China supercomputer design points to future speed kings

China’s new Nebulae Supercomputer is No. 2, right on the Tail of ORNL’s Jaguar in Newest TOP500 List of Fastest Supercomputers

Jack Dongarra, a professor at University of Tennessee's department of electrical engineering, says graphics chips will be used increasingly in supercomputers to boost performance.
(Credit: University of Tennessee)

China has muscled into the No. 2 spot on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers thanks, in part, to specialized Nvidia graphics chips: a technology that Intel is now pursuing to keep pace with this new trend in high-performance computing. 

China's Nebulae supercomputer is located at the recently constructed National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, and achieved 1.271 petaflops/s (1.271 quadrillion floating point operations per second) running the Linpack benchmark, which put it in the No. 2 spot on the widely reported Top500 list. The latest list was formally presented Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. (Jaguar, a Cray system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, retained the top spot.)

Nebulae achieved this "in part due to its Nvidia GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators...Nebulae reports an impressive theoretical peak capability of almost 3 petaflop/s--the highest ever on the TOP500," according to a press release Friday.

Though Nebulae also uses Intel Xeon processors, those are so-called commodity processors that are also employed in standard server computers. So, Intel--despite canceling its Larrabee graphics chip project--is pursuing a technology that leverages Larrabee R&D. On Monday, Intel said the first product of this kind, code-named Knights Corner, will be made on its future 22-nanometer manufacturing process--using transistor structures as small as 22 billionths of a meter--to pack more than 50 processing cores on a single chip.

On Tuesday, I spoke with Jack Dongarra, Distinguished Professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory. Dongarra introduced the LINPACK Benchmark, which is used as the primary yardstick to measure supercomputer performance.

Q: Are GPU accelerators in supercomputers a trend we'll see more of in coming years?

Jack Dongarra: This looks like this is going to be one of the modes of high-performance computing. Taking commodity processors (such as standard Intel or AMD server-class processors) together with specialized accelerators, in this case graphics processors.

How much do GPUs generally boost performance?

Dongarra: A board by Nvidia can give an order of magnitude greater performance than the commodity processor.

But programs must be written to take advantage of this, it just doesn't happen, correct?

Dongarra: There's nothing automatic about it. You have to write a program that explicitly passes information to the GPU and tells the GPU what to do. That can be easy or hard. In most cases it becomes a challenge to write an efficient program to do the operations. Part of the issue there is that the connection between the commodity part of the computer and the graphics processor is a very thin pipe. So, you have to pass information and think of a very thin straw through which you're passing a lot of information. And once you move it over there, you have to do a lot of operations to gain back any benefit.

And what's the future hold for GPU supercomputing?

Dongarra: Two things will happen. One, the connection will improve slightly. And then ultimately what's going to happen is that the graphics processor is going to be integrated into the commodity processor. So, you'll have a chip that has both the commodity processor's cores plus the graphics processors or an accelerator for doing floating-point arithmetic embedded into the chip itself. It's a path a number of companies are pursuing. Intel is one. AMD is another. Companies would like to pursue that path because it does provide the best performance but it does require another ratchet up in chip design.

Dongarra added that chips have been designed in the past with accelerators, though, of course, the chip-manufacturing technology at the time yielded different results. "There were companies that made these things that attached to mainframes," he said, citing Floating Point Systems, a company founded in 1970.

by Brooke Crothers, 

Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 

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China’s new Nebulae Supercomputer is No. 2, right on the Tail of ORNL’s Jaguar in Newest TOP500 List of Fastest Supercomputers

Fri, 2010-05-28 00:31
 

HAMBURG, Germany—China’s ambition to enter the supercomputing arena have become obvious with a system called Nebulae, build from a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Nebulae is currently the fastest system worldwide in theoretical peak performance at 2.98 PFlop/s. With a Linpack performance of 1.271 PFlop/s it holds the No. 2 spot on the 35th edition of the closely watched TOP500 list of supercomputers.

The newest version of the TOP500 list, which is issued twice yearly, will be formally presented on Monday, May 31st, at the ISC’10 Conference to be held at the CCH-Congress Center in Hamburg, Germany.

Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, held on to the No. 1 spot on the TOP500 with its record 1.75 petaflop/s performance speed running the Linpack benchmark. Jaguar has a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 petaflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores. One petaflop/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per second.

Nebulae, which is located at the newly build National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, achieved 1.271 PFlop/s running the Linpack benchmark, which puts it in the No. 2 spot on the TOP500 behind Jaguar. In part due to its NVidia GPU accelerators, Nebulae reports an impressive theoretical peak capability of almost 3 petaflop/s – the highest ever on the TOP500.

Roadrunner, which was the first ever petaflop/s system at Los Alamos in June 2008, dropped to No. 3 with a performance of 1.04 petaflop/s.

At No. 5 is the most powerful system in Europe -- an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. It achieved 825.5 teraflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
Tianhe-1 (meaning River in Sky), installed at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China is a second Chinese system in the TOP10 and ranked at No. 7. Tianhe-1 and Nebulae are both hybrid designs with Intel Xeon processors and AMD or NVidia GPUs used as accelerators. Each node of Tianhe-1 consists of two AMD GPUs attached to two Intel Xeon processors.

The performance of Nebulae and Tianhe-1 were enough to catapult China in the No.2 spot of installed performance (9.2 percent) ahead of various European countries, but still clearly behind the U.S. (55.4 percent).

Here are some other highlights from the latest list showing changes from the November 2009 edition:

• The entry level to the list moved up to the 24.7 teraflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark from 20 teraflop/s six months ago. The last system on the newest list would have been listed at position 357 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This replacement rate was far below average. This might reflect the impact of the recession and purchase delays due to anticipation of new products with six or more core processor technologies replacing current quad-core based systems. 
• Quad-core processor based systems have saturated the TOP500 with now 425 systems using them. However, processor with six or more cores per processor can already be found in 25 systems.
• A total of 408 systems (81.6 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is slightly up from six months ago (402 systems, 80.4 percent). Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share of TOP500 systems. The AMD Opteron is the second most common used processor family with 47 systems (9.4 percent), up from 42. They are followed by the IBM Power processors with 42 systems (8.4 percent), down from 52.
• IBM and Hewlett-Packard continue to sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. HP lost its narrow lead in systems to IBM and has now 185 systems (37 percent) compared to IBM with 198 systems (39.8 percent). HP had 210 systems (42 percent) six months ago, compared to IBM with 186 systems (37.2 percent). In the system category, Cray, SGI, and Dell follow with 4.2 percent, 3.4 percent and 3.4 percent respectively.
• IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 33.6 percent of installed total performance (down from 35.1 percent), compared to HP with 20.4 percent (down from 23 percent). In the performance category, the manufacturers with more than 5 percent are: Cray (14.8 percent of performance) and SGI (6.6 percent), each of which benefits from large systems in the TOP10.
• The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 282 of the 500 systems (up from 277). The European share (144 systems – down from 152) is still substantially larger then the Asian share (57 systems – up from 51). In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 38 systems (45 six months ago). France passed Germany and has now 29 (up from 26). Germany is still now the No. 3 spot with 24 systems (27 six months ago). Dominant countries in Asia are China with 24 systems (up from 21), Japan with 18 systems (up from 16), and India with 5 systems (up from 3).

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. For more information, visit www.TOP500.org.

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BP's $70 billion whipping

 
Since April 20 when the Gulf oil spill began, BP shares have tumbled about 40%.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Despite the sharp fall in BP's share price following the company's inability to cap a leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, most analysts say the selloff is overdone.

BP shares sank nearly 15% Tuesday after the company's latest attempt to seal the leaking Gulf oil well failed over the weekend. The selloff accelerated just before the closing bell, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a criminal probe into the spill.

Since the accident happened April 20, which resulted in 11 deaths and an oil leak of up to 19,000 barrels per day, BP shares have fallen nearly 40%, wiping out nearly $70 billion in shareholder value. Before the accident the company had a market capitalization of nearly $183 billion. Now it's just below $115 billion.

Investors are concerned the clean up costs, lawsuits, and added restrictions from the spill, the worst in U.S. history, will sap BP's earnings potential.

Plus, like most big oil projects, BP is self-insured for the operation, so all of the costs of the cleanup and damages will fall on its shoulders.

No one knows how much the spill will eventually cost BP. Estimates have ranged from $3 billion to $25 billion - many fall somewhere in the middle. As of Tuesday BP said it has spent just shy of $1 billion on the accident.

0:00 /4:20Analyst: Oil spill could cost up to $30Bn

 

But whatever the price tag, it will likely be paid out over a period of years. For a company that made nearly $17 billion in profit last year and is expected to top $20 billion this year, most analysts say the stock hit is unjustified.

"They've got a balance sheet you could slap $20 billion of debt on and not miss a beat," said Mark Gilman, an oil and gas analyst with the Benchmark Co., a boutique broker-dealer. "We think the financial hit has been excessive."

Indeed, so do the majority of analysts.

In England, where BP (BP) is based, 38 analysts have a buy rating on the stock and eight have it as a hold. Only three recommend selling it, said Douglas Youngson, an oil analyst at Arbuthnot Securities, a London-based investment bank.

Beyond the clean up costs and lawsuits, there's also possible damage to BP's reputation. This is, after all, the company that branded itself an environmentally friendly oil firm, buying wind farms and solar arrays and adopting the slogan "Beyond Petroleum."

Will there there be a major public backlash?

"'Here in America we tend to have pretty short memories," said Ken Carol, an oil analyst at Johnson Rice & Co. "There was a big boycott after the Exxon Valdez, and they seem to be doing just fine now."

Satirists cash in on oil spill

 

Carrol also didn't think the spill would impact too heavily on BP's relationship with other oil companies. Because of the high up front costs to develop an oil field, many partners are often required on a project. In this case, BP had partnered with Anadarko (APC, Fortune 500) and the Japanese firm Matsui.

Many subcontractors are also brought in to work on an oil well. The primary subcontracts in this case were Halliburton (HAL, Fortune 500) and Transocean (RIG).

Might it be harder for BP to find partners in the wake of this disaster?

"BP has been a good partner before," said Carrol. "I don't think people will turn their backs on them."

Carrol said the selloff in BP's share price was likely overdone, but said he didn't expect it to get any better until BP can fix the problem.

As long as the well is leaking, the costs are adding up, he said.

Dissenting opinion

 

When BP will fix the problem is anyone's guess. The company is trying to put a new dome over the leak this week, but with several previous attempts to cap the well failing, that procedure looks like a long shot.

The company is saying it may not be able to stop the leak until August, when a relief well being drilled into the failed well's base is completed.

"That's two months of horrible images and horrific headlines," said Youngson, the analyst at Arbuthnot Securities.

Youngson is one of the few analysts that are recommending people sell BP's stock.

He thinks that in addition to the massive cleanup and liability cots, BP will face serious regulatory pressure going forward. That may mean a loss of leases in the Gulf of Mexico, and a loss of confidence from their peers.

"Anything BP does in the future will be under the microscope, and that will drive costs higher," he said.
Youngson also brought up another possibility that most other analysts have not openly talked about to date: That BP stock could get so cheap it might be the subject of a takeover.

He thinks if the stock falls much below $30 a share, BP will become a target. Shares traded around $38 Tuesday afternoon.


'If the share price continues to fall," he said, "other companies may see this for the bargain it will be."

By Steve Hargreaves, Senior writerJune 1, 2010: 4:52 PM ET
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Clickjacking' worm hits hundreds of thousands on Facebook

'This girl gets OWNED.' And you can too

A vulnerability on Facebook forced hundreds of thousands of users to endorse a series of webpages over the holiday weekend, making the social networking site the latest venue for an attack known as clickjacking.

The exploit works by presenting people with friend profiles that recommend — or "Like," in Facebook parlance — links with titles including "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE." Those who click on the link see a page that's blank except for the words "Click here to continue." Clicking anywhere on the page automatically forces the person to add the link to his list of Likes.

Clickjacking is a term that was coined in late 2008 by web application security researchers Jeremiah Grossman and Robert "RSnake" Hansen. It describes attacks that allow malicious website publishers to control the links visitors click on. Virtually every browser is vulnerable, although many browsers come with safeguards that can make exploitation harder.

The Facebook worm that hit over the weekend superimposes an invisible iframe over the entire page that links back to the victim's Facebook page. As a result, as long as the person is logged in, his profile automatically recommends the link to new friends as soon as the page is clicked on.

Twitter was attacked by a series of clickjacking exploits last year that forced users to publish tweets against their will. The exploits stopped after company engineers finally tightened down their site. Facebook engineers will undoubtedly follow suit, if they haven't already. But this isn't the first time Facebook has been hit by clickjacking.

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author
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