Tony,
Did we decide mainframes were dead or not?
Thursday June 29, 10:06 am Eastern Time
Forbes.com
IBM Christens The Brawniest Supercomputer Yet
By David Einstein
The nation's troubled nuclear labs could use some good publicity for a change, and here it is: IBM has just put the finishing touches on ASCI White, the mother of all supercomputers, and is starting to ship it to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Lab officials early this week took delivery on 30 refrigerator-sized computer cabinets, with another 90 boxes scheduled to arrive later this summer. It will take 28 big rigs to transport the 106 tons of equipment, which is like Ringling Bros. schlepping 17 elephants to the circus.
When fully assembled, ASCI White will take up a space the size of two basketball courts. The electricity needed to run it will be enough to power more than 10,000 homes, and the cooling system will be enough to air-condition 765 homes. So if there's a brownout in the Livermore Valley east of San Francisco, you know whom to blame.
The sizzling system will justify its $110 million price tag and the cost of running it by delivering computing power that makes a Mike Tyson uppercut look like a love tap. In final testing at IBM's (NYSE: IBM - news) facility in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., ASCI White managed 12.3 trillion operations per second. That's more than three-times the peak performance of any other supercomputer, including IBM's ASCI Blue Pacific, the monster it will replace in Livermore. In fact, ASCI White can crunch numbers faster than today's top four supercomputers combined (two made by IBM, including ASCI Blue, and one each from Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news) and Silicon Graphics (Nasdaq: SGI - news).
To put it in perspective, the new kid on the block is about 30,000 times more powerful than the average desktop PC and about 1,000 times quicker than the IBM computer that sent world chess champion Garry Kasparov packing. If you take a hand calculator and do the math that ASCI White can do in one second, it would take you 10 million years. And that's without lunch or bathroom breaks.
What do you do with that kind of computing clout? You simulate nuclear explosions, what else? You could also forecast the weather, predict earthquakes and model the expansion of the universe. But since the U.S. Department of Energy is paying the bills, you do what they want, and what they want is a computer that can monitor the country's aging nuclear stockpile. ASCI Blue will be decommissioned over time and turned over for unclassified scientific work.
Actually, for all its power, ASCI White isn't even close to being able to simulate the main explosion in a hydrogen bomb. The best it will do is start to give scientists a look at what such an explosion looks like in 3-D. To run a full simulation, it would take an estimated 100 trillion operations per second, and the computer that can do that won't be built for years. Jim Jardine, program director of IBM's ASCI Project, says that getting to the 100 trillion level will require a whole new type of processor, faster switches to rout information within the supercomputer and new software capable of handling the increased calculations.
Nevertheless, IBM already has some major bragging rights it can use when it goes out to sell its RS/6000 SP servers to corporations. ASCI White is composed of RS/6000 SPs, which turn into supercomputers when you link them together. A lot of big companies already do just that. Charles Schwab & Co. (NYSE: SCH - news), for example, uses a 2,000-processor system that clocks more than half a trillion operations per second. It ranks as the world's 19th largest supercomputer.
``Schwab handles an incredible amount of transactions, and the fundamental technology is very similar to working on a big scientific problem,`` says Jardine. ''They need a lot of computers, and they need them to be reliable.``
If ASCI White can generate talking points for IBM salespeople, it can do the same thing for the public relations crew at Lawrence Livermore--and boy, could they use it. As far as morale goes, the Livermore Valley has been more like Death Valley in recent months as one calamity after another has struck Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos, its sister lab in New Mexico.
First, there was the secret scandal that landed Los Alamos employee Wen Ho Lee in the slammer. Then came the wildfire in May that blew to within a quarter mile of the plutonium vault at Los Alamos. That was scary. And finally, there was the mysterious temporary loss of two hard drives at that lab that contained information for deactivating nuclear bombs.
In the wake of this giant Get Smart-like routine, Los Alamos, understandably, has tightened security, and so has Lawrence Livermore. Hard disks and computers containing information that could be spy candy are now kept under lock and key, and early this month the lab began to subject workers in sensitive areas to polygraph tests. That's always a crowd pleaser.
''I don't think anybody is especially pleased, but people do what is necessary in the interest of national security,`` says David Cooper, chief information officer at Lawrence Livermore.
That lab has also been wrestling with a big problem of its own--the costly delays in building the world's most powerful laser, which would make it possible to replicate a tiny version of an actual nuclear detonation. The National Ignition Facility was supposed to cost $1.2 billion and start operating in 2004. Now it looks like you can change that to $2 billion and 2008.
The botched project has given the lab a black eye with Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who told Congress last summer that the laser was on schedule, only to be blindsided by a report on problems no one had told him about.
Cooper believes that the arrival of ASCI White should lift the spirits of workers, giving them something to contemplate besides stolen disks and delayed projects. ''I don't know if it will restore morale to what it was a few years ago, but getting access to these tools will take our minds off some of the negative publicity,`` he says.
Heck, if worse comes to worst, they could let lab technicians play videogames on the thing. Can you imagine what ASCI White could do with Madden NFL 2000? |
