US nuclear laboratory supercomputer packs a punch

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.infoworld.nl/idgns/bericht.phtml?id=002570DE00740E18882572300021D932

More details about the hardware held at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory has emerged: it uses Panasas clustered file storage for its petascale nuclear weapons testing supercomputer.

A petascale supercomputer computes at the petaflop level - ten to the power 15 or one million billion floating point operations per second. Parallel supercomputers need parallelized I/O so that the many computing elements can be fed data fast enough to keep them operating at maximum speed.

Serial network-attached storage (NAS) products are not fast enough and clustered file system products, such as Isilon's have emerged to speed data delivery

LANL set up the very first (Cray) supercomputer which ran at 80Mflops. It now uses Panasas storage to supply seven terascale - meaning the one thousand billion FLOPS level - supercomputers with data, and is building the Roadrunner hybrid petascale supercomputer from AMD Opteron and IBM Cell processors, both running Linux.

[Xipe Totec]

1. It still doesn't beat the Cray VII

Which can complete an infinite loop in three seconds flat.

















:hide:

[Dudley_DUright]

2. wait till quantum computers hit the scene

and run so fast that they solve a problem before they start on it. :-)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060223084147.htm

[Xipe Totec]

6. Very interesting!

This could crack NP-hard problems:

There are also decision problems that are NP-hard but not NP-complete, for example the halting problem. This is the problem "given a program and its input, will it run forever?" That's a yes/no question, so this is a decision problem. It is easy to prove that the halting problem is NP-hard but not NP-complete.

So, with quantum computing you still couldn't run an infinite loop in finite time, but at least you would know you were spinning your wheels forever.

(and stop the process in three seconds or less)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hard

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

7. That one is beyond hard -- it's unsolvable!

It's proven that there can be no mathematical procedure that can look at any algorithm and determine whether it halts or not. Alan Turing proved that using a neat math trick called "exclusion by diagonal." (don't know how it's called in English)

[Xipe Totec]

12. Yes, it is unsolvable in the general sense

It belongs to a class of problems called NP-hard. Problems that are beyond NP-hard belong to the class NP-complete.

The only way to determine whether a generic algorithm halts or not is to run it and see if it does.

With the quantum computer the answer is obtained before the program runs, therefore you don't have to wait infinitely long for the answer; you will have the answer before the program runs.

Which would be a neat trick.

[Spinzonner]

9. Probably ...

[Xipe Totec]

11. LOL!

:rofl:

touche!

[Dudley_DUright]

14. We have a funny moose on the loose

:-)

[dubykc]

3. Isn't "complete an infinite loop" an oxymoron?

After all, how can something that is infinite be completed?

[Xipe Totec]

4. Why yes, yes it is....

and welcome to DU!

:hi:

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

5. OMG! How does one reply to this?

At least, without getting a mod warning? :banghead:

[boolean]

8. Technically....

Your multitasking OS is an infinite loop....

[Tesha]

10. That was an updated instance of one of the world's oldest computer jokes. (NT)

[dubykc]

17. Sorry for being so dense....

I guess I am just not up to date on even the oldest computer humor.

[jmowreader]

13. I got bad news for you, Sunshine...

Microsoft just put out a press release.

Sez here that Los Alamos' shiny new computer is the Minimum Recommended Configuration for the Windows release after Vista.

[karlrschneider]

15. But you have to buy extra RAM

:evilgrin:

[HCE SuiGeneris]

19. lmao

:D :9

[jmowreader]

21. I KNOW that, dammit!

Tell me you EVER got a Microsoft OS past...oh, MS-DOS 2.1...to run in the amount of RAM listed on the box.

[karlrschneider]

16. Those silly teraflops, so 2005

;-)

[Warren DeMontague]

18. So. When can I play "Halo 3" on one?

That's what I want to know.

[upi402]

20. By Christmas

?
:rofl:

[symbolman]

22. But it locks up after three months

and you can't get your money back, even with a receipt..

"Sorry but you allowed a 'Protein Unit' to operate it, and that voids all warranties.." :)