Dr. Lillian Reynolds: Can you see better if I move it a little closer?
Dr. Michael Anthony Brace: I can see something. It’s parts of the grid, but it’s still rotating. It’s not locking up.
Hal Abramson: Maybe we all need a little break, Lillian.
Dr. Lillian Reynolds: Hal, you take a break.
- Brainstorm
The DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced this week that IBM has won a deal to build a supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory that will pair more than 16,000 AMD Opteron processors with more than 16,000 Cell processors similar to the ones in the Playstation 3.
As first reported by CNET News.com, the machine, dubbed Roadrunner, uses a hybrid approach that combines a conventional cluster of Opteron servers with Cell chips that handle some of the calculating grunt work. The $35M Roadrunner will run Red Hat’s Version 4.3 Linux operating system and will be built entirely with commercially available hardware, according to IBM.
Each Cell chip, originally designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3 video game console, includes eight special-purpose engines that can rapidly perform physics calculations.
Roadrunner’s construction will involve the creation of advanced “Hybrid Programming” software which will orchestrate the Cell B.E.-based system and AMD system and will inaugurate a new era of heterogeneous technology designs in supercomputing.
LANL’s sister lab, Lawrence Livermore, currently houses the top-ranked machine, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which can perform 280 trillion calculations per second, or 280 teraflops.
Roadrunner is designed to nearly quadruple that to a sustained speed of 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, or a petaflop.
The U.S. Department of Energy today announced $60 million in new awards annually for 30 computational science projects over the next three to five years. The projects are aimed at accelerating research in designing new materials, developing future energy sources, studying global climate change, improving environmental cleanup methods and understanding physics from the tiniest particles to the massive explosions of supernovae.
The DOE’s Advanced Computing program (SciDAC-2), brings together some of the nation’s top researchers at national labs and U. S. universities to create the software and infrastructure needed to effectively utilize the next generation of supercomputers. These projects will be selected from a total of 240 proposals, involving 70 institutions and hundreds of researchers and students.
Blue Gene (above), and the new cell-based Roadrunner Supercomputer may be no match for a broadband nation. Millions of broadband gamers cannot be denied. South Korea and Japan are the hub for Massively Multiplayer Online gaming. That’s reality.
Scientists at Stanford University last month announced plans to distribute the folding@home program on Sony’s PS-3. It would tap the cell’s spare processing power to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The project is currently named ‘Cure@PS3‘.
This distributed method uses each individual machine to process a small amount of data, with results fed back over the internet to a central machine where they can be viewed together. Stanford researchers say that 10,000 consoles running the program would give a performance equivalent to one petaflop.
The team hopes eventually to enlist 100,000 machines. That would be ten times the power of Road Runner, far and away the most powerful computer on Earth.
More than 7 million players pay recurring fees to play Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW), explains Red Herring, and many industry officials think the phenomena is just getting started.
“This genre really is the biggest frontier,” Rob Pardo said Wednesday of MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). The Blizzard VP of game development delivered the keynote address at the 2007 Austin Game Conference, a three-day event attracting thousands from around the world this week to Texas.
According to Bruce Woodcock, the analyst behind MMO tracking web site Mmogchart.com, the genre currently attracts some 13 million players around the world. The majority pay to play, too, either in the form of monthly fees or pay-as-you-go plans. Mr. Woodcock has been tracking MMO subscriptions since 2002. He predicts that by 2009, the number of worldwide MMO players will mushroom to more than 20 million.
Funcom offers free play for Anarchy Online. Puzzle Pirates, Project Entropia and Second Life all offer virtual currency for real money. NCSoft has already gone free play with Guild Wars, while Sony is discussing a virtual property based game.
South Korea has become the world’s best laboratory for broadband services. Cyworld, a social network owned by a subsidiary of SK Telecom, is a mixture of MySpace, Flickr, Blogger, AIM and Second Life. Helio, a joint venture between SK Telecom and EarthLink, is launching a full fledged marketing effort for its service in the US.
Cyworld has 90% penetration rates for South Koreans in their 20s, using avatars that visit and link to each other’s “minihompy” – a miniature homepage that’s actually a 3-D room containing a users’ blog, photos, and virtual items for sale.
NCSoft, the company that runs Korea’s most popular multiplayer online role-playing game, Lineage, has found a string of successes in the U.S. with its City of Heroes online games. Starcraft by Blizzard is so widely played in South Korea that two TV channels broadcast Starcraft matches between professional players.
Massively Multiplayer Online servers, based in Asia, will tap into a broadband nation. Can Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore defend its crown over the next few years?
Do the numbers.
The Open Grid Forum and GlobusWORLD today provided a preview of next week’s GridWorld, taking place September 11-15, 2006 at the Washington Convention Center, Washington D.C. The Conference will feature commercial benefits of grid computing, with keynotes from industry leaders and a showcase of the leading companies.
Tony Parisi, co-inventor of the VRML 3D standard, is also co-inventor of 3-D for the World Wide Web (Web3D), and co-chair of the Extensible 3D (X3D) Specification, the new standard for Web3D graphics. In August of 2006, Media Machines launched Ajax3d.org as an open industry body to foster Ajax3D development. You can view and interact with 3D content and virtual worlds on the Web using the free Flux Player or Octaga Plugin (below).
Second Life, created by Linden Labs has competition from other virtual worlds such as Multiverse and Bigworld Technology, as well as open source platforms like Uni-Verse.org.
The Media Grid provides digital media delivery and processing services for a new generation of networked applications. Built using Internet and Web standards, the Media Grid combines Quality of Service (QoS) and broadcast features with distributed parallel processing capabilities.
If a Health University really wanted a $35 million Petaflops supercomputer, perhaps all they need to do is provide 20 schools with 500 PS3s, each. That totals 10,000 PS3′s — a Petaflops for $5-6 million. Grants could cover half the cost. The remaining ($3M) could be split between schools and the supercomputer host. WiMAX might link schools into The Grid.
Perhaps Folding@Home, running on a PS-3, could be the start of something big.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Remote Ocean Viewer, Googleplex in Oregon, Brainstorm, West Coast Grid, Grid Becomes Self-Aware, Dataveillance, iGrid 2005, Big Science Projects, Oceanographic Dead Zone, The Global Grid, The Global Hub, Unwired Countries, Taipei Unwired, Gollum Blows Hollywood, Transnational Media Production, Outsourcing US, Sony’s Cell Comes Alive, Grid Becomes Self-Aware, Creating an International Zone, West Coast Grid, Unreal Games, XBoxLive: 1M subs by June?, X-Box + IBM Chips, Playstation2 Goes Grid, Telepresence Now!, Grid Conference, GIG-BE, Multi-Player Frontier, Korean Gaming, Sensor Nets, Meshing at Intel, and Subducting The Zone.
[...] Related DailyWireless articles include Municipal Wireless Flash Applications, Microsoft’s 3D Photo Flyby, Supercomputer Cells, Microsoft Buying Vexcel, Cities as Game Grids, True Crime, WinHEC 2006, The 19 inch Earthbook, 3D Cities, On Mt. Saint Helens, EZ Photo Mapping and City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup. [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » Microsoft’s Amazing Virtual Earth on November 6th, 2006