Supercomputer to Hit 1.6 Petaflops With 16,000 Cell Chips 260
tygerstripes writes, "IBM has announced that they are gearing up to build the world's fastest supercomputer, more than four times faster than the reigning champ, IBM's BlueGene/L. Nicknamed 'Roadrunner,' the new machine will be a hybrid of off-the-shelf CPUs and Cell chips designed for the PS3. Roadrunner is to be installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, occupying 1,100 square metres of floorspace (that's a square about 110 feet on a side). According to the BBC: 'The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 Cell processors... each Cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second.'"
Re:PS3 delayed? (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe not so much a joke after all?
-nB
Re:PS3 delayed? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PS3 delayed? (Score:2, Informative)
Feet/Metres/Meters (Score:5, Informative)
Why mix the units like that? It's either 33 meters a side, or its 12,100 square feet. Mixing units is the sort of thing that can only lead to errors.
And for the record, sqrt(1100m2) = 33.17 meters = 108.83 feet a side. 110 feet per side gets you an extra 24.13 square meters
Re:Flops? CPS? (Score:2, Informative)
Bogomips? [wikipedia.org]
Re:Billion or billion? (Score:2, Informative)
Long scale is the English translation of the French term échelle longue, which designates a system of numeric names in which the word billion means a million millions.
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United Kingdom uniformly used the long scale, while the United States of America used the short scale, so the two systems were often (and accurately at that time) referred to as "British" and "American" usage, respectively. However, today the United Kingdom uses the short scale so widely that the term "British usage" is no longer an appropriate phrase."
16,000 cells? (Score:1, Informative)
Of course, there may be other challenges top500 wise beyond the first-gen cell limitations. I know the cluster is supposed to have some bits operate on classified problems and that will begin before the entire setup is there, while other bits are to remain working on unclassified stuff. I don't know how that impacts them, someone at LANL may be able to answer as to whether they could run a big linpack run once complete across the typically distinct units of the cluster. Of course, the first gen cell blades will not deliver remotely impressive top500 numbers, only 32-bit precision operations. The 1.6 petaflops number I'm not sure is intended to be a 64-bit precision number, and therefore isn't necessarily directly comparable with the BlueGene numbers on Top500.
Also, I'm not sure if the cell blade is a proven platform for IO performance (i.e. pushing the Infiniband). The blade is largely based on the PS3 reference implementation, afaik, and of course in designing that they didn't necessarily worry too much about high-speed interconnects. Of course the cell blades have no high-speed graphics to worry about, so whatever communication mechanism used for that may be redirected for inter-blade ccommunications.
Other tidbits, the x3755 is a 4U box, and they have no more than 6 per rack (to leave room for bladecenters), and this means on the order of 400 racks or so. It will be running linux (that's nearly a given in the top500 nowadays). For a cell processor to qualify to be in one of the blades, all 8 SPEs must be workable, and all 8 will be usable by developers/users, the core os generally running only on the modest PPC core, unlike the PS3 which will contain a single cell part that may contain a failed SPE, and Sony reserves the use of one of the others at all times, limiting application developers to 6 SPEs, but the Cell blade of course doesn't have anything but serial console, so no gaming on cell blades....
Definitely flops (Score:3, Informative)
Link to IBM's Cell SDK (Score:3, Informative)
The toolchain and a simulator are freely available and run on Fedora Core 5 systems. Take a look for yourself.
Re:62 supercomputers (Score:3, Informative)
PR Numbers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Billion or billion? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised this wasn't tagged "AMD" sooner... (Score:2, Informative)
And, the article also confirms that the machine will indeed be running Linux.
Re:Billion or billion? (Score:3, Informative)
I think that the "official" changeover (as far as the treasury was concerned) was late 60s / early 70s. A quick google can't find a cite for it but a post here mentions "the official announcement some three decades ago":
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:O4P5O5xh-6sJ: