ON SUPERCOMPUTER MILESTONES

SUPER BUILDING BLOCKS

While most of us have been focused on small hand-held computers this week like the upcoming 3G iPhone, the computing industry crossed a milestone on the other end of the spectrum.  This New York Times piece explains:

"An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine (known as the Roadrunner), is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California."

The article tries to explain this metric in other terms:

"To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

Or to put it another way,

"The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone..."

They achieved this milestone by using hardware designed for much smaller packages:

"The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers."

What's the next stop, you ask? Well, there are several stops to go, as it turns out:

"By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop."

I can't wait for my next game of Scrabble.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

Stories like this are somewhat reminiscent of those that talk about the fastest aircraft, when the real development was moving towards towards electronic communication. Are super computers even that relevant anymore when we have moved computational power to massive server farms and distributed clients (ala SETI@home)?