Re: What is a Super Computer?

Cooling problems do abound and in fact the first Cray was unique partly because it was freon cooled in order to make it physically smaller and thus have shorter wires and thus run faster!

One of the unique things about the Original Blue Gene was that it sacrificed pure megahertz for scalability. So they piled on a whole bunch of POWER4(generation) CPUs at lower Ghz ratings plus 512MB RAM per processor each on a rack wide drawer. (I've actually handled one of these drawers.) They then stacked the racks full of these boards top to bottom and both front and back. Airflow was cross-wise not front to back. The sides of the rack were solid fans top to bottom and front to back as I recall. Four racks were teamed together with cold air coming from the floor and feeding into one 'end' and then coming out of the fourth rack and heading up into the ceiling return. It was all about how much compute you can get for your KW. OK MW but who's counting. :-)

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 3/1/2013 1:10 PM, Dan Kimmel wrote:

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In actual fact, a supercomputer is not good at billing. The output to print is a linear process that doesn't parallelize very well. Supercomputers are good at forecasting the weather where the change in one location is based on prior conditions in neighboring locations. Easily modeled using the architecture Larry describes. The algorithm is highly mathematical and independent of external algorithms.

I have a theatre acquaintance who works for Cray here in Minneapolis. They claim they have the largest supercomputer. It's built of Intel graphic co-processors. Rumor is they burned down a rack late last year when heat dissipation methods failed. These things require their own electric sub-station, mainly to keep them cool enough to run. From a software development standpoint, the problem is how to run a debugger.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jeff Crosby
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 2:45 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: What is a Super Computer?

Our daily billing cycle would be complete before the operator's finger was off the ENTER key.

:)


On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 3:41 PM, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

All those cores (each running a linux kernel) are communicating to
their 'neighbors' in 6 directions (in 3D) and simultaneously working
on a piece of the same problem. There is no traditional console with
Blue Gene, no USB port, no keyboard and no mouse. It also doesn't have
disk storage! All the programs are sent in over the network and
results come out the same way. The compute nodes are all linked very
tightly into a 'lattice' if you will.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 2/28/2013 3:26 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(r)
Pro* Colin Parris, Power Systems GM points out that the world's
largest,

fastest super computer runs Power nodes. Information Week states:

"The IBM Sequoia supercomputer, installed at the Department of
Energy's

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, runs 16.32 petaflops, using
1.6 million compute cores in 96 racks, each roughly the size of a
large refrigerator, Parris said."

Okay, 1.6 million cores; that seems almost unbelievable. What makes
it

"one" computer? A single console? Something dispatching work to all
compute nodes?

-Nathan

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