The Barcelona Supercomputer Center is make one of thegreenest high - performance computerson the major planet , but if Alex Ramirez perplex his agency , it could also be the most powerful .
Ramirez , a manager with the center , is in the midst of build a raw supercomputer , called Mont - Blanc , that will use the same kind of grim - power chips that you may determine in tablets and smartphones today . Starting next calendar month , his team will start assembling the first Mont - Blanc prototype using Nvidia ’s Tegra 3 processors rather of the RISC or Intel x86 - compatible processors that are used on virtually all of today ’s supercomputer . The Tegra 3 will handle communications between different parts of the system while the factual number craunch will be done by yet - to - be - determined low-down - ability multicore Nvidia graphics CPU like to theGeForce 520MX .
By June , Ramirez plans to prevail benchmark for the wide followedTop500 supercomputer inclination , which measures how well data processor perform a supercomputing benchmark political program make out as Linpack . But Ramirez says that he ’s get his eye on another target : theGreen 500 list . This list ranks computers by king efficiency , not raw carrying out . “ There we have a bun in the oven to be in the top 10 , ” Ramirez says .
Last November , the top computing gadget on the Green 500 – a prototpye of IBM ’s Blue Gene computer at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center – could do just over 2 quadrillion computation per second ( 2 gigaflops ) per watt . When the Mont - Blanc image is up and running next calendar month , it should be closer to 7 gigaflops per W .
Ramirez is tapping into one of the coolest trends in supercomputing : the drive to habituate low - great power mobile and artwork processors to do high - power computing .
Because battery life history is so significant in mobile devices , chips like the Tegra 3 focus on using as little power as potential . The Mont - Blanc Tegra 3 chips will probably run in the 4 - W range . That ’s nothing compare to an Intel Xeon chip , which can easily cauterise between 50 and 100 Isaac Watts .
The whoremaster is that supercomputer programs have to be rewrite for take advantage of the GPUs and the Tegra 3 . Nvidia has tried to help that along by resign a software growth kit that helps multitude like Ramirez write program for its chipsets .
Ramirez carry to be on June ’s Top500 with a computer that uses between 2,000 and 4,000 processors . “ Instead of using very few – but very bad performance – CPU … we ’re go to be using a lot of very down - power – but mediate performance – processors , ” he say .
But matter get really interesting when Nvidia start ship successor to the Tegra 3 , include a raw 64 - bit chip ground on a newCortex A15design from ARM Holdings . That central processor will be able-bodied to take on some of the supercomputing workload being done by Ramirez ’s GPUs right now and it could give him a real discovery in performance : four - times the figurer processing for essentially the same 4 watt of power .
But to take reward of this next - multiplication of poker chip , the Barcelona Team will need to get their software finely tune up for this new and unproven architecture . They require to hightail it the Linpack bench mark used by the Top500 group , but they ’ll also need to rewrite the research programs used by the university ’s scientists : software system that simulates intricate chemical and physics problem . That ’s going to be the tricky part . If his bet pays off , though , Ramirez think that this machine could pave the way for the most sinewy organisation on the Top500 list by 2017 . “ We are working now toward a automobile that could be deploy five eld from now , ” he say .
That system wouldprobably be in the 200 Petaflop range – or about 20 times as hefty as the top supercomputer in the world today , Japan ’s K Computer .
For all of the excitement about Mont - Blanc in the supercomputing world , ARM is rubicund about the project . It sees big sawhorse in all of those smartphones and tablets that consumer are grease one’s palms – not in geeky supercomputer .
Last month , ARM chair Simon Segars differentiate us that the Barcelona Supercomputing project was “ interesting , ” but he downplayed the supercomputing market . “ supercomputer , for ARM , is not a eminent bulk market place , ” he say . “ It ’s not something we spend a lot of meter talking about . Ours is a job that is royal family and unit of measurement drive , so we ’re interested in high - mass markers . ”
Cade Metz contribute to this story .
Photo : Barcelona Supercomputer Center
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