- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease - John Donne
Kraken is the most powerful academic supercomputer
NICS, the US National Institute for Computational Sciences has just upgraded its Cray XT5 supercomputer called Kraken.
The machine has become the first academic system to surpass a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or one petaFLOPS. The upgrade also puts the Kraken among the top five supercomputers in the world.
The system came online on 5th October with a peak performance of 1.03 petaFLOPS. It features more than 16,000 six-core 2.6-GHz AMD Istanbul processors with nearly 100,000 compute cores.
It also has 129 terabytes of memory, which doubles the size of Kraken for researchers running some of the world's most sophisticated 3D scientific computing applications.
The boffins who built the beast hope that it will enable academic users to explore problems that were previously inaccessible. These include understanding the mechanism behind the explosion of core-collapse supernovas, how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin and tricky questions such as, "How did Crazy Frog ever get to number one?"
The system is linked to the NSF-supported Teragrid, a network of supercomputers across the US that is the world's largest computational platform for open scientific research. µ
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Power consumption? 2-3 Megawatts?
But can it make me a cuppa tea?
can you run crysis on it?
if, as someone pontificated, a core is equivilent to an ant's mental processing capability - surely we arn't far away from a "deep thought" type scenario?
screw coding. ask it what you want.
http://www.willitblend.com/
Could Deep Thought make a nice hot cuppa?
Still, the mysteries of BistroMath lie beyond the capabilities of human understanding, even with nice, new, shiny toys like Krakken.
how Nick Farrell ever got a job as a journalist. well not within this lifetime anyway.
I really question what results require these super-OMG-fabulous machines.
I mean really, are these machines just build to speed garner records, and then mothballed?
What massively parallel, multinode, application requires 100,000 processors?
Sounds like a waste of resources.
Sharon?
Where did I put me sexy trousers?
One of the more annoying comments I read.
Crapular, ever since actual nuclear testing was banned by fiat, then treaty, in the U.S., we have had to develop ways to model warhead behaviour over time to ensure they don't go boom in the middle of the night.
Also, to develop better warhead designs.
There are additionally a number of large-scale problems tractable only on systems of this magnitude.
So the need is there.
We already know what it's going to find: 42.
They are certainly not mothballed! The supercomputers at academic universities are always under extreme demand. It's often a coup just to get some on them. Academics have to limit the scope of their programs to run in the time alloted to them. Faster computers mean more complex, more complete, programs can be run in the same time.
42!
Where are the intel fanboiz?
*cricket cricket*
Hey, I have one in this machine, but apparently smarter people than me use AMD. I lemming'ed out and went intel for no apparent reason and no performance gain. It did cost more this round though which was a great plus over AMD.