IBM says that a three petaflops supercomputer would require 216 of these racks holding 884,736 processors. All of these systems use high-speed optic fiber interconnects.
NASA Enters the Picture
NASA announced that they are planning to build a supercomputer named the Pleiades Project, which they expect will pass the petaflop barrier in 2009 and hit 10 petaflops by 2012. With initial installation of this Intel, quad-core Xeon based machine targeted for completion by July 2008 and initially producing 245 teraflops from a total of 20,480-cores.
This new supercomputer will be installed at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center at the Moffett Federal Airfield in California. Moffett is the location of NASA's current supercomputer “Columbia” which became oerational in 2004.
The Columbia supercomputer on the other hand is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently giving it a performance rating of 88.88 teraflops.
The Pleiades supercomputer will be made up of 40 racks, each equipped with 512 processor cores and 512GB of memory. In all the new supercomputer will have more than 20,800 GB of memory. An SGI InfiniteStorage InfiniBand disk solution, designed to store and manage 450 TB of data is also included in the project, which is five times bigger than the entire print collection of the Library of Congress.
NASA stated that they are planning to use the new Pleiades supercomputer for designing a new rocket, modeling, simulation of future missions, hypersonic aircraft, simulate landing deployments and model fabrics for future spacesuits and more.
Relative Processing Performance
A current model Intel quad-core Xeon 2.66 GHz based workstation costing a few thousand dollars now outperforms a 1990s model Cray C90 supercomputer costing many millions of dollars. Many of the cutting edge technologies of the 1990s supercomputer can now be found in your average desktop today.
A supercomputer running at 1 petaflop would outperform a 2.4 Kilometer high stack of laptops.
As of 2007, the fastest PC processors (quad-core) perform over 30 gigaflops but in terms of purely FLOPS performance the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in consumer video cards such as those based on the nVidia GeForce 8 series. The 8800 Ultra for example scores 576 gigaflops on 128 processing elements or 4.5 gigaflops per element.
This equates to around 4.5 gigaflops per element. Compare that with the IBM Blue Gene/L's 2.75 gigaflops per core. However, GPUs are to date nowhere as flexible as a general purpose CPU.
Check out the top ten supercomputers on the Top500.org list
Supercomputer Uses Today
Tasks that supercomputers are commonly used for today inlcude calculation intensive tasks such as:
Physics - Quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, cosmology, astrophysics
Meteorology - Weather forecasting, climate research, global warming research,
Molecular Modeling - Computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals
Physical Simulations - aerodymanics and fluid dynamics, wind tunnels,
Engineering Design - Structural simulations, bridges, dams, buildings, earthquake tolerance
Nuclear Research - Nuclear fusion research, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons
Cryptography and Cryptanalysis - Code and cypher breaking, encryption
Earth Sciences - Geology, volcanology, geophysics
Training Simulators - Advanced astronaut training and simulation
The main users of these supercomputers inlcude: universities, military agencies, scientific research laboratories and major corporations.
