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Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
- RA_Fisher 11y agoWhy not just use commodity spot instances?
- phreeza 11y agoA bit more informative is the actual fact sheet put out by the white house [1]. What they are really aiming for is exascale computing, which they define as being capable of applying exaFlops to exabytes. From my limited knowledge, the latter will actually be the bigger deal. As pointed out elsewhere, an exaflop supercomputer will probably come around beforehand. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/nsci_fact_sheet.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...
- ypcx 11y agoClearly designed to run AI for cyber-warfare / cyber-defense purposes? William Gibson's Black Ice coming to life?
- scottcha 11y agoMore likely its for modeling nuclear weapons which I believe is the primary purpose of NSCI.
- trsohmers 11y agoNNSA*, which is an office within the Department of Energy.
- scottcha 11y agoNational Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) is the initiative within the DOE.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoThe story linked below about the French exascale plans explicitly states that it is the military applications division of the French nuclear energy agency (CEA) that is spearheading that effort. (I believe they work on both reactors and warheads.)
- jen729w 11y agoSerious question: what's left to model? They're already big enough to kill everyone, and we have heaps of them.
- markhahn 11y agoOften they model how the warhead ages, rather than how it explodes.
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- neonbat 11y agoThanks Obama (no sarcasm).
- tdicola 11y agoDon't we already have a exabyte-scale supercomputer in Utah run by the NSA?
- striking 11y agoYeah, but everyone knows that thing's doing illegal stuff (illegal now or soon-to-be illegal), and Obama doesn't want that on his record.
- acaloiar 11y agoDo you have a source for that information?
- striking 11y agohttp://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/07/27/nsa-will-stop-looking-at-old-phone-records http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/07/27/nsa-... The NSA's currently being sued over its metadata collection. I wrote that comment slightly tongue-in-cheek, but repurposing that supercomputer for civilian use would actually be a great way to recoup some of your losses.
- knowaveragejoe 11y agoEr, do we?
- dekhn 11y agoIt looks like they are explicitly saying they want to make a machine that works for both types of HPC -- classic low-latency high-bandwidth internode communication (physics simulations) and modern Internet-driver high-bandwidth storage/node communications. This is because the supercomputer community has long ignored the Internet-style of computation (MapReduce etc). But most of the new generation of scientists are adapting their codes to this new style, because dollar-for-dollar they can get more throughput than the classic style machines. Classic machines invest heavily in low-latency communication and typically require APIs like MPI to achieve it, while Internet HPC just uses well-designed TCP-based socket communications. Building dual-design systems like this- especially when the community has little or no skill at building NG Internet HPC systems- is likely to produce a system that is good at few things. Instead, build two systems. One is the largest (but not necessarily exaflop) you can afford and is a classic supercom[puter. Then, for the second, hire some datacenter designers from Google/Facebook and have them build a modern HPC cloud design. The biologists will flock to the second one; they have long been underserved by the DOE supercomputing community.
- eitally 11y agoAnd it's not like there isn't precedent. I remember a couple years ago when Google showed off gene mapping at I/O (Urs' demo to visualize how easy it was to scale GCP From 1 to 10 to 1000 to 100000 cores), and now they've partnered with the Broad Institute to apply this more generally. http://www.broadinstitute.org/google http://www.broadinstitute.org/google
- dekhn 11y agoI was the person on stage with Urs who ran the demo (I'm a computational biologist who went to Google to help them build this kind of infrastructure, because DOE wasn't doing it). Read more about the demo here: https://cloud.google.com/compute/io https://cloud.google.com/compute/io I also helped create the original idea for the Broad collaboration. It was pretty obvious that standard HPC was a waste of money and not designed for high throughput biology, while Google published numerous papers (MapReduce, GFS, Bigtable) that demonstrated they were building infrastructure that was perfect for a wide range of computational biology programs.
- mturk 11y agoReading over the list of priorities in the PDF linked from the Whitehouse blog, the one that I was the most pleased about was improving HPC productivity.
- onalark 11y agoLet's hope this is not just bluster :(
- chatman 11y agoI think one of the primary motivations for doing this is to break cryptographic keys, and using that for surveillance and to hack into Chinese websites.
- _nedR 11y agoIs this in the realm of feasibility for modern crypto? And what about past/current transmissions using older crypto.
- codewithcheese 11y agoCan anyone provide back of the napkin calculations on this proposed supercomputers computing power vs Googles compute farm?
- DanBC 11y agoor the Bitcoin farmers?
- srdev 11y agoComparing Bitcoin miners to any supercomputer or server farm is meaningless at best and deceiving at worst. Current Bitcoin miners cannot do anything other than one specific calculation.
- graphene 11y agoYou could compare raw FLOPS (Floating point operations per second) but that would only tell part of the story. These supercomputers are highly engineered for low network latency between nodes, which is necessary for many scientific workloads. Google and other companies are generally able to express their algorithms in highly parallel ways, which means there are much reduced requirements for communication between nodes. Therefore, even if the raw performance in terms of FLOPS sound similar, the two systems will have widely differing performance on real workloads.
- oaktowner 11y agoDepends on what you mean by a "real" workload. Capturing and indexing the entire web is certainly a real workload, even if it is massively psrallelizable, so it would probably run equally well on Google's infrastructure as on a supercomputer because those fast interconnects wouldn't provide much advantage, right? However,when simulating a nuclear explosion or a weather system (maybe that's what you mean by "real" workloads?), the heavy node-to-node communication makes the supercomputer much, much better suited.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoThis could be slightly misleading. Supercomputers tend to be used for different types of computations.
- 88e282102ae2e5b 11y agoIt kills me every time I read about how the world's nth-fastest computer is just used to simulate nuclear explosions, so it was a delight to see that they're planning on using this one for some good.
- realityking 11y agoMy perspective: I'd rather haven them spend money on simulating bombs in fancy computers, than having actual nuclear tests. Yes, a world without nculear weapons would be nice. Unfortunately that ship has sailed.
- melling 11y agoAnd it kills me every time someone makes a silly comment like this. Someone has to spend the large amount of money for the R&D. Your model of how the world works is flawed. We went to the moon because of the Cold War. The military paid for the development of the Internet. GPS? Supersonic flight? Nuclear energy? Autonomous vehicles? I wish private industry would do more. Every company should have a Bell Labs.
- danharaj 11y agoAre you extolling the virtues of a world that was shaped by the threat of nuclear annihilation for multiple generations?
- striking 11y agoYou can't deny that some of that stuff is pretty sweet. And ignoring where it came from requires rewriting history.
- danharaj 11y agoI would not have wagered the world for what we got out of it. The fact that we're around to talk about it is fine and all, but the last century is not a good model for any century.
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- sadgit 11y agoPress: "What's it for?" Obama: "Uuuh... NASA."
- neverartful 11y agoI find it odd that a president would sign an executive order for a new kind of computer (even if the new kind of computer is technically impressive). Call me cynical, but I'll bet that there's a number of quid-pro-quo arrangements with big party donors (or soon to be donors) -- regardless of which party is in office.
- twoodfin 11y agoIt's not that sinister, it's just PR. This project likely would have been in the budget, anyway, and the executive order is just a way to get the President's name behind it and his image in front of it.
- jazzyk 11y agoI think he added an extra "A" there at the very last minute. :-)
- agumonkey 11y agoQuite a large NAS don't think ?
- baseballmerpeak 11y agoNuh-SA
- simi_ 11y agoIMHO if you need to break down a task well enough to run on a supercomputer, there isn't a lot more to do to make it run on a regular server farm. edit: Actually, in the scenarios you'd use a supercomputer for, the added latency and overhead (shoddy servers, network, etc.) would most likely make the run time orders of magnitude higher.
- dekhn 11y agoThis is not remotely true for a wide range of codes that matter to the supercomputing industry.
- jakub_h 11y agoAnd by "codes", you mean specific legacy software artifacts written in FORTRAN (note that I'm not even spelling it as Fortran)? Of course that's a problem.
- dekhn 11y agoWhere to begin? There are many existing valuable codes written in FORTRAN. They work, it's not worth the investment to replace them with something else. Second, many of the codes are in C++, not FORTRAN. Not clear that's any less of a problem.
- apawloski 11y agoWrite in any language you want; that's irrelevant to the nature of the computations being done here. By codes they mean -- at the minimum -- pretty much anything that requires frequent communication between any or all nodes as a necessary part of computation. (For example, simulations across a large 3D space, where the changing states of particles on node A directly impacts the states of particles on adjacent nodes.)
- dekhn 11y agoYou can't write your code in any language you want on a supercomputer. Also, there is a wide range of literature about communication patterns for supercomputer apps; my argument is that often times, to solve the problem that matters, you may not actually need to run the simulation you think you do. It's more that people are just used to running that way. For example, with MD, you can run 1 sim parallelized over 100 machines using tightly coupled communication (doesn't necessarily mean the forces and positions of every particle have to be shared between node decompositions) or run 100 sims over 100 machines, with no communication except for input and output files. The latter can often answer the same question far more cheaply.
- davegardner 11y ago10 years ago the fastest supercomputer was BlueGene/L which was rated at 136.8 TFlop/s. The current fastest supercomputer is rated at 33,862.7 TFlop/s, or 247 times faster. It seems to me that the aim of taking 10 years to build a supercomputer that is only 20 times faster than the current one might fall a little short if it's aiming to take the top spot.
- edpichler 11y agoI think this do not advanced more just because of economic reasons. I have have read last 10 years that Processing is a lot more cheaper did by network of computers and clusters, instead of a expensive supercomputer that also demands an appropriate building and infrastructure.
- TallGuyShort 11y agoModern supercomputers are essentially clusters, but with much more advanced network topologies and technologies, shared storage, etc. It's not just one monolothic machine. However, the types of computation performed by the top supercomputers are rarely the "embarassingly parallel" programs you can easily distribute via an @Home-style program, or something like Hadoop. They do depend heavily on very reliable, very low latency, high bandwidth networks.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- murbard2 11y agoDoubling time: 10 years * log(2)/log(247) ~ 15 months x20 ought to take about five years and a half.
- bjacobel 11y agoIt could very well be that there's diminishing returns involved but I agree - they should be aiming to surpass the current tech by at last 100x in the next ten years.
- bjacobel 11y ago> The supercomputer would be 20 times quicker than the current leading machine, which is in China. So given Moore's Law, by the time it's finished in 2025, it will be 50 times slower than 2025's fastest? Yes, yes, Moore's Law is slowing, transistors on a chip =/= flops, etc. Still seems like they'd want to aim higher than 20x in 10 years.
- unfamiliar 11y agoYou're assuming the goal is to build the fastest supercomputer in the world. I think the goal is probably closer to "get the computing resources we need at the lowest cost".
- mathetic 11y agoWell, the title literally says "world's fastest computer."
- _delirium 11y agoProbably fluff added by the headline writer to sound more exciting. The White House press release doesn't make world's-fastest claims: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/07/29/advancing-us-leadership-high-performance-computing https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/07/29/advancing-us-lead...
- scottcanoni 11y agoI wonder how many bitcoins can be mined with it :)
- angdis 11y agoI suppose that "supercomputers" are all multi-processor these days, so the colossal FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many processors and one has to coordinate these processors in any application that takes advantage of the FLOP specs. Now I am curious what is the fastest single processor?
- TheLoneWolfling 11y agoProbably an intel xeon (or i7?) overclocked and cooled with liquid nitrogen. There may be a specialized processor with higher performance, but I doubt it.
- marvelous 11y agoI don't think knowing that is usefull. "Single processors" are all superscalar or pipelined these days, so the colossal single-thread FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many arithmetic units and one has to coordinate these units (mainly avoiding branch mispredictions) in any application that takes advantage of them.
- ddingus 11y agoIt's still relevant. Some applications remain single threaded due to data dependencies. Mechanical CAD geometry kernels are one such application. Recently, I had a use case that demanded the peak single threaded performance. In PC land, it's this chip clocked at 4.x Ghz: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K. It's multi-core performance is pretty great too, so it's not that big of a trade-off to maximize single thread performance. I would be very interested in knowing what faster solutions exist. Are there any, regardless of instruction set?
- rayiner 11y agoOn a per-core basis, probably Power 8: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review...
- mbell 11y ago
- varelse 11y agoI'd really love to see speed measured by performance by a single collective computation of an O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm. This would emphasize the importance of balancing communication performance with computation. Not holding my breath, the LINPACK is strong with these people...
- nickpsecurity 11y agoStep 1: Order exascale computer. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit. U.S. and other countries have been in a race for exascale. The thing holding us back isn't funding or political will: exascale is so ridiculously hard that it requires fundamentally different architectures. The main issues are making our CPU's do more work, eliminating memory bottlenecks, and dramatically improving energy efficiency of both. It's just very tough, technical challenges that might also have to operate on process nodes that are themselves tough. Rexx Computing is one attempt whose founder posts here a lot [except in one thread dedicated to it lol]. I'm curious if any other exascale researchers read HN and can post their concepts as it's probably interesting stuff. Here's some links for readers interested in this stuff. LLNL gives data on exascale and its challenges https://asc.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/exascale-white.pdf https://asc.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/exascale-white.pdf Also describes problems but skip to Venray's TOMI approach http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4368705/The-future-of-computers--Part-1-Multicore-and-the-Memory-Wall http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4368705/The-future-... Rexx Computing's approach http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/12/the-little-chip-that-could-disrupt-exascale-computing/ http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/12/the-little-chip-that-c... Intel's relatively conventional approach http://www.exascale-computing.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Exascale_Onepager.pdf http://www.exascale-computing.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/... Architecture from Univ of Texas and NVIDIA https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/skeckler/pubs/SC_2014_Exascale.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/skeckler/pubs/SC_2014_Exasca... Boise exploring non-Von-Neuman with ParalleX http://cswarm.nd.edu/news-events/assets/PSAAP_II_Kick-off_CS.pdf http://cswarm.nd.edu/news-events/assets/PSAAP_II_Kick-off_CS... Same group enlightens on details that all fight with http://sites.ieee.org/boise-cs/files/2015/04/Thomas-Sterling-Exascale-Computing-BSU-talk-20150409.pdf http://sites.ieee.org/boise-cs/files/2015/04/Thomas-Sterling... Bonus: 1,000 core, cache-coherent, optical interconnect. Sort of thing might be useful in exascale. http://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/67490 http://dspace.mit.edu/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/67490 Have fun with these. Submit a link if I left out any chip architecture in exascale race that's pretty cool.
- RhysU 11y agoStep 1: Nuclear test ban treaty. Step 2: Avoid nuclear test disasters. Step 3: Maintain military status quo. Notice step 3 implies international stability and hence profit. NNSA stresses computation so heavily because stockpile stewardship cannot be done by noncomputational means.
- bitwize 11y agoNSA director be making that smug frog face right about now
- ytdht 11y agotoo bad for him that he didn't order it earlier, maybe he could have figured out a way to stay for more then 8 years as President...