Oak Ridge;worlds fastest computer

[Deleted]

Ralph I thought you might like this.

Oak Ridge Lab builds world's fastest computer, still can't divide by zero

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan Cray XK7 supercomputer is officially the world’s fastest data cruncher just after being unveiled last week. According to IEEE Spectrum , Top 500 released an updated list Wednesday morning at the SC12 Supercomputing Conference that shows the Titan toppling its competition with 17.59 petaFLOPS of processing power.

The specs behind Titan’s processing strength include a total of 18,688 nodes, each containing a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 CPU paired with a NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU, as well as 710 terabytes of memory. All this hardware is capable of reaching a theoretical peak performance of 27 quadrillion calculations per second (27 petaFLOPS).

In November 2011, Top 500 ranked IBM’s Sequoia as the world’s fastest supercomputer. The Sequoia was equipped with 1,572,864 processor cores that produced 16.32 petaFLOPS to help take care of our nukes.

While Titan won’t be doing anything as eyebrow-raising as managing our nuclear stockpile, it does have a long list of calculations to do for the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program (INCITE). As part of this program, Titan will help scientists develop a better internal combustion engine, model neutron behavior in a nuclear reactor, play with magnets, and anticipate the effects of climate change.

www.techhive.com/article/2013992/oak-ridge-labs-builds-worlds-fastest-computer-still-cant-divide-by-zero.html#tk.nl_geektech

[dave]

The hardware always grabs top billing, as we used to say when I worked in software for the company that ran neck and neck with Cray for the title of "world's fastest." Some time in the 80's (maybe sooner) Cray and IBM began to realize that you could never even get to the speed of one petraflop with a single processor and so laid plans for multi-processor super computers. At the time the plan was convenient, because great strides were being made with Personal Computer chips and processors that didn't need to be water cooled, as did the "heavy iron" mainframes popular in business computing. One of Sequoia's ancestors saw life begin in the building next to where I worked in the Hudson Valley.

Multi processor computing means that you take a task and break it up so that multiple processors can work on it at once. Of course, any worthy task consists of steps that need to be take before others and computer tasks are usually pretty complicated. So you need a few of the processor working on which sub-task needed to take precedence over other sub-tasks, more processors to predict when these events would complete, and even more to .... well, you get the point. The first time I attended a lecture on the "basics" of multi-task multi-processor vectoring for beginners ... for beginners, no less ... I came away with my head spinnning. The short of this little story is that the programming needed to accomplish all of that is terrifically complex and the software developers ought to be taking a bow along with the engineers who lashed the silly thing together.

[Deleted]

Wow thanks for the extra knowledge. You are a bright lad, indeed

[Ralph]

Ditto on what Dave said!
Without decent software the fastest computer is just a box full of chips soaking up electricity like a California Blonde soaks up sun.

All that being said, fastest or not............




.............if it's not giving me the secret original recipe to Col. Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken I don't want to talk about it. ;D

[dave]

That's right, Ralph. It's all in the perspective!