[info] [tt] NYT: Military Supercomputer Surpasses Petaflop Milestone

Tue Jun 10 13:26:44 UTC 2008

Military Supercomputer Surpasses Petaflop Milestone
New York Times, 8.6.9
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.html

By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO -- An American military supercomputer, assembled from
components originally designed for video game machines, has reached
a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than
1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest
supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference
to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers
and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based
in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified
military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear
weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner
will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a
second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be
used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater
speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test
global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P.
D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security
Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used
hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven
days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner
can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products
and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that
computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are
seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer
computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop -- one
thousand trillion calculations per second -- has long been viewed as
a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific
organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group
including Japan, China and the European Union. All view
supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic
competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time
-- compared with as long as three months on older generations of
computers -- petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to
fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts
say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually
interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have
been impractical.

"This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing," said
Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee
who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest
computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step
closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also
produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly
spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and
business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well.
Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and
development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended
in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the
world's fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960
chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor,
a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation
3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or
turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional
Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are
already widely used in corporate servers.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,"
said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science
at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming
from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening
first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics."

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers
will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the
complexity of the system's hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or
about the power required by a large suburban shopping center,
requires three separate programming tools because it has three types
of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the
116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in
order for it to run effectively.

"We've proved some skeptics wrong," said Michael R. Anastasio, a
physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can
look at phenomena we have never seen before."

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few
years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens
or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for
new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some
experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful
supercomputers will provide useful examples.

"If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy
Malibu you're driving will benefit from this," said Steve Wallach, a
supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a
start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video
gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the
resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its
inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly
claimed the title of the world's fastest by executing more than 35
trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a
supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the
United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the
Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

"It's a sign that we are maintaining our position," said Peter J.
Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He
noted, however, that "the real competitiveness is based on the
discoveries that are based on the machines."

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking
toward the next generation of supercomputing. "You do these
record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push
on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the
leader," said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice
president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally
expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to
sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a
thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold
goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second,
followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.
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