[tt] Exaflop Computer

[Arlind Boshnjaku]

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/one-million-trillion-flops-second-targeted-new-institute-15534.html


One million trillion ‘flops’ per second targeted by
new institute 


Preparing groundwork for an exascale computer is the
mission of the new Institute for Advanced
Architectures, launched jointly at Sandia and Oak
Ridge national laboratories.

An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop,
itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop.
Teraflop computers —the first was developed 10 years
ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art.
They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop
computers would perform a million trillion
calculations per second.

The idea behind the institute —under consideration for
a year and a half prior to its opening — is “to close
critical gaps between theoretical peak performance and
actual performance on current supercomputers,” says
Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. “We believe this
can be done by developing novel and innovative
computer architectures.”

Ultrafast supercomputers improve detection of
real-world conditions by helping researchers more
closely examine the interactions of larger numbers of
particles over time periods divided into smaller
segments.

“An exascale computer is essential to perform more
accurate simulations that, in turn, support solutions
for emerging science and engineering challenges in
national defense, energy assurance, advanced
materials, climate, and medicine,” says James Peery,
director of computation, computers and math.

The institute is funded in FY08 by congressional
mandate at $7.4 million. It is supported by the
National Nuclear Security Administration and the
Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Sandia is an
NNSA laboratory.

One aim, Dosanjh says, is to reduce or eliminate the
growing mismatch between data movement and processing
speeds.

Processing speed refers to the rapidity with which a
processor can manipulate data to solve its part of a
larger problem. Data movement refers to the act of
getting data from a computer’s memory to its
processing chip and then back again. The larger the
machine, the farther away from a processor the data
may be stored and the slower the movement of data.

“In an exascale computer, data might be tens of
thousands of processors away from the processor that
wants it,” says Sandia computer architect Doug
Doerfler. “But until that processor gets its data, it
has nothing useful to do. One key to scalability is to
make sure all processors have something to work on at
all times.”

Compounding the problem is new technology that has
enabled designers to split a processor into first two,
then four, and now eight cores on a single die. Some
special-purpose processors have 24 or more cores on a
die. Dosanjh suggests there might eventually be
hundreds operating in parallel on a single chip.

“In order to continue to make progress in running
scientific applications at these [very large] scales,”
says Jeff Nichols, who heads the Oak Ridge branch of
the institute, “we need to address our ability to
maintain the balance between the hardware and the
software. There are huge software and programming
challenges and our goal is to do the critical R&D to
close some of the gaps.”

Operating in parallel means that each core can work
its part of the puzzle simultaneously with other cores
on a chip, greatly increasing the speed a processor
operates on data. The method does not require faster
clock speeds, measured in faster gigahertz, which
would generate unmanageable amounts of heat to
dissipate as well as current leakage.

The new method bolsters the continued relevance of
Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation of Intel cofounder
Gordon Moore that the number of transistors placed on
a single computer chip will double approximately every
two years.

Another problem for the institute is to reduce the
amount of power needed to run a future exascale
computer.

“The electrical power needed with today’s technologies
would be many tens of megawatts — a significant
fraction of a power plant. A megawatt can cost as much
as a million dollars a year,” says Dosanjh. “We want
to bring that down.”

Sandia and Oak Ridge will work together on these and
other problems, he says. “Although all of our efforts
will be collaborative, in some areas Sandia will take
the lead and Oak Ridge may lead in others, depending
on who has the most expertise in a given discipline.”
In addition, a key component of the institute will be
the involvement of industry and universities.

A spontaneous demonstration of wide interest in faster
computing was evidenced in the response to an
invitation-only workshop, “Memory Opportunities for
High-Performing Computing,” sponsored in January by
the institute.

Workshop organizers planned for 25 participants but
nearly 50 attended. Attendees represented the national
labs, DOE, National Science Foundation, National
Security Agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, and leading manufacturers of processors and
supercomputing systems.

Ten years ago, people worldwide were astounded at the
emergence of a teraflop supercomputer — that would be
Sandia’s ASCI Red — able in one second to perform a
trillion mathematical operations.

More recently, bloggers seem stunned that a machine
capable of petaflop computing — a thousand times
faster than a teraflop — could soon break the next
barrier of a thousand trillion mathematical operations
a second.





      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  
Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.  http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping