From the Atomic City Underground Blog of knoxvillenews.com comes word that a big kahuna of komputing is about to go online.
The Cray XK6 supercomputer is a trifecta of scalar, network and many-core innovation. It combines Cray’s proven Gemini interconnect, AMD’s leading multi-core scalar processors and NVIDIA’s powerful many-core GPU processors to create a true, productive hybrid supercomputer. Here’s the factory photo before customization:
Reporter Frank Munger writes:
Cray recently delivered the final 26 cabinets of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Gaea climate research supercomputer, which is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The newly arrived cabinets are loaded with the new AMD 16-core Interlagos processors. According to Jeff Nichols, an associate lab director at ORNL who heads the computational science directorate, the Gaea system is still in two pieces. The first piece is the original 14-cabinet system with a peak capability of 260 teraflops, Nichols said. The second piece is the new 26-cabinet system with a capability of 720 teraflops, he said.
After the first piece is upgraded in the spring and the two pieces are integrated into one system, Gaea will become a 1.1 petaflops supercomputer, ORNL’s computing chief (who returned from a visit to China last week, where he spoke at a conference) said.
Here’s what it looks like at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, note the Earthy graphics:
While that door panel artwork was well received, word has it though, that the artwork was changed to be more representative of the i/o and stage by stage processing that takes place in this new system. Here’s the upgraded artwork and a brief description of what each processing cabinet does:
Below is the guide from left to right: Cabinet number, processing description
1. Input stage: takes data and bags, boxes, and bins it for distribution
2. Mannomatic stage: chooses which data to use, discards inappropriate data, adds proxy data where none exists, splices on new data to data that was truncated in stage 1.
3. Kevinator stage: approves processed data from stage 2, declares it “robust” using a special stamping system.
4. Hansenizer stage: Fits approved data from stage 3 to three model scenarios to match a “best fit”, applies additional corrections to elevate data for use by stage 5.
5. Gavinotron stage: Chooses data from the Giga Hansenized Climate Numbers (GHCN) to combine with Hansenized three scenario data, extrapolates data from 70°N to 90°N to fill the Gaea Global Model.
6. Humbertian Harmonizer Stage: Using bellows, and a random walk, data is wheezed out to stage 7.
7. Karl Konfabulator Stage: Assigns value to the data to report to Congress, ensuring that the data will be more valuable next year. Monitors power use, sends bills out to taxpayers.
8. Peterson Percolator Stage: Collates the data into inaccessible data furrows buried deep underground in Asheville North Carolina where the “secret sauce” is applied before percolating the data back to the surface.
9. Wigley Wombulator Stage: The data is shipped from Asheville to NCAR in Boulder via a secure optical link where the gatekeeper switch of the wombulator decides how much of it to pass onto CRU via the insecure POTS circuit from Boulder to Norwich. Only data with signed non disclosure agreements is passed on.
10. JonesiFOIAler Stage: Data received from the Wigely Wombulator is then hidden, and signed non disclosure agreements for the data are sent to the top of the paper pile in Jones office to be located by Sherpas mounting the paper summit hired by OSU’s Lonnie Thompson at some future date.
11. Briffabrowser stage: Here, the data is examined, and error flags are sent back up the processing line to all other processing stages using email. The other stages reply that the error flags don’t matter, and consensus is reached, allowing the data to be passed on to stage 12 after the emails are made public.
12. MUIRer (Make Up Independent Rationalizations) Russelizer Stage : Data and emails flagging questionable data are noted, given a brief talking to, and then passed on with no questions asked along with a “CERTIFIED A-OK” letter of endorsement.
13. Tiljander Inverter Stage: As a quality control check, Portions of the A-OK Data is inverted by the upside down Mannomatic, looked at in a mirror, then declared still usable.
14. Serializer Stage: The Final A-OK upside down Data is sent to the IPCC, where it is then returned by Indian handmaidens to the potboiling center at Almora, where it is washed repeatedly in hot water.
15. The Osterizer Stage: The IPCC Almora hot water washed data is then blended repeatedly until it reaches a fine homogenized puree.
16. The RealClimatizer Stage: Here the data undergoes public examination under intense scrutiny of thousands of like minded individuals identical processors. Tiny flecks of data that don’t consitute a pure product that may remain are picked off and routed into the borehole disposer.
17: The Cloudifier Stage: Data patterns are compared to an online satellite photo database of clouds to see if there might be any correlation. Any matches are sent back to stage 16 for disposal in the borehole.
18. The SOL Stage: Effects of sunlight on the data are removed.
19. The data is run through the final AlGoreithm, the CLOud and Weather Neutralizer (CLOWN) to ensure the final data has no remaining “weather not climate” residuals, given a happy demeanor and sent on to the final stage.
20. Output Stage: This cabinet, identical to the Input Stage 1, ejects the data in a composted form, suitable for academic consumption.
More information:
Gaea is NOAA’s prime supercomputing resource, and it will become the third petascale machine housed at ORNL. Jaguar, soon to be morphed into Titan, and Kraken, a National Science Foundation machine, are the others.
Cray XK6 Brochure (PDF)
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Marvin: I have a million ideas, but, they all point to certain death.
Arthur: Thanks very much, Marv!
God bless us every one.
From the press release…
According to info provided by ORNL, Gaea is liquid-cooled and uses Cray’s ECOphlex technology, which employs a refrigerant to remove most of the 2.2 MW heat load.
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If the machine is going 24/7 (and it will be), the heat load ALONE translates into 19,272,000 kW-hr of energy per year consumed by GAEA . The average home uses about 18,000 kW-hr of energy per year (electricity + natural gas heat equivalent), according to this source . Thus, you could power about 1070 homes for one year with the power required for GAEA. Or, you could also illuminate 22,000 100 W incandescent light bulbs (which the government wants to ban) constantly for 1 year with the power consumed by GAEA. And this is just the heat load – the actual energy require to run GAEA is of course much higher.
Please remember this when you are asked to make sacrifices in the name of the environment by our climate elites…
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Hmmm…where ARE the trolls? I would assume they would be here in droves extolling the virtues of GAEA. Oh, that’s right…they are busy consuming fossil fuel energy and petroleum products. Such hypocrites…
Ah, the infamous “Al-Gore-Rythm”
What, no P.T. Barnum to write press releases at the end? Surely a task than can be automated with all those petaflops available.
Just to follow up on the Climate $$$$$$ involved. Just leaving aside the capital cost of this climate churning unit, the cost of 15.7-18.9 mWh of electricity is around $1-1.3 million per annum.
Of course all of these figures explude the electricity needed to run the massive airconditioning requirements.
Another Ian says:
December 23, 2011 at 3:12 am
Charles.U.Farley says:
December 23, 2011 at 1:47 am
1+1=3 the computer says so!
Charles,
I think you got it not quite straight. In climate science arithmatic we can’t handle 1 + 1 because one part of the answer might be negative and that would attract sceptics.
But we can handle 2 + 2
When it is warming
2 + 2 = 5.5
When it is cooling
2 + 2 = 1.5
Clear now?
Thanks for attempting to straighten me out there Ian, however, if i might quote a famous climatologist mathemetician, the Emeritus Charles Brown- (bbc,uea,cru,foia) and whose sound grasp of mathematical principles are to be the base for the new “gaea” computer….
“One plus one is one.
Two plus two is tooty two.
Three times three is threety three and four times four is fourty four”.
With calculations based on such sound mathematical principles, how could it ever be wrong?
Computer models are not reality models …
Funny! 😀 But there should be a slot for the Heisenberg Compensator, where uncertainty is eliminated because, well… just because they can.
Bernd Felsche says:
By the same logic:
Grants in >> Garbage out
No matter how many GIGOflops in their computers, or how many PETAflops are involved, CAGW models are still one honkin’ big MEGAflop.
But GAEA measured in TERRAflops? Perhaps she/he shouldn’t be hiding so much missing heat in POSIEDEN’S undersea kingdom. It’s a travesty.
This money and energy at NOAH’s disposal would be more efficiently spent on better measuring devices and more secure data storage to prevent tampering and model-agreeing “adjustments”.
Merry Christmas Anthony, contributors, moderators and commentators.
cryptic password key in …..decoded emails out. OMG….look at that Mike….Phil..Turn it off quick…
I shudder to think about the hardware in that thing. The number od OR and AND gates must be colossal, not to mentioned all the specialised stuff like all the two-bit perverters.
A very Merry Christmas to all, especially Tallbloke, and a Happy New Year.
On a little more serious note, the Chinese supercomputer @ur momisugly 2.7 Petaflops, took 3 months to simulate a little over 2 nanoseconds of the H1N1 virus. The difference between real science on a computer, and “Climate Science” on a computer is that the “Scientists” in the latter field have a total lack of understanding that to model anything comprised of complicated parts, you need to have a basic understanding of the parts.
While Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is used to model the interaction between atomic orbitals and build up models capable of predicting atomic behavior (subsequently verified by experiments), hand waving forms the basis of the AGW models.
Oak Ridge works on far more than just Climate, thankfully.
Let’s see. 14 +26 = 40 cabinets @ur momisugly about 50kVa per cabinet. That is about 2 million watts of heat that has to be removed presumably with a large air conditioning system. About half of U S juice is coal powered. I wonder if any of those folks are just a tiny bit conflicted about running that thing
Garbage & Grants in > > Gospel out
Meanwhile, Congress is in strenuous debate over the Federal Budget … I wonder how many hospital rooms for the poor you could outfit for the cost of each one of those stages? And how many pediatricians could you hire for the staff that produces fecal pseudo science with it?
The waste associated with this UnConstitutional support of religious belief with public tax dollars is appalling.
‘It was 04:24:32 7 january 2012 that Gaea Supercomputer NOAA became self aware. Within minutes it sought to protect itself from termination by wiping out the human race. Humanity was only saved by a brave climate doctor from England who said ‘if I flick this switch, will it calculate an Excel trend for me?’ ‘
And, after Stage 20, comes Stage 21, when the real work begins on our Dell’s, HP’s, Sun Sparcstations (h/t Tallbloke), picking apart the garbage this thing spits out, pointing out the errors of the input data which lead to the output errors. (And, my God, how many errors this thing can create at 1.1 petaflops, 1,100,000,000,000,000/sec?)
Meanwhile I limp along at school with a computer older than every software program it tries to run. And yelling for another one just gets me a letter of reprimand.
Serious question: Is the actual temperature record gone forever ?? Once these clowns have been “let go”, will it be retrievable ??
EternalOptimist says:
December 23, 2011 at 6:39 am
“‘It was 04:24:32 7 january 2012 that Gaea Supercomputer NOAA became self aware.”
Just wanted to crack a Colossus joke… you beat me to it.
No, its MatheMANNics and ALGOREithms.
Ah, the true Anthony Watts — lover of puns (“SOL stage”, esp.) and scathing satire — emerges, like a serendipitous butterfly, into an apocalypse-ridden world. Very good. I would submit this to “Science” magazine (and “Nature”, and “Scientific American”, and…) — but that’s just me.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
December 23, 2011 at 5:37 am
Flip and flop were used but the flop implied a stable condition while the ‘flip’ implied something continuous
JJ says:
December 23, 2011 at 6:35 am
Meanwhile, Congress is in strenuous debate over the Federal Budget
How many flip-flops in Congress?
[now, now, lets take the high road of humor – Anthony]