LANL to house world's fastest supercomputer
Beep. Beep. Make way for Roadrunner -- the world's fastest computer. The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that the IBM-built machine, which will be housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has broken the petaflop barrier. That's geek speak for the number of calculations the computer's processors are capable of performing -- 1,000 trillion operations per second in the case of Roadrunner. In today's news release, the Energy Department described it this way:
To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.
Roadrunner achieves this feat using the same technology that benefits video gamers -- microprocessors originally developed for Sony's PlayStation 3.
LANL, which is charged with ensuring that the country's nuclear weapons work without underground testing, uses complex supercomputer simulations to certify the weapons stockpile. But U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, who takes credit for securing much of the funding for the project, said the computer will also be a valuable tool for other kinds of science, including climate change, biology and physics research.
Congress provided $35 million in 2006 and NNSA added another $6 million to get the project off the ground. Congress has since approved nearly $60 million for the project, and this year's budget request seeks another $26 million for the Roadrunner system, according to Domenici's office, which heralds Roadrunner as the "fastest earmark in the world."
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Posted 06/09/2008 15:38 with
Comments
By Chris Mechels
This piece should be taken as hype, which is what it is. The “sustained” performance will turn out to be LINPAC runs which demonstrate that LINPAC will run fast and continue to be used for such things. As for running “real” LANL weapons codes at a reasonable portion of these peak speeds, don’t hold your breath. The last big, and expensive, machine at LANL, called Q, was an absolute, unreliable DOG, and they swept the whole thing under the rug.
Lest you believe that I am just blowing smoke; although I have a long history in “super” computers at LANL, going back to 1976, here’s a bit from a LANL weapons code person, Jim Hill, which I found over at “Slashdot” on the web;
“As a software developer who’s worked on the Lab’s previous ASC machines (Blue Mountain, Q, Lightning) I can say that once the calculation is run to get a machine atop Jack Dongarra’s gee-golly list, it’s partitioned, segmented, divided, and subjected to such crappy resource management that if I could trade the entire machine for a pair of coupled 8-core Mac Pros I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Dongarra is the guy who built LINPAC, the code I mentioned earlier.
The real problem with this machine is HOW it was acquired. As Domenici’s web site brags; it was done with EARMARKS. Domenici, and LANL, bypassed the normal planning and funding process at the DOE and forced this machine on DOE. This is no way to run a railroad.
Why such an endrun? Perhaps because the previous LANL “super” computers were losers, and the DOE was tired of LANL lies and mismanagement. Well, they have done it again, so we look forward to more lies and mismanagement.
One of the least competent managers of super computers, LANL, has, with the help of Domenici picked our pockets once again. We will get the hype, as usual, and the bad news will be buried. The same old game.