Petaflop

[Aranor]

Probly not the most exciting news but its kinda cool.

IBM's RoadRunner super computer has broken the petaflop barrier.

The sound barrier. The four-minute mile. The moon. So many milestones that once seemed insurmountable are now written in the record books of human and technological achievement. Now IBM has added another to that list: the petaflop.

A milestone in perspective

IBM’s latest Roadrunner system, designed for the U.S. Department of Energy and its Los Alamos Lab, is the first supercomputer to achieve performance at the petaflop level. The accomplishment was announced today by the U.S. Department of Energy in conjunction with the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, TOP500.org and IBM.

This type of breakthrough was just what Thomas Watson wanted for his company when he implemented the THINK motto in IBM in 1914. "Thought has been the father of every advance since time began," said Watson. That mantra is in part what drives IBMers to achieve technical greatness and why IBM technology has helped people walk on the moon, see surface pictures of Mars, map the human genome and achieve countless other breakthroughs.

Every IBMer can be proud of this supercomputing milestone. It speaks volumes to our heritage as a company that embraces possibility, inspiration and a culture of innovation. In the world of industry firsts, everyone remembers the company that makes a technical mark of such unprecedented scale.

Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which has, at least until now, been the world's fastest supercomputer. Roadrunner is six times faster than our competition's systems.

How fast is it? One petaflop equals one thousand trillion flops or one quadrillion calculations per second. The fastest computer in the world 10 years ago was capable of one teraflop (one trillion calculations per second). Since that time, supercomputing power has increased by 1,000 times. In fact, a complex physics calculation that will take the Roadrunner system one week to complete would take the 1998 machine 20 years to finish, which means it would only be 50 percent complete today.

Another way to think about a petaflop of performance is to imagine the entire population on earth — about six billion people – all working on handheld calculators at the rate of one calculation per second. In that case, it would take more than 456 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.

The latest in green

Roadrunner is a new hybrid supercomputer that is made up of both AMD-based processors and Cell Broadband Engine-based processors. Hybrids enable different systems and microprocessor technologies to work together as a single system. The record-breaking Roadrunner supercomputer relies on the latest IBM BladeCenter QS22, which uses the new IBM PowerXCell 8i processor and allows the system to reach performance levels that are more than five times that of the previous Cell B.E.-based BladeCenter. The same chips that are at the heart of Roadrunner also power the Sony PlayStation 3.

Due to the hybrid design, IBM engineers anticipate that Roadrunner will likely become the most energy efficient supercomputer in the world and consequently among the top systems on the Green 500 list. IBM already dominates the Green 500 list of the world’s most energy efficient supercomputers, but Roadrunner takes that commitment to a whole new level.

What can a petaflop of performance accomplish?

About 80 percent of Roadrunner’s capacity at the Los Alamos National Laboratory will be devoted to national security in the United States – ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also be used for research in astronomy, human genome science and climate change. According to John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at Los Alamos, “Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before. We'll be able to run a different level of problems. We'll be able to do calculations that we wouldn't have considered before.”

For our clients, petaflop performance levels will allow them to cross new thresholds in solving some of the most challenging problems in science and engineering, such as designing more effective drugs, anticipating the effects of climate change, simulating the mysterious bodily process of protein folding that could shed light on disease formation, and understanding the evolution of the universe. On the commercial side, this kind of massive computing power can help engineers virtually prototype entire cars and planes without building costly models, allow traders to instantly predict the ripple effect of a stock-price change, and analyze complex underground geographies for oil and gas production.

Once-in-a-lifetime achievement

According to Dr. Don Grice, IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief engineer on Roadrunner, “I think the opportunity to contribute to an achievement of this magnitude is something that comes along once in a lifetime. I believe our team has fully embraced this concept and firmly grasps the opportunity Roadrunner represents.”

Don was responsible for system design and integration. And while the world's fastest computer was in the thinking stage for six years, physical construction started only six months before its announcement. Another interesting aspect of the petaflop project involves Dr. Cait Crawford, who lead the critically important software side of Roadrunner while working from home. Read Don and Cait's perspectives on the petaflop milestone.

The THINK motto has guided IBM since its beginning as an enterprise-focused innovation company, exploring the frontiers of technology decade after decade. As Don said, “This kind of breakthrough allows IBMers to not just impact the present and future of computing, but humanity. We can only imagine what the world will do with this much power at its fingertips.”

Now the next supercomputing performance race is on and IBMers, of course, are already engaged. THINK exaflop!

[McAvoy]

Well, commerically compyters are not 1,000x more powerful. In 1998 I had a Dell computer with 96 MB, 466 MHz and 13 GB of memory. My current computer which is a laptop is 2 GB, 1.5 GHz Duo Core and 240 GB of memory.

They say the fastest super computer which i guess is now the Roadrunner is .01% (depending on who you talk to) as powerful as the human brain. But considering the rapid advances of computer technology, it's fast approaching that we will have a supercomputer with the power to match a human brain. I wouldn't be worried since we would have to program the software.

[Aranor]

That was quoted text by the way, not my own words.

I think th epower they are talking about is calculations per second, not necesarily processor speed or disk space. For instance, now, one could buy a portable hard drive that can store up to 3 terabites. But reading that without a good processor would take forever.

[McAvoy]

Well, the point I was making is that computers have been increasing in power very rapidly. It was once said that computers doubled in power every 18 months. In reality they were doubling in power every 9 months.

The biggest problem is actually the processors. They haven't been jumping in power as much. If that was the case, my current laptop would be 10 GHz fast.

It takes a good hour to read just 120 GB for my computer BTW.

[*zeo]

Well there are a whole host of factors to consider in terms of computer power.

The biggest hurdle in home systems is the motherboard, since it limits the speed by which all the other components can communicate with each other.

The CPU may not be 10 GHz, but the processing power has increased equivalently. They just get more done with fewer cycles. Which is one reason why they stopped promoting the clock speed for CPU's as it is not a true indicator of the processor power.

Increased clock cycles do help but are offset by increase power consumption and consequential increased heat generation that present material manufacturing can't deal with without major cooling systems like they have in super computers.

There is also design, specialized processors like GPU's are actually far better at number crunching than CPU's, which aren't specialized, and is why you may have read up on some recent cheap super computers having been created from a couple of GPU's. Ratio to a CPU with the same setup was quoted as 250 to 1 for each GPU.

Course GPU's aren't as flexible as CPU's but all those gaming systems out there do provide a level of specialized power that they are now starting to take advantage of.

Both OSX 10.6 snow leopard and Adobe Phototshop CS4 will use GPU acceleration. Photoshop for example will be able to handle a 2GB image file like the present photoshop can handle a web image.

But yeah, computer power is increasing at a steady pace.