GHz. There is hardly a spectacular clock speed. If the chip is optimised for a particular operation (as these are) then it is hardly beyond the realms of possibility. Oh, and by the way, the NVIDIA 7800 GTX gets 200GFLOPS, so it's not even that unusual.

Re:Imagine...

But does it run Linux?