Fujitsu Ships Parts for the Fastest Supercomputer

[joebob2000]

The desktop to cellphone divide is a good 10 years, the supercomputer to desktop divide is probably around 20 years. By the time my kids have cellphones (hell they will probably be on their 5th cellphone) they will have this kind of power.

 

[BT]

IBM's Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore Labs is expected to be 20Pflops by next year. That is an x86 machine, but all these new GPGPU machines that are planned will be over 10Pflops as well.

 

[Guest]

@joebob2000

if the hype is to be believed, we wont need a 10 petraflop chip in our cell phone, but we will have access to it through the cloud..... we have the tech for that today

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

Supercomputer for 2012... Desktop by 2016... Phone by 2020.

Imagine the folding on that one.

:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[formin]

Instead of paying for a supercomputer they should rent computing power from the general public. There is an insane amount of computing power out there doing nothing. A 100,000 or more average home PCs connected to some distributed super computing service through the internet.
The folding @ home program has the basic idea but a company should start up that actually pays people for their computing power when they arent using it.
Im sure this would be a much cheaper route as there is no power or hardware costs. How much did is this K Beast going to cost again?

 

[AMD_pitbull]

[citation][nom]scook9[/nom]Things like discovering how the universe works and curing cancerBoth of which I am ok with[/citation]

You and me both. It really is incredible how they're starting to use computers more and more in these research studies, taking a good load of the tedious workload off of the scientists. To all of you running folding-@-Home, cheers and thank you

 

[mikem_90]

[citation][nom]formin[/nom]Instead of paying for a supercomputer they should rent computing power from the general public. There is an insane amount of computing power out there doing nothing. A 100,000 or more average home PCs connected to some distributed super computing service through the internet. The folding @ home program has the basic idea but a company should start up that actually pays people for their computing power when they arent using it.I'm sure this would be a much cheaper route as there is no power or hardware costs. How much did is this K Beast going to cost again?[/citation]

There is a fundamental problem there, with folding and Seti@home, those are easily distributed since work units are nice and separable, one unit does not depend on another. Not all problems can be separated out that way. Climate science and model prediction is one, where there are so many variables so interdependent on each other that if you're waiting a week for half the work units to come in before the next grouping goes out, the latency will negate all the gain from using so many computers.

Oil exploration, large scale cosmology, massive physics simulations, high speed material analysis, there are many many problems that are just very large and not easily broken down. Plus if someone is renting the time out and the company who is buying the computer time and the data or work they are doing is trade secret, what better way to do so on a system you can control.

 

[rpgplayer]

petaflop? isn't that when you fail to throw blood on a fur coat???

 

[HavoCnMe]

"What the hell is a petaflop?" JK...LOL

 

[dEAne]

one day I will have one myself I will use it to help people.

 

[cryptz]

i am expecting much more sohphisticated fortune cookie sayings after this is implemented. i know its not china, but its close enough

 

[getritch]

[citation][nom]thebigt42[/nom]For calculating the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything[/citation]

Why do you need 10 petaflops to calculate 42? it's already been done! 😉

 

[squidz66]

My 'K' keeps crashing when I play 'Total Annihilation'.

 

[fritter87]

[citation][nom]eklipz330[/nom]what would they need all that computing power for?[/citation]
To divide by zero.

 

[Tesla1483]

Wow, that is actually really cool. As someone before said though, its name is a bit anticlimactic. As annoying as I find products with really stupid, self-serving names (cell phones in particular: Samsung Fascinate? HTC Incredible? Wow), this is one instance in which I believe it's justified to call itself whatever the hell it wants. I mean, not only will this be the fastest supercomputer in the world(!), it blows the nearest competitor completely out of the water. Didn't they learn anything from the failed marketing campaign of OK Cola?

 

[MrKKBB]

It is amazing at how fast we are surpassing the petaflop. All that power is nice (I'ld like a 10th of that), but I am not aware of a single app that can utilize all that power. 80,000 procs, wow, big deal if your code can only use 5,000 of these efficiently. The way I see it, this machine will run multitudes of codes, but never a single separate code. Thus, I think quoating a single number to gage a machine's computing potential is pointless these days. It's like saying that you have 5000 horse powers in your garage, but in reality you only have ten Shelby GT Mustangs --- good luck driving them all at the same time to achieve your 5000.

 

[eddieroolz]

[citation][nom]burnley14[/nom]This might be true, except every conversation about it is going to have to include: "It doesn't have as much power as K. K? You don't know K? You know, the terribly named non-descriptive title of the Japanese supercomputer." Very efficient.[/citation]

Right, because Japanese scientists working at RIKEN won't know what K is. And they also converse in English, with slang "K" meaning "OK".

/sarcasm.

 

[Guest]

Oh who cares. Just get it to where it can run windows 7, play the latest 3D games and give it to ME!! Then I'll be happy. Also I want the developers of these games to tweak their games so that it uses the full power of this super computer. I want 10,000 the complexity I'm now seeing. Then I'll get a nice big peperoni pizza, some cheese nips, and play games on it, along with surfing for porn until I fall to sleep 🙂

 

[wompai]

It uses up to 9 megawatts of power. Which is enough to support 10.000 homes for a year and costs 10 million dollars a year to keep it running.