IBM Supercomputer Reaches Quadrillion Calculations Per Second

[onedomino]

This machine is twice as fast as the second fastest supercomputer, also an IBM design. Roadrunner will be used at Los Alamos to, among other activities, simulate thermonuclear explosions, i.e., nuclear weapons testing without the nasty aftertaste. The machine has many applications including weather forecasting, climate modeling, drug research, and number theory.

"Roadrunner" Reaches 1000 Trillion Calculations Per Second

complete article: IBM - The Roadrunner Project - United States

see also: Roadrunner supercomputer fastest in world: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The world's first hybrid supercomputer has broken through the "petaflop barrier" of 1,000 trillion operations per second, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Codenamed "Roadrunner," the machine was designed by IBM and uses Cell Broadband Engine chips—originally developed for video game platforms—in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD.

The computer was built for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and will be housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Later this summer, it will be dismantled at IBM's Poughkeepsie, New York, plant and loaded onto 21 tractor trailer trucks for delivery to the Los Alamos facility.

Roadrunner is twice as fast as the world-leading Blue Gene, which is itself three times more powerful than the remaining contenders on the industry's Top500 list of supercomputers. This new claimant to the title of world's fastest computer has the computing power of 100,000 of today's most powerful laptops—or a stack of such laptops one and a half miles high.

 

[Gungnir]

{nocks on window} Skynet? Hello? Collosus? HAL9000? Is that you in there?

Pretty friggin sweet! The good old days when Computers were larger than a house.

I wonder at how many vacuum tubes it would take...

 

[onedomino]

How much is a quadrillion (1000 trillion)? If a quadrillion pennies were stacked they would reach 790 million miles, more than 300 million miles beyond the distance of the Sun to Jupiter. What is significant about Roadrunner's quadrillion operations per second (10^15 OPS)? There are about 10^15 synapses in the human brain. Each synapse operates at about 10 impulses per second, thereby yielding 10^16 synaptic operations per second. Roadrunner is close to the number of operations per second of which the human brain is capable. Though the brain accomplishes its OPS in a volume of .4 ft3, while IBM's hardware requires 21 truck loads to transport. But the read/writes are on the wall. I imagine Roadrunner plays a wicked game of chess. The question is: does Roadrunner imagine at all? It is only a matter of time. Brain limits

 

[Gungnir]

Are you a Transhumanist?

That machine can do quite a few things that a human can't. Comparing the two is like comparing a Ford Mustang with a Catepillar Backhoe, different critters designed for different purposes.

 

[onedomino]

Are you a Transhumanist?

That machine can do quite a few things that a human can't. Comparing the two is like comparing a Ford Mustang with a Catepillar Backhoe, different critters designed for different purposes.

Humans. at least so far, are not "designed." Computers are tools. Fundamentally the same as these:

http://anthropologynet.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/paleolithic-stone-tools.jpg

 

[editec]

I'd be much more impressed if Windows could stave off malware, personally.

 

[Annie]

Humans. at least so far, are not "designed." Computers are tools. Fundamentally the same as these:

http://anthropologynet.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/paleolithic-stone-tools.jpg

I like the analogy!

 

[onedomino]

Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale

Complete article: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL): Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 12, 2008

Code run on the machine mimics brain mechanisms underlying human sight.

Less than a week after Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Roadrunner supercomputer began operating at world-record petaflop/s data-processing speeds, Los Alamos researchers are already using the computer to mimic extremely complex neurological processes.

Welcome to the new frontier of research at Los Alamos: science at the petascale.

The prefix “peta” stands for a million billion, also known as a quadrillion. For the Roadrunner supercomputer, operating at petaflop/s performance means the machine can process a million billion calculations each second. In other words, Roadrunner gives scientists the ability to quickly render mountainous problems into mere molehills, or model systems that previously were unthinkably complex.

Late last week and early this week while verifying Roadrunner’s performance, Los Alamos and IBM researchers used three different computational codes to test the machine. Among those codes was one dubbed “PetaVision” by its developers and the research team using it.

PetaVision models the human visual system—mimicking more than 1 billion visual neurons and trillions of synapses. Neurons are nerve cells that process information in the brain. Neurons communicate with each other using synaptic connections, analogous to what transistors are in modern computer chips. Synapses store memories and play a vital role in learning.

Synapses set the scale for computations performed by the brain while undertaking such tasks as locomotion, hearing or vision. Because there are about a quadrillion synapses in the human brain, human cognition is a petaflop/s computational problem.

To date, computers have been unable to match human performance on such visual tasks as flawlessly detecting an oncoming automobile on the highway or distinguishing a friend from a stranger in a crowd of people. Roadrunner is now changing the game.

On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to eventually achieving human-like cognitive performance in electronic computers...

...“Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science at Los Alamos National Laboratory,” said Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos. “Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago.”

Based on the results of PetaVision’s inaugural trials, Los Alamos researchers believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex—arguably a human being’s most important sensory apparatus.

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[Gunny]

Humans. at least so far, are not "designed." Computers are tools. Fundamentally the same as these:

http://anthropologynet.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/paleolithic-stone-tools.jpg

Uh huh ... 'til it becomes self-aware.

 

[onedomino]

Uh huh ... 'til it becomes self-aware.

Now that would be some interesting software.

 

[Gunny]

Now that would be some interesting software.

LOL ... it's from "Terminator". Coincidentally, "Terminator 2" was on when I was reading the thread. Entertaining flick.

I wonder if that is possible. We don't really know what it is that makes us self-aware other than the ability to reason; which btw, is a human definition.

How far removed from it do you think we are? I've noticed over the years on the internet board especially posters that are really little more personality-wise than data input/output receptacles. They have no personality at all.

 

[eots]

-

hail Satan

 

[Gungnir]

Design was a poor choice of words. One was created as a result of selective persures, mutations, and luck while the other was designed. The two fill seperate niches and can not be effectively compared.

~~Addendum~~
Preface: I have yet to read your linked article to Brain Limits.
If the rate of operations was all that mattered, shoudln't a personallity spontaneously appear in that dinkum thinkum Roadrunner? I would think (har har) that it would be at least a low order mammalian.

 

[Chester Burnett]

the fastest supercomputer in the world only has the processing power of a the brain of a retarded 2 year old human

 

[AllieBaba]

Lol!