Japanese supercomputer blisters 10 quadrillion calculations per second
networkworld.com
networkworld.com
For the benefit of previous employers: いや、うちのプロジェクトではなくて、アメリカのNASAを考えていますよ。
Analyzing the behavior of nanomaterials through simulations and contributing to the early development of such next-generation semiconductor materials, particularly nanowires and carbon nanotubes, that are expected to lead to future fast-response, low-power devices.
Predicting which compounds, from among a massive number of drug candidate molecules, will prevent illnesses by binding with active regions on the proteins that cause illnesses, as a way to reduce drug development times and costs (pharmaceutical applications).
Simulating the actions of atoms and electrons in dye-sensitized solar cells to contribute to the development of solar cells with higher energy-conversion efficiency. Simulating seismic wave propagation, strong motion, and tsunamis to predict the effects they will have on human-made structures; predicting the extent of earthquake-impact zones for disaster prevention purposes; and contributing to the design of quake-resistant structures.
Conducting high-resolution (400-m) simulations of atmospheric circulation models to provide detailed predictions of weather phenomena that elucidate localized effects, such as cloudbursts.
Which sound a bit squishy. I'd be interested to know what China's super has done since they showed pictures of it. Clay Dillow over at the Popular Science blog has been putting out snippets on various super computers under the titles "what are you working on now?" and it seems like a whole lot of nothing.
Franklin (#27) - http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/day-life-su... Climate change modelling.
iForge (unranked) -http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-11/what-are-yo... Doing fluid dyanmics (this is probably the most common thing)
Roadrunner (#10) - http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/roadrunner-... Super sekrit weapons stuff. Which seems to be the most common use. (Is there like some sort of open source nuke simulator or something?)
Anyway, there are probably a dozen machines PopSci has looked at and I really am trying to get a sense of how they pay for themselves.
There was a recent Washington Post article on the DoE's supercomputers and the uses they're put to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/sup...
Most of those machines are shared between a bunch of researchers working on a bunch of different problems. There's some great stuff going on, some semi-great stuff going on, and probably some fairly useless stuff going on, too. I've used many of 'em myself. In terms of science done per dollar spent, big-arse supercomputers are certainly far more efficient than most publicly-funded research.
The shuttle CFD work that Ames did, came out with a lot of info on their use of the Cray super to do the modelling, that is an example of something I would expect to see.
However, as others have pointed out you can get a machine that is close to that of a Cray 2 today off the shelf.
Schlumberge has one doing oil field seismic analysis, I understand the value proposition there. But there are many many machines on the T500 list where I just wonder, "Ok why do they have that?"
There are many papers in Science and Nature based on work from supercomputers. And if by Xarchiv you mean arXiv, the proportion is bloody huge. Just try searching for "NERSC" for instance and you'll find that NERSC alone leads to a zillion publications per year.
there are many many machines on the T500 list where I just wonder, "Ok why do they have that?"
And you take the fact that you personally don't know what they're being used for as evidence that they're not doing anything worthwhile?
Most of these machines aren't used for one big project, they're used by hundreds of researchers for hundreds of small projects.
That was not what I said. Clearly some organization ponies up a few hundred million to build one of these systems and signs up to feed it power they think what ever it is doing is "worthwhile." I would love to understand that so I posed the question.
I think I mentioned that I understand the NERSC vision, sharing super computers around for science. And yes, there are lots of citations about their facilities, and they have six such machines on their homepage [1].
My question is if you aren't a government or university, what value would you derive from having a supercomputer on the T500 list? (patio11's excellent response not withstanding). Off list someone pointed out that Boeing uses their computer for structural analysis of airplanes made of carbon fiber. That seems like a perfectly reasonable use, one plane like the 787 is probably 5 - 6B$ of sales over its life time.
Airbus has one at 29. I think it's clear what they use that for.
Vestas Windsystems in Denmark has number 53. Presumably they're optimizing their wind turbines.
IBM has a couple, which they largely run like shared research facilities.
And that's pretty much it for commercial research facilities in the top500.
I'm much more impressed by the advances in CPU architecture. SSDs have been amazing so far. Networking has been improving too.
There are interesting OS challenges for the compute nodes, interesting hardware challenges on interconnect, interesting filesystem challenges, interesting programming challenges to manage the parallelism, competing architectural approaches between CPUs and GPU-accelerated clusters ... it's a pretty interesting space!