World's Greenest Supercomputer is Not the Fastest

[Marcus Yam]

I'm pretty sure that it can.

World's Greenest Supercomputer is Not the Fastest : Read more

 

[Parsian]

"I'm pretty sure that it can."

but you dont have access to it, so it is all assumption sigh

 

[rohitbaran]

It may not be the fastest, but looking at the specs, at least it could very well play crysis!

 

[Parsian]

"Its total performance of 23.4 TFLOPS is below the 24.67 TFLOPS needed to crack the top 500 supercomputers in the world."

thoses numbers seem to be too low, you can beat that with bunch of graphic cards like TESLA packages

 

[Shin-san]

I'm not surprised the PowerXCell 8i made it into the Green 500 list. The Cell processor's advantage for the PS3 wasn't high power, but the most power they could pack into 75 Watts, which made desktop CPUs at that time not very usable in a console. However, it seems like the faster Cell machines need another CPU to complement it like the AMD Opteron.

 

[grieve]

[citation][nom]Parsian[/nom]"Its total performance of 23.4 TFLOPS is below the 24.67 TFLOPS needed to crack the top 500 supercomputers in the world."thoses numbers seem to be too low, you can beat that with bunch of graphic cards like TESLA packages[/citation]
yah, this is my old rig... i needed to upgrade.

 

[Shin-san]

[citation][nom]Parsian[/nom]"Its total performance of 23.4 TFLOPS is below the 24.67 TFLOPS needed to crack the top 500 supercomputers in the world."thoses numbers seem to be too low, you can beat that with bunch of graphic cards like TESLA packages[/citation]
This isn't the fastest computer, but the most efficient supercomputer. The Tesla rigs are definitely fast and right now a Tesla supercomputer is #2, about the Cell supercomputer. That computer IS listed in the Green 500

 

[MU_Engineer]

I wonder how reliable it will be with those consumer parts in it and a complete lack of any reliability features like ECC memory. I would imagine there is node-level failover to recover from an individual board going belly-up, but if I built it, I'd feel a lot better if it used a proper 1P workstation/server board and a Xeon 35xx/36xx CPU to be able to use ECC memory.

 

[vectorm12]

I'd be interested in finding out exactly could be done with one of those accelerator boards in a workstation running Windows or Linux. Wonder what it does exactly?

 

[blasterth]

top500 ranks using the "LINPACK Benchmark", not the Nvidia theoretical specifications.

 

[zoemayne]

how is it cooled? that should be the main part of this article

 

[back_by_demand]

I'm pretty sure that it can

Can what? Play Crysis?

There, I said it, thumbs-down ahoy!

 

[Guest]

I put a plant on mine, it is greener then all of them.

 

[maximus20895]

I think it's funny how this super computer only has 18 GB of memory and some people have 32+ GB for their gaming computer..

 

[anamaniac]

Impressive.
I'm interested in the accelerator board myself though.

 

[mcvf]

I just love first sentence. Even before I continued reading I knew it answers The Question about its abilities.
Well done, you made my day!

 

[j1701john]

But can it play Crysis 2?

 

[captainnemojr]

[citation][nom]rohitbaran[/nom]It may not be the fastest, but looking at the specs, at least it could very well play crysis![/citation]

Or Mafia II...

I'd hate to be the new guy asked to install a cable management system on that bad boy.

 

[kristoffe]

18gb and 23.4TFlops used properly and efficiently is much more powerful than a normal i7 board with 24gb (32gb stated) and even a tesla board. You would have to program in cuda, have very limited multithreaded app or process support. The parallelism in a tesla card must be tweaked like the scene kids in the 80's used to up to today with 36-64kb 3d engines with sound synths and animations showing the true power of efficient computing. The most ram or the fastest processor does you no good if you're a sloppy programmer. kudos on the japanese professor for developing this homebrew implementation.

 

[TwoDigital]

I'm pretty sure the greenest computer will NEVER be the fastest one. Kind of like a "green" electric car (which really ultimately is running on electricity from COAL) is neither the cheapest nor fastest car.

 

[saran008]

[citation][nom]rohitbaran[/nom]It may not be the fastest, but looking at the specs, at least it could very well play crysis![/citation]
+1

 

[back_by_demand]

[citation][nom]TwoDigital[/nom]I'm pretty sure the greenest computer will NEVER be the fastest one. Kind of like a "green" electric car (which really ultimately is running on electricity from COAL) is neither the cheapest nor fastest car.[/citation]
And if the electric is generated from coal, won't be the greenest either...

 

[SVoyager]

I think someone should invest in some cable management. OMG THE MESS!!!!! These boxes seems to just be sitting there, not rackmounted or fastened to anything. Someone hits a cable and you get a new definition of a server crashing (down)! heh.

Wonder if the janitor is allowed in to cleanup lol.

 

[joebob2000]

[citation][nom]vectorm12[/nom]I'd be interested in finding out exactly could be done with one of those accelerator boards in a workstation running Windows or Linux. Wonder what it does exactly?[/citation]

Reading (tfa)... It's a hell of a drug...

"The Grape-DR accelerator chip realizes a double-precision performance of 200 GFLOPS with a power consumption of 50W. The supercomputer system is equipped with 64 pairs of a Core i7-920 microprocessor and a board mounted with four Grape-DR accelerator chips.

Without the accelerator chip, the supercomputer's performance per unit power consumption is about 150 MFLOPS/W. So, the chip enhances the performance by about five times. "

So the accelerator is there to enhance the operations specific to supercomputing (floating point crunching) and would probably be of little to no benefit to anyone's desktop pc (unless you loved floating points THAT much).

 

[officeguy]

What is the table for? Looks like it is holding up a mess of cables. Looks like you have to crawl to get to certain racks. So much for cable management.