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13.11.2012

US Titan supercomputer clocked as world's fastest

The top two spots on the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers have both been captured by the US.

The last time the country was in a similar position was three years ago.

The fastest machine - Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee - is an upgrade of Jaguar, the system which held the top spot in 2009.

The supercomputer will be used to help develop more energy-efficient engines for vehicles, model climate change and research biofuels.

It can also be rented to third-parties, and is operated as part of the US Department of Energy's network of research labs.

The Top 500 list of supercomputers was published by Hans Muer, professor of computer science at Mannheim, who has been keeping track of developments since 1986. It was released at the SC12 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Mixed processors

Titan leapfrogged the previous champion IBM's Sequoia - which is used to carry out simulations to help extend the life of nuclear weapons - thanks to its mix of central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) technologies.

According to the Linpack benchmark it operates at 17.59 petaflop/sec - the equivalent of 17,590 trillion calculations per second.

GPU processors are designed to carry out hundreds of calculations in parallel

The benchmark measures real-world performance - but in theory the machine can boost that to a "peak performance" of more than 20 petaflop/sec.

To achieve this the device has been fitted with 18,688 Tesla K20x GPU modules made by Nvidia to work alongside its pre-existing CPUs.

Traditionally supercomputers relied only on CPUs.

CPU cores are designed to carry out a single set of instructions at a time, making them well suited for tasks in which the answer to one calculation is used to work out the next.

GPU cores are typically slower at carrying out individual calculations, but make up for this by being able to carry out many at the same time. This makes them best suited for "parallellisable jobs" - processes that can be broken down into several parts that are then run simultaneously.

Mixing CPUs and GPUs together allows the most appropriate core to carry out each process. Nvidia said that in most instances its GPUs now carried out about 90% of Titan's workload.

"Basing Titan on Tesla GPUs allows Oak Ridge to run phenomenally complex applications at scale, and validates the use of 'accelerated computing' to address our most pressing scientific problems," said Steve Scott, chief technology officer of the GPU accelerated computing business at Nvidia.

The other top systems included:

  • Fujitsu's K computer at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, which was in third spot.
  • IBM's BlueGene/Q Mira computer at Argonne National Library, near Chicago in the US, which came fourth.
  • Another IBM BlueGene/Q system, called Juqueen, at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany - Europe's fastest - which came fifth.

Out of the top 500 computers, 62 used a mix of CPU and GPU processors. Six months ago the figure was 58.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20272810




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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.

The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies. 

The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.

A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.

The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.

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The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
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Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning  bodily life. Such technologies will  greatly enlarge  the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make  all  kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.

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This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive!  Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.

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