Britain's Fastest Supercomputer Unveiled

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The University of Edinburgh unveiled HECToR today, Britain’s fastest supercomputer. According to the article, researchers will tap into its power to study ocean currents, build tiny parts for advanced computers and make warplanes less visible to radar.

With the power of 12,000 desktop PCs, the mammoth machine called HECToR is the country's fastest computer and one of the most powerful in Europe. It can make 63 million calculations each second, allowing scientists to conduct research into everything from climate change to new medicines.
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Exactly what type of calculations can it do 63 million per second?

How many simple additions can a Q6600 @ 3.68Ghz do per second?

I'm talking 4 threads of a loop of 1+1.

Or how about simple multiplies or divides (bit shifts)?

You can't really guage performance from such a huge blanket statement.
 
NickS said:
So America's is faster, right?
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If that thing can only do 63 million calculations per second, then America's supercomputers are roughly 8-10 million times faster. Maybe some fact-checking is in order by the editors of that paper....
 
Yeah um. What's a "calculation"?

It's also very heavy. 113 million pounds is big even for a "super" computer.
 
Edit: the British supercomp does 63 teraflops, so the report was only 6 orders of magnitude off. Blue Gene/L in the US remains comfortably in the lead at half a petaflops.
 
More technical information

For the lazy:
HECToR contains over 5000 AMD 2.8GHZ dual core Opteron processors the peak performance is 63Tflops. The total memory of HECToR is 33TB (6GB per processor)!! The storage used is high performance RAID disks with a total capacity of 576TB. HECToR uses Unicos/lc as the operating system and has two components - compute node linux for compute nodes and linux distro(SUSE Linux) for service nodes. The communication network uses 6 sets of Seastar2 chip based system and each link offers bi-directional bandwidth of 7.6GB/sec!
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imo, they woulda had a more powerful computer for cheaper if they had bought Core 2's :p
 
cesium666 said:
Floating point operations
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I'd certainly hope not, considering Big Blue can exceed 3 petaFLOPS, and somehow I doubt Big Blue is nearly 50,000 times as powerful as this computer.

Pretty sure it's a typo. 63 million million (63Tera) makes a lot more sense.
 
RoffleCopter said:
imo, they woulda had a more powerful computer for cheaper if they had bought Core 2's :p
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they run too hot

Nemesis999 said:
I'd certainly hope not, considering Big Blue can exceed 3 petaFLOPS, and somehow I doubt Big Blue is nearly 50,000 times as powerful as this computer.

Pretty sure it's a typo. 63 million million (63Tera) makes a lot more sense.
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it is a typo, but calculation for sure means floating point ops
oh, and there is no current blue gene installation capable of 3 petaflops. the only bluegene/p installations at the moment are in the low hundreds of teraflops
 
Crysis? Heck with that, I bet you could store a ton of porn and do it in 3D :)
 
According to the article, researchers will tap into its power to study ocean currents, build tiny parts for advanced computers and make warplanes less visible to radar.
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I gurantee you this is what sold them the contract (bolded)
 
Somebody needs to go to england and borg this thing so we can add it to our folding team.
 
Renegade_Azzy said:
I doubt it is their fastest... this is the fastest they will tell you about :)
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it's not really that easy to hide a massive supercomputer installation :rolleyes: especially in the financial reports for the companies building them
 
cesium666 said:
it's not really that easy to hide a massive supercomputer installation :rolleyes: especially in the financial reports for the companies building them
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They managed to hide the SR-71 pretty good for decades, and that was a multi billion dollar contract with hundreds of big names involved ;) Lets not forget, A-51, B2, F22, etc etc.


A computer is easy to hide, it appears as a normal datacenter.
 
cesium666 said:
it's not really that easy to hide a massive supercomputer installation :rolleyes: especially in the financial reports for the companies building them
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It is when they're classified projects. There are plenty of methods used to obfuscate the actual nature of a classified project.
 
Ockie said:
They managed to hide the SR-71 pretty good for decades, and that was a multi billion dollar contract with hundreds of big names involved ;) Lets not forget, A-51, B2, F22, etc etc.

A computer is easy to hide, it appears as a normal datacenter.
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Nemesis999 said:
It is when they're classified projects. There are plenty of methods used to obfuscate the actual nature of a classified project.
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I stand corrected. Oops :(
 
To be honest, I doubt this is the fastest super computer in the UK, I personally think this is just the fastest civilian one that is know about, as I am sure the supercomputer or computers that are used for Intelligence collecting from every single phone, landline or cell, radio transmissions, all emails, and internet access and voip transmissions that are all scanned and categorized within seconds by the Intelligence system called Echelon which looks for "key words and phrases" would be the fastest due to the amount of information it has to sift through 24 hours a day, its basically a never ending process and whether this is true or not but supposedly some parts of it are based in old nuclear bomb shelters to stop it from being attacked due to how important it is for internal? and external security and those nuke shelters that parts of it may be kept in are huge so it is very probable their is some huge setup that is faster than the supercomputer being spoken about.

I dont know what the true setup of Echelon actually is but I know its jointly run by the US, so I reckon it would be very powerful, but since its classified as top secret then its doubtful we will ever get to know exactly what it comprises of anytime soon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/503224.stm
 
The US gov't uses all your folding rigs as their supercomputer cluster. ahaha. :p
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
To be honest, I doubt this is the fastest super computer in the UK, I personally think this is just the fastest civilian one that is know about, as I am sure the supercomputer or computers that are used for Intelligence collecting from every single phone, landline or cell, radio transmissions, all emails, and internet access and voip transmissions that are all scanned and categorized within seconds by the Intelligence system called Echelon which looks for "key words and phrases" would be the fastest due to the amount of information it has to sift through 24 hours a day, its basically a never ending process and whether this is true or not but supposedly some parts of it are based in old nuclear bomb shelters to stop it from being attacked due to how important it is for internal? and external security and those nuke shelters that parts of it may be kept in are huge so it is very probable their is some huge setup that is faster than the supercomputer being spoken about.

I dont know what the true setup of Echelon actually is but I know its jointly run by the US, so I reckon it would be very powerful, but since its classified as top secret then its doubtful we will ever get to know exactly what it comprises of anytime soon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/503224.stm
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I was always under the impression that all of Echelon's servers were based in Fort Meade, and all collected data from around the world was routed there
 
I couldnt say, but I wouldnt just think that the info is captured then sent to the states without the UK having some of the same tech to do that same job based here.

For some reason the UK keeps stuff like this a closely guarded secret, ok people know about it and know the locations of some of its places etc, but what it actually comprises of and what capabilities it does have wont be given out in public, also not long ago I was reading an article that says that their are many rumours about Echelon outside and even inside the Echelon community and most are just that, rumours, supposedly only a handful of people really know the full scope of what it is, where its based, what it comprises and what it can do, the rest only know certain parts that only make up a fraction of the entire project.

But I do know their was talk about old government nuclear bunkers converted to hold shitloads of new telecommunications technology and banks of computers, we wont get anything from the UK government as trying to get anything from them regarding this Echelon project is like pulling teeth as their usual response is their is no such thing, but I think it would be safe to say that Britain does have its own supercomputers to decipher incoming data related to the project, maybe just a fraction of the entire amount of data that the project is capable of and the rest being forwarded to meade?, Maybe the info goes to GCHQ in cornwall ? but rest assured the UK does have local access to it without having to go cap in hand to the NSA to ask for whatever info it/we needed, especially since the technology is based all over our country in those huge golfball buildings, their is one not far from where I live and I live as far from harrogate england as you can get basically, so I would really think that its a cert that we also have our own servers to sift through the info that is collected.

We have more chance of finding out the exact process from the US government alot quicker than we do from the UK government, as shit like that basically isnt spoken about in this country at all, well not to any degree that is.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
To be honest, I doubt this is the fastest super computer in the UK, I personally think this is just the fastest civilian one that is know about, as I am sure the supercomputer or computers that are used for Intelligence collecting from every single phone, landline or cell, radio transmissions, all emails, and internet access and voip transmissions that are all scanned and categorized within seconds by the Intelligence system called Echelon which looks for "key words and phrases" would be the fastest due to the amount of information it has to sift through 24 hours a day, its basically a never ending process and whether this is true or not but supposedly some parts of it are based in old nuclear bomb shelters to stop it from being attacked due to how important it is for internal? and external security and those nuke shelters that parts of it may be kept in are huge so it is very probable their is some huge setup that is faster than the supercomputer being spoken about.

I dont know what the true setup of Echelon actually is but I know its jointly run by the US, so I reckon it would be very powerful, but since its classified as top secret then its doubtful we will ever get to know exactly what it comprises of anytime soon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/503224.stm
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Ooookay there Mel-Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory. Why would they put extremely powerful computing megaclusters in ancient nuclear bomb shelters? Those things aren't exactly wired to the gills with the multiple OC192s it would take to process an entire country's entire output of data across all media that you say they do. And it wouldn't exactly just escape public attention if they all of a sudden did lay all of that fiber at an unused site. And the whole "megapowerful server 300 yards beneath the Earth's surface" stuff is BS; what would that protect against? An army of spindly hackers beating the switches with folding chairs?
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Finally, someone who recognises that Britain/UK isnt just England and that England isnt Scotland.

you sir deserve a beer and am buying...
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I'm not American, before you get excited. I know the difference because I live here.
 
finalgt said:
Ooookay there Mel-Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory. Why would they put extremely powerful computing megaclusters in ancient nuclear bomb shelters? Those things aren't exactly wired to the gills with the multiple OC192s it would take to process an entire country's entire output of data across all media that you say they do. And it wouldn't exactly just escape public attention if they all of a sudden did lay all of that fiber at an unused site. And the whole "megapowerful server 300 yards beneath the Earth's surface" stuff is BS; what would that protect against? An army of spindly hackers beating the switches with folding chairs?
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Ok then, so where do you propose they put them ? They could put them in there for security, like MANY companies in the UK have done, so tell me exactly, why do you think that putting top secret stuff/data into disused nuclear bomb shelters is bullshit? because if I were to take your word for it then non of the companies that store their data in disused nuke bomb shelters that were sold to the public in the 90s wouldnt be used at all, but sadly for you they are doing extremely good business due in part to the security of the facility and the fact that companies will and have paid good money for their data to be secured in underground bunkers and this is just the public sector so what makes you think that the Ministry of Defense would be any different ?

Also, why would it attract attention if they laid some fibre ? fuk man the whole of the UK is being dug up for fibre to be laid in one place or another, so what would stand out ? because I wouldnt blink an eye if I saw BT digging up the streets, so if I dont blink an eye when their digging up the streets to lay cables then why would you think that laying cables in a military base that is secluded and huge would bring that to public attention ? chances are no one apart from those who were doing it and those on the base would be any of the wiser, just because a nuclear bunker is unused, it doesnt mean to say that its not on military land and sealed off from the public and also their is many public nuclear bunkers that have been turned into museums which I have personally visited and even if they laid cables there nobody would fucking know because their in the country and surrounded by trees and they are made to look like a normal farm house which nobody who didnt know that it was a bunker would give 2 shits about if BT were laying cables there or not.

So yea, your little bullshit theory is pure stupidity at its best because you obviously dont know wtf your talking about in regards to whats happening in this country involving the uses of disused and sold nuke bunkers, so if its good for the credit card companies and alike to store their info on servers in old nuclear bunkers then why would you think that the Ministry of Defense wouldnt or couldnt do the same thing ? Also as I think I said before, that some of them in the last 10 years or so have been upgraded with new telecommunications equipment and pc equipment and one in particular got massively upgraded at the cost of hundreds of millions for all of a sudden for it to be classed as disused as soon as it was finished being upgraded ?, if I recall their was word of cray computers,I am not sure if the talk of crays was in that particular bunker or not, how true or untrue the talk of crays is I dont know and will probably never know, but yea, your right, I cant stop watching Conspiracy Theory :rolleyes:
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
With a nickname like Wally I had a feeling that you were from here.
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After spending 3 years in England and traveling around GB, I can definitely attest to the fact that Wales, Scotland and England are very different peoples.

I enjoyed my stay in each area very much. I went skiing in Scotland and the people in Edinburgh were very friendly. They made sure I had a great vacation, as did the great people in Wales. England was pretty good too, once I got away from the Air Base. London was a riot.

It's amazing how much difference there is in such a small area.
 
finalgt said:
Ooookay there Mel-Gibson-in-Conspiracy-Theory. Why would they put extremely powerful computing megaclusters in ancient nuclear bomb shelters? Those things aren't exactly wired to the gills with the multiple OC192s it would take to process an entire country's entire output of data across all media that you say they do. And it wouldn't exactly just escape public attention if they all of a sudden did lay all of that fiber at an unused site. And the whole "megapowerful server 300 yards beneath the Earth's surface" stuff is BS; what would that protect against? An army of spindly hackers beating the switches with folding chairs?
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lol. I guess you must not work at a large scale facility. We can drop over 100 lines of fiber and not a single contractor or company comes and ask "what's this all for"... we don't look like a datacenter and our building is built like a bunker. We might just as well be a millitary installation (who knows ;) )

I think you get the notion that the moment a supercomputer goes up, you need nuclear power plants, truckloads of fiber to the internet (not many supercomputer systems needs truckloads of connections to the internet), cooling towers, 1000' bunkers, armed guards and barbed wire.... It's simply not so. A supercomputer setup is nothing more than a bunch of cabinets in a facility such as a datacenter.... nothing special is needed.

I think you have been watching way too many movies.
 
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