22 Years Of Supercomputer Evolution (Archive)

[opio]

Your phone is over a billion-fold increase in price to produce in relation to size in relation to power over supercomputers in the 80's. Crazy huh?

 

[jasonf2]

With the average Nuclear Power Plant putting out 846 megawatts that Chinese beast is pulling just over 2% of a whole facilities output to crunch numbers. If the average home uses 900Kwh per month and that thing is running 24/7 the power consumed is the equivalent to 14246.4 households worth of electricity. I have to say that I am impressed with the computational power but with an electricity bill figured at 12.8¢ per KWH that thing is costing $68382.72 a month in electricity I don't think you are going to play tetris on it.

 

[jasonf2]

With the average Nuclear Power Plant putting out 846 megawatts that Chinese beast is pulling just over 2% of a whole facilities output to crunch numbers. If the average home uses 900Kwh per month and that thing is running 24/7 the power consumed is the equivalent to 14246.4 households worth of electricity. I have to say that I am impressed with the computational power but with an electricity bill figured at 12.8¢ per KWH that thing is costing $68382.72 a month in electricity I don't think you are going to play tetris on it.

Sorry miss calculated. It is actually 1.6 Million a month to operate.

 

[mosu]

Great presentation.

 

[mctylr]

I just don't understand how it works. How do all these motherboards link up?

Using high-speed interconnections. For "recent" systems, InfiniBand (IB) is probably the best know.

 

[ToineF]

Most factories and brains at intel are in china now...

Most!?!? Intel makes no secrets about where it's factories and employees are located. You may want to look that up before making such claims because you are quite misinformed.

Intel is probably full of china govt agents monitoring everything.

Uh, yeah, "probably" no more than any other tech company, but it's sure hard to argue with such hard evidence.

Have you ever worked in China? The govt is everywhere there, in most businesses they even have agents that filters information that gets out, even for foreign companies that is. Intel is no different I am sure.

 

[ZelmoQuad]

On these machines you can play teris ??

Yes and very fast too.

 

[wlp]

"The good ole USA has the knowledge, skills and the experience to stay way out front with everything computers.".

How many years ago is it that I read that Japan would never be capable to produce cars that are as good as the American ones?

 

[ToineF]

"The good ole USA has the knowledge, skills and the experience to stay way out front with everything computers.".

How many years ago is it that I read that Japan would never be capable to produce cars that are as good as the American ones?

it's been 20 years since Japanese build cars way way better than americans.

 

[Vogner16]

Really incredible stuff hard to imagine a mobile i7 hq can computer faster than the fastest computer in the world a mere 20 years ago. you can really see where the power kicked up a few notches as we went from 200 ish teraflops to a petaflop in a year then 60 petaflops 5 years later. performance got here in 2010 from there on we just worked with power efficiency. and put more cores in!

 

[beayn]

I was disappointed at no "Can it play Crysis?" comments.

 

[Brian_R170]

Have you ever worked in China? The govt is everywhere there, in most businesses they even have agents that filters information that gets out, even for foreign companies that is. Intel is no different I am sure.

Yes, I have worked in China... for Intel. Were agents there? I don't know and I don't care. However, I do know a little about controlled technology. There are US government restrictions on allowing access to controlled technology to Chinese nationals. So, where do you think "agents" trying to access controlled technology are most likely to be?

 

[lachlan]

Cool article. I can't stand "comprised of", however; the "of" is unnecessary and incorrect. A professional writer should know this.

 

[waikano]

How can China take back the reins, when they are using Intel Processors?

 

[Eggz]

How can China take back the reins, when they are using Intel Processors?

Huh? They have the fastest supercomputer in the world right now, by a large margin, and that's precisely because they use Intel chips. Their setup's CPU config has 32,000 individual Ivy Brdige Xeon chips, each with 12 cores and 24 threads. That's 384,000 cores and 786,000 threads. You can look up the chip. The model is "Intel Xeon E5-2692."

Tahine-2 (the computer's name) also has 48,000 Xeon Phi cards installed (model 31s1p). They are fairly powerful GPUs tuned for number crunching, not gaming - sorta. It's a card with several less powerful CPUs on it, for a total of 57 cores each. That's a total of 2,736,000 cores from the add-in cards.

In all, that's about 3.5 million threads available for simultaneous use. . . . It can almost play Crysis.

Supercomputer ranking list --> http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon%20E5-2692%20v2.html

 

[waikano]

How can China take back the reins, when they are using Intel Processors?

Huh? They have the fastest supercomputer in the world right now, by a large margin, and that's precisely because they use Intel chips. Their setup's CPU config has 32,000 individual Ivy Brdige Xeon chips, each with 12 cores and 24 threads. That's 384,000 cores and 786,000 threads. You can look up the chip. The model is "Intel Xeon E5-2692."

Tahine-2 (the computer's name) also has 48,000 Xeon Phi cards installed (model 31s1p). They are fairly powerful GPUs tuned for number crunching, not gaming - sorta. It's a card with several less powerful CPUs on it, for a total of 57 cores each. That's a total of 2,736,000 cores from the add-in cards.

In all, that's about 3.5 million threads available for simultaneous use. . . . It can almost play Crysis.

Supercomputer ranking list --> http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon%20E5-2692%20v2.html

That's my point, Intel is an American Multinational Company. It's not a Chinese Company.

 

[Eggz]

That's true. But whether the chips came from USA, Finland, or Mars, China still has the fastest computer. I think the only takeaway I'm seeing from what you're saying is that Tahine-2 has some American-Made parts in it. Maybe I'm missing something, but how does that demonstrate that China has to "take back the reins?" It seems to me that China has the reins.

 

[deuce_23]

Awesome i would never have thought we could do what we do on a phone. I finished school in 1995 and the teacher new jack. I knew way more as i worked in a computer shop. I missed learning about the internet untill later on. I wonder what the next 20 years hold

 

[Diverse]

I find the insecurity in some of these China v US comments amusing. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I suppose.

 

[dmitche3]

China cannot win this race... Especially with US technology...
What I wonder, is how powerful the computers are that the government keeps secret. Back in the cold war, the Government kept quite a few then powerful computers secret.
It would not surprise me to find out that both china and the US either can run their computers at higher speeds, or have other computers of greater power.
After all, the government does not care about its benchmark scores and how they stack up against others, or at least they should not.
It will be interesting to find out what Obama's proposed super computer will be like.

I'm with you on that. If Intel is allowed to sell that type of hardware to China, then just imagine what they might have hidden away in government contracts.

If you really want a fancy tinfoil hat, how about the possibility of computer generated online communities? Below a certain IQ number, a person, or group of persons may never even tell the difference. This would be even simpler to achieve if a character limit were imposed.

So wrong. China is requiring these companies to share or transfer their knowledge to China. Search for IBM and China and transfer and you will see that just 3 months ago IBM was forced to give up the IP if they wanted to do business with our in China. As corporations are international and do not give a fuck about governments only money they don't care how their products are used. Dam , I hate typing on this Samdung tablet.

 

[sbandyk]

There's a mistake in the first paragraphs.
The article characterizes Los Alamos as a University site that is managed by the DoE. This is not correct.
Like many similar National Labs, this is a DoE site. It operates under the rules of the DoE. You go through the DoE's security to get onsite. If you host a supercomputer out there.. it either belongs to the DoE or you pay the DoE rent for the space and power.
The management of Los Alamos is outsourced to a research University. This is they same arrangement that other DoE sites, like Argonne & Fermi Labs [both managed by the University of Chicago].