
World’s top supercomputer from ‘09 is now obsolete, will be dismantled - ari_elle
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-from-09-is-now-obsolete-will-be-dismantled/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29
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naftaliharris
Something about these numbers doesn't quite make sense. The reason cited for
dismantling the machine is that "it isn't energy-efficient enough to make the
power bill worth it." But the supercomputer uses 2345 kilowatts, which at US
prices of around 15 cents per kWh would cost $352 / hour to run in energy
costs. By comparison, the $120 million cost of building roadrunner, amortized
over the four years it's been running, comes out to $3400 / hour. The article
makes it sound like the power bill is costing them a fortune, at $3 million a
year, it isn't that much at all next to the $120 million price tag.

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miahi
They already have the Titan, four times more efficient, with 17 pflop
consuming only 8000 kwh.

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davidmr
Titan is for open science, not classified research as roadrunner was. Sequoia
is the new classified nuclear supercomputer.

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rwg
It's interesting to read articles like this since I came from bizarro not-so-
HPC world where "we" (academic department) didn't pay for electricity (the
university did!), so there was no incentive at all to retire obsolete
hardware. Right up until I left many months ago, I was running jobs on a
cluster made up of 84 servers on death's door, each with dual-processor (not
dual-core!) Nocona Xeons or Opteron 240s.

"Oh, but there's a cost to support obsolete hardware!" Yeah, sure, but the
person supporting everything was me, and I was a constant cost to keep around
whether I supported crappy obsolete hardware or shiny new hardware.

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m_mueller
In terms of age this system isn't a dinosaur - the problem is the hardware
architecture as stated in the article: Cell is now obsolete, noone wants to
program new software for it anymore. X86 systems on the other hand, even older
ones, can still be targeted by new Software without problems, so it may still
make sense to keep them. To be blunt, the accelerator market simply moved to
NVIDIA Tesla.

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hamoid
"At more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second..." - how
fast is that when cracking typical passwords or mining bitcoins? If we have an
encrypted drive, how long would it take to find the passphrase with it?

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dmm
Bitcoin uses double SHA256 which is all integer operations, so that's not
directly comparable to flops.

As far as I know most passwords hashes are also integer operations.

The cell processor in the ps3, despite being optimized for floating point ops,
can do about 22.23 Mh/s. Assuming each of the 12,960 PowerXCell 8is in
Roadrunner can do the same: 12960 * 23.23 ~= 288100 Mh/s which would earn you
about 21.6 BTC/day at the current difficulty. That's about $2000/day at
current prices.

The PowerXCells also have 8 SPUs vs 6 in the ps3, so they are potentially 25%
faster.

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moconnor
For bitcoin mining you probably want to use Titan's 56k GPUs. I've run jobs at
full scale on Titan, sometimes I forget it can be pretty cool to be in HPC!

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m_mueller
I'm also interested in what language and tooling you're using, plus the
scientific field. Depending on what you do, you might be interested in [1].
It's my current project dealing with better tooling for CPU and GPU compatible
Fortran code.

[1] <http://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran>

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DannoHung
Well, that's four years. Only a year ahead of normal amortization schedules.

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auctiontheory
How many years till everyone's cell phone has this much computing power?

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kragen
Let's suppose current medium-spec cellphones have a gigahertz CPU, and that it
can do one flop per cycle, peak performance. That's probably a tenth of a flop
per cycle at LINPACK, which is how the Top500 list is ranked. So that's a
hundred megaflops in your cell phone today, guessing.

This was the first petaflop machine. A petaflop is a million gigaflops, or ten
million current cellphones. That's roughly 23 doublings in performance. If
Moore's Law were to continue at one doubling per two years, that would be 46
years, or about 2059. Another ten or fifteen years might pass before low-end
cellphones have it.

But 46 years is a long time. 46 years ago was 1967. There were no packet-
switched computer networks. Nobody had ever seen a video arcade. Computers
mostly interacted with people via punched cards, or at best a teletype. The
Bloom filter had not yet been discovered. Timesharing and high-level languages
were radical, risky concepts; the popular high-level languages of the time
were all domain-specific, not general-purpose like C. There was no such thing
as a mouse. There were graphical user interfaces and virtual reality. Humans
had never walked on the moon.

46 years from now, there may not be cellphones, or humans. We certainly won't
still be doubling the density of planar silicon chips every 18 months.

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davidiach
Not sure we will still have cellphones 46 years from now.

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kragen
What is WRONG WITH YOU?

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n00b101
RIP Cell processor.

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Elhana
flops = floating operations per second, why all this tech articles keep using
terms like "petaflop"? It is not plural, it doesn't make sense.

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kislayverma
What better way to spend the public dime than this.

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supervillain
Oh I wish I have a supercomputer and could play with one right now.

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supervillain
I wonder what's wrong with this comment, I get downvoted for wishing out loud
for a supercomputer to code on?

