U.S. to build world’s fastest computer

12 May, 2004 at 12:12am ET Article published in Tech

Viewing supercomputers as crucial to scientific discovery, the U.S Energy Department will announce plans today to build the world’s fastest computer at a research laboratory in Tennessee.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was to make the formal announcement in a speech Wednesday, in which he will call development of the world’s fastest computer for general science “critical to our nation’s competitiveness.”

Yea, but will it overclock well?

Submitted by Jengo

Source: MSDN

Comments

12 May 2004 ~ 12:26am Camman ooooo even faster than that Earth Simulator thing in Japan??? that thing is pretty crazy...
12 May 2004 ~ 12:31am mmonnin Proud to be a small part in a Super computer soo huge it dwarfs all supercomputers put together.:)

Fold on
12 May 2004 ~ 12:47am Geeky1 Wonder how fast it folds...
12 May 2004 ~ 6:35am Medlock :wow:
12 May 2004 ~ 8:13am Leonardo You mean, Oak Ridge Nat'l Lab is going to buy a Mac G-5?
12 May 2004 ~ 9:17am OverLoad lol
12 May 2004 ~ 2:09pm KingFish That's top secret Leo. shhhh

KingFish
12 May 2004 ~ 3:16pm bothered

Geeky1 wrote:

Wonder how fast it folds...

If only it would. It'll probably be used for weapon development or some other nonsence.
12 May 2004 ~ 5:51pm fudgam I wonder how much the worlds fastest computer would cost if it came from DELL??
12 May 2004 ~ 9:01pm Geeky1 Let's assume it cost as much as the Earth Simulator- about $400,000,000.00.

Let's see what you can get from newegg for that, shall we?

Do a beowulf cluster with nodes with the following specs:

Accessories - Hard Drive
3 Supermicro 5 Bay SCSI HDD (Black) Enclosure MODEL CSE-M35SB
N82E16817121403 $166.00
$498.00

Cases (Server Rackmount)
1 Enlight 4U Rackmount Server with 470W Power Supply, Model "EN-89900SX47" -RETAIL
N82E16811116163 $248.00
$248.00

Fans, Heatsinks (Case, CPU, Chipset)
4 Thermaltake 80mm High Performance DC fan, Model "TT-8025A-2B"
Bearing Type: Double Ball Bearing
Nominal Speed(RPM): 2900
Max Air Flow: (CFM): 37
N82E16811999107 $5.00
$20.00

1 ALPHA Heatsink for AMD64, Model "PAL8150T" -RETAIL
N82E16835112006 $27.99
$55.98

Hard Drive Controllers/RAID Cards
1 LSI 64-bit PCI to Ultra320 Dual-Channel SCSI RAID Storage Adapter Card, Model "MegaRAID SCSI 320-2" -RETAIL
N82E16816118013 $649.00
$649.00

Hard Drives
15 Maxtor/Quantum 36.7GB 15,000RPM SCSI Hard Drive, Model 8C036J0, OEM Drive Only
N82E16822151018 $235.00
$940.00

Memory (System Memory)
8 Corsair XMS Extreme Memory Speed Series, 184 Pin 1GB ECC Registered DDR PC-3200
N82E16820145513 $393.00
$3,144.00

1 Kingston 184 Pin 128MB ECC Registered DDR PC-2100 - Retail (SCSI RAID Cache)
N82E16820998004 $57.00
$57.00

Motherboards - Server
1 IWILL "DK8X" AMD-8000 Chipset Server Motherboard for AMD Opteron CPU -RETAIL
N82E16813129132 $449.00
$449.00

Network - Interface Cards
2 Intel PRO/1000 XT Server Adapter, Model PWLA8490XT - OEM
N82E16833106208 $105.00
$210.00

Power Supplies
1 ENERMAX 660W Power supply for AMD K7 & Pentium4, Model "EG851AX-VH(W) FM" -RETAIL
N82E16817103438 $248.00
$248.00

Processors
2 AMD Opteron Model 248, 1MB L2 Cache 64-bit Processor - Retail
N82E16819103428 $689.00
$1,378.00

Subtotal » $ 7,896.98

So, basically, each node has:

2 2.2GHz Opterons
8GB of RAM
550.5GB of RAID 5 disk space with 15,000rpm disks. For $8,000 each.

Divide 400,000,000 by 7,896.98 and you get roughly 50652. So say 50,600 nodes. Which would be a total of:

222,640GHz
404,800GB of RAM
27,855,300GB (that would be 27,855 TERABYTES) of hard drive space

Now, according to www.top500.org, a 2816 node, 2GHz Opteron cluster has a theoretical maximum speed of 11,264 gigaflops, and an actual benchmarked speed of 8051 gigaflops.

If you scale those numbers to the cluster I just outlined, you get a theoretical maximum speed of 222,640 gigaflops, and a real-world speed of about 159,133 gigaflops.

To put that in perspective, the current top supercomputer, the NEC Earth Simulator, does 35860 gigaflops, with a theoretical maximum of 40960 gigaflops. In other words, the beowulf cluster I just outlined would be about 4.4x faster than the current fastest supercomputer. That is Hella Fast (highly technical term).
12 May 2004 ~ 9:07pm Geeky1 Bah. I just re-checked the article. $50,000,000 budget. *geeky goes to re-calculate stuff*
12 May 2004 ~ 9:12pm Geeky1 Pfft. That works out to about 6300 nodes, 12,600cpus, a theoretical speed of about 55440 gigaflops, and a real-world speed of about 39600 gigaflops. Which isn't all that much faster than the NEC earth simulator. Stupid tightwad government.
12 May 2004 ~ 9:46pm KingFish Skimp on the hard drive space and turn it over into more processors. Proc speed and ram is more important than it needing to access a lot of space with each proc. 50 Mil is a little low for the feds. 'Sup with that?

KingFish
13 May 2004 ~ 1:35pm Straight_Man

KingFish wrote:

Skimp on the hard drive space and turn it over into more processors. Proc speed and ram is more important than it needing to access a lot of space with each proc. 50 Mil is a little low for the feds. 'Sup with that?

KingFish

The software used is probably Open Source, so cut total cost in half versus cost with proprietary software. Lessee, weather modelling takes OOODLES of storage, so does complex modelling like atomic particle research, TAX compliance records and figuring out who owes what, etc. Guess is, they need it for complex stuff and are not talking about the details of how complexe it is.

AFAIK, NEC included software costing also, at a guess this budget is hardware only and they are getting bulk discounts in massive percentages-- you get to bid to sell that kind of thing to gov't, and for that large-cluster kind of purchase some of the mfrs probably bid direct sale bids. AMD will happily sell units of 1000 Opertons to anyone with good money to spend. And WD will and does bid direct sales to gov't. Etc....
13 May 2004 ~ 11:56pm Camman

Geeky1 wrote:

Bah. I just re-checked the article. $50,000,000 budget. *geeky goes to re-calculate stuff*

this article cites a 25 million dollar budget:

http://www.eet.com/at/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4IICALTVRVAASQSNDBGCKHQ?articleId=20300759