New Supercomputer Works 1,000 Times Faster
Scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory announced Sunday that they have developed a supercomputer that can solve complex scientific problems 1,000 times faster than a normal computer, a rate far faster than scientists believed possible.
The new “hypercube massively parallel supercomputer” consists of 1,024 processors--each the microchip equivalent of a single, ordinary computer--linked so that they work simultaneously, or “in parallel,” on separate parts of one massive problem, Sandia scientists said.
The problems were worked out on a parallel supercomputer called an NCUBE-10 made by NCUBE Corp. of Beaverton, Ore.
Long-Range Forecasts
The advance opens the way for scientists to tackle some of their most intricate problems, such as weather prediction. Accurate long-range forecasts must take into account thousands of detailed, continually changing phenomena.
The new supercomputer could also deal with other practical problems such as how pollutants are dispersed in the atmosphere or coolants are circulated in a nuclear power plant.
“We think it’s a very exciting result,” Bill Gear, head of the department of computer science at the University of Illinois, told the Associated Press.
Parallel computers are envisioned as the centerpiece of the next stage of progress in supercomputing. A top-of-the-line Cray supercomputer, often considered the most powerful model on the commercial market, contains four parallel processors. Cray has designed a 16-processor model, but it is not yet being sold.
Experimental computers with up to 256 processors have been developed at various research centers, but none have achieved speedups in proportion to the number of processors, which is what the Sandia scientists said they have done.
The Sandia computer can solve a large problem more than 1,000 times faster than an ordinary computer could. The feat demolishes a long-accepted belief that there is a limit to how much speedup is possible with parallel computers. It had been thought that improvements of 50- to 100-fold were about the best that could be achieved.
The new computer was asked to calculate the detailed stresses and strains throughout a solid metal beam under a load, a standard type of test for supercomputers. The Sandia machine completed the test in a week, 1,019 times faster than the 20 years it would have taken an ordinary computer.
