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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Anybody remember the Forbin Project?
I am Colossus.
What could go wrong?
Where do they keep the printer?
Does anyone know how much GAEA cost? This link refers to yet another supercomputer center funded by stimulus money from 2009 – 2010:
“The supercomputer, being paid for with $27.6 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will be housed at NOAA’s Environmental Security Computing Center. It’s seen as both a boon to NOAA’s climate program and north-central West Virginia’s high-tech reputation, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.”
“The center was established by NOAA and the General Services Administration, which took out a 20-year lease on the 54,000 square-foot property. Renovation work is expected to begin in January, with completion scheduled for fall 2011.”
“NOAA has stepped up its climate modeling, in part fueled by $170 million in stimulus funding.”
—
My guess would be that GAEA was funded in large part through STIMULUS money! So while the US was suffering it’s worst recession in a generation, climate fat cats at NOAA were stuffing themselves full of stimulus ca$h to pay for new computers for themselves…
Please remember this next year in November…
PS: WHERE ARE THE TROLLS? ARE THEY AFRAID OF THIS TOPIC???
You can see what’s coming down the line, can’t you – a Cray Mars, a Cray Venus, Cray Jupiter, and so on; and to quote Kipling, “each and every one of them is right”.
Anthony damn you I am just glad I had finished my coffee before seeing that second picture!!!!!!!
That has got to be the funniest single picture that I have seen all year. Some skeptical blog has just got to adopt that as its masthead.
Anthony, a fund raising idea, turn that second picture with GIGO into one of those demotivational posters!!
How about a contest for the best caption for it!
I will laugh about this one for days…..
Paul Marko says:
Where do they keep the printer?
Their Mann-operated HD (hide-the-decline) printing press is located in the NOAA repenthouse, together with skeptic-burning boilers consuming 2000 Mega-Watts’ per hour, and thus supporting sustainable carbon printing of 12 Terra-grants per month.
Whoever did the Photoshop artwork of the ” team” onto the Cray computer should be commended…very nice work!
I suspect that all the output from it will be a flop.
Anthony that is a monument. Brilliant idea. Brilliant artwork. Brilliant lines. How the heck do you find the time and inspiration to do it all???
Merry Christmas, and take time off please.
And season’s greetings to all. The darkest part of the year is a time celebrated for the turning of the Sun in many cultures, not just Christian. A time to enjoy, gather together, remember and reflect.
I like to think that we are all shining sunlight into Science at this dark time in Science’s history. The sunlight that really governs climate, of course.
What we have here is the world’s most costly dumpster.
Garbage in, garbage out, and based on what we know of so much of NOAA’s climate research we can assume that will be the case.
If one were of a conspiratorial bent one could even imagine that its most important role will be to find ever-better-hidden places to hide data adjustments…
reminds me of the time Apple installed their Cray, when asked what he thought about Apple using his computer to design the next gen Apple Seymoure replied that it was “….OK with him as he was using an Apple mac to design the next gen Cray”
This won’t challenge the #1 supercomputer, as measured by the folks at top500.org. That one is 10 Pflops, uses 705024 processing cores and consumes 12.7 Mw.
The top ranked Cray there is now #3 a DOE system at Oak Ridge and is 1.8 Pflops, and consumes 7.0 Mw.
#6 is is a system similar to this one and is a DOE system at Los Alamos.
So, a very big system, but nowhere close to the biggest.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
December 23, 2011 at 5:37 am
Disko Troop says:
The term is most accurately “FLOPS” – Floating Point Operations per Second.
A flip-flop is a one bit memory element, it takes a lot of them to do a floating point operation. There are several types RS (reset/set latch), D (single bit input with clocked latch), and JK (dual input, though only one presents the data to save). US/Massachusetts joke – I call the JK the “John Kerry Flip-Flop.
They have to power it with solar, is my only condition.
Skiphil says:
December 23, 2011 at 8:19 am
This is clearly a tremendous advance for climate science and humanity, but the most important question is,
will it enable Phil Jones to calculate a trend in Excel?>>>
No. That is a desk top utility and the problem can only be mitigated by removing the nut behind the keyboard.
On the other hand, it should be able to decrypt FOIA.zip in about an hour.
btw, should we be concerned about the number of posters who don’t seem to realize this is a parody? Or maybe it will give Al Gore ideas for his next great production, the new CAGW supercomputer to save the planet.
Yes, I know that sometimes “art imitates life” so well that the line is blurry to indistinguishable, and that a lot of activities by The Team and friends are beyond parody. But still…..
To be completely successful it might need three more stages:
An FOIA “obstructificator”
A Climategate “outacontextimator”
and a Investigation “whitewashinator”
**********************************************************
Merry Christmas to Anthony and mods with thanks for a great year of interesting posts.
Seems that snarkyness is flowing freely today. Of course this close to Christmas maybe you all are hoping for coal in your stocking, just so you can burn it to mock the folks you disagree with.
I know it’s a joke and is actually rather clever. But considering the time of year wouldn’t it be better to turn the other cheek and pray that all of us, on both sides of the discussion, are granted greater wisdom, to both better understand this wonderful world and to act in a manner which improves it?
philincalifornia says:
December 23, 2011 at 6:58 am
Serious question: Is the actual temperature record gone forever ?? Once these clowns have been “let go”, will it be retrievable ??
___________________________________________________________________________
Hi Phil,
Problem: When you say “actual temperature record” you are referring to something that does not exist in the sense that you intend. I believe that in most cases the original station data still exists, but the CRU data that was deleted was which original data was used, and how were adjustments made. Evidently that information is gone forever, unless FOIA was helpful enough to save a copy. ;-> GISS actually stores the original data AND the adjustments that they have made, However, there has been some concern recently that there is a team over at NOAA that is “adjusting” historical temperature data, but it looks like that data is already in the public domain, and the “adjustments” can be examined by any interested third party.
Other Problem, Both of the GISS and CRU datasets have taken years of work and millions of dollars to produce. Both have been under the thumb of people who appear to be political activists that require the datasets to show warming to support the positions that they have staked out for themselves. Recently, a team attempted to create a new temperature dataset BEST, but unfortunately eco activists appear to have corrupted that one as well.
On the bright side. At this stage, even with the flawed datasets and other antics by members of the “team”, it is becoming obvious to anyone who cares to look that every single TESTABLE prediction made by the supporters of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) have proven false. Furthermore, no one has ever found the mid-tropospheric “hot” spot required by AGW. It is not there. Therefore AGW theory has failed.
Down side. Billions of dollers (probably Trillions) have been wasted to “combat” AGW. More resources are being wasted every day. We have very serious real world problems that are being neglected while we combat the fantasy bogey-man that is AGW. It will take several more years for the next stage of the process to get rolling. The search for the guilty and punish the innocent phase if I remember correctly. 🙁
“Playstation X released in time for [non-religious generic wintertime post-solstice celebration] – for government and university players only”
R. Gates says:
December 23, 2011 at 10:01 am
Whoever did the Photoshop artwork of the ” team” onto the Cray computer should be commended…very nice work!
————————————-
“team”? Cabal would be more accurate.
zeke says
“They have to power it with solar, is my only condition.”
Surely it would be better powered by wind. Plus the inevitable UPS……… 🙂
R Barker says:
December 23, 2011 at 6:26 am
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
You don’t understand. Reduced carbon footprints are for the little people like us, the Chosen Ones are exempt. Beside I’m sure Algore and his cronies will be more than eager to sell them phantom carbon offsets for a few billion to cover their activities in perpetuity.
So now the miscreants can create terranonsense at an even faster rate. Don’t forget, that Einstein said that it only takes one (1) contrary result to disprove any of the rubbish this peta zeta terra flop creates out of pure phantasy.
“”””” Ric Werme says:
December 23, 2011 at 10:29 am
This won’t challenge the #1 supercomputer, as measured by the folks at top500.org. That one is 10 Pflops, uses 705024 processing cores and consumes 12.7 Mw.
The top ranked Cray there is now #3 a DOE system at Oak Ridge and is 1.8 Pflops, and consumes 7.0 Mw.
……………..
Why do I find the word “flop” so appropriate when talking about super computers? Maybe it is just a British thing.
++++
Odd, but we are stuck with it. It is from the days of bistable multivibrators that we built in the electronics shop at school. “””””
Well to be pedantic, a “flip-flop” is NOT a bistable multivibrator; that would be a “flip-flip”.
A flip-flop is a mono-stable multivibrator, and has only ONE stable state. You flip it to its metastable state and it flops back in its own good time. Then of course there is the unstable multivibrator, which has NO stable states and two meta-stable states, which it alternates between. The two meta-stable states can have different lifetimes, depending on the temporary state memory time constants. That gizmo, is of course a flop-flop, and needs no help from us.
Actually, my digital electronics guru Professor, who was decidedly British, never ever used the term flip-flop, and called them xxx-multivibrators (of whatever species). That guy knew the exact physical cause (short of free quarks) for every single bend or kink in the switching waveforms of any kind of multivibrator; well make that “valve” multivibrators.
Poor chap built a decimal counting chain of bistables; by buying up every single 12AT7 in New Zealand, and building a huge rack of equipment to digitize the signals from the Project Vanguard satellite when it was launched. It was to broadcast on 40 mHz.
Well PV, became project rearguard, with all the launch vehicles, preferring to bore through the earth to China, so when in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, which beeped on 20 MHz, the prof had to improvise somewhat. Sadly he forgot that the incoming audio Doppler signals were going to be extremely noisy; and he wasn’t much of an analog signal detection chap, so his whirlygig triggered on all the trash noise, and he never ever did get any digitized measures of the Doppler frequencies.
But I’ll give him that; he definitely knew his valve multivibrators.
Actually, I made the first prediction (in Auckland) for when the public could go outside and see Sputnik, simply by listening to it on the radio (bunch of us listened). I made the mistake of telling an Auckland Star reporter, when I answered his phone call to the radio-physics department; and he printed it on the front page of the 6pm edition. Millions of Aucklanders, went up One-Tree hill, and Mt Eden to watch for it at 8pm, and it went right across the zenith exactly on schedule. So I didn’t go look till the second night. You think I would believe any prediction; excuse me, that’s projection, that I had made; not a chance. But I got lucky once.
timg56 says:
December 23, 2011 at 11:08 am
Seems that snarkyness is flowing freely today. Of course this close to Christmas maybe you all are hoping for coal in your stocking, just so you can burn it to mock the folks you disagree with.
I know it’s a joke and is actually rather clever. But considering the time of year wouldn’t it be better to turn the other cheek and pray that all of us, on both sides of the discussion, are granted greater wisdom, to both better understand this wonderful world and to act in a manner which improves it?
No, it’s actually better to use the principle of overwhelming farce. Shortens the conflict, and makes it more fun.