63 billion calculations per second

This is not the actual machine. It is for illustration only 🙂

Software Applications Insight

February 01, 08
Calculate this – up close to the UK’s newest supercomputer
Few understand or have ever seen a supercomputer. But they do more than play chess these days.
By John E. Dunn, Techworld

They call it HECToR and it’s the latest and greatest of the UK’s supercomputers, a breed of machines that have evolved from their distant ancestors in the mainframe world of 1960’s cleanrooms to become one of the most important phenomena of modern computing.

Installed in a non-descript building in a wooded facility south of Edinburgh, it is run as open-access computing serviced by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPPC), a wing of the University of Edinburgh. Made up of a series of wardrobe-like Cray XT4 towers that sit beside one another in rows, HECToR (or High-End Computing Terascale Resource, to use its longer and less cuddly name), its creators will try to convince visitors that it is as beautiful as its £113 million ($220 million) project price tag would imply.

Come face to face with it for the first time, and what that hits you first is not its looks but its noise – a loud, steady boom of rushing air – the consequence of the beast’s immense thirst for cooling. Then you are swamped by the warm, dry air. It is imposing in an alien sort of way, like a massive fist that is no longer attached to a real body, but which continues to flex. Around it stand a small team of technicians in labcoats, who fuss over it like gardeners tending to a morbid rose.

Beyond the eerie charisma of a calculating furnace, there’s remarkably little to say about HECToR as a physical object. It’s a bunch of cabinets packed with nests of 2.8GHz AMD Opteron microprocessors (11,328 in total), strung together with fancy interconnects at the rear of each tower, and cooled like crazy to stop the whole thing melting.

Scheduled to be replaced in two years, its matter-of-fact design hints comically at its obsolescence. One day they’ll unplug HECToR’s cabinets, wheel them out of the room, and replace with something that looks exactly the same but which has around four times as much processing power. Then they’ll repeat this exercise at roughly two-year intervals from now until the ability to resolve the world through digital muscle hits some kind of law of diminishing returns. Will that happen one day? Nobody can say.

It’s HECToR’s vital figures that make its case persuasive. Four times the rating of its predecessor, it can manage up to 63 billion calculations per second, equivalent its makers say, to every human being on earth doing 10,000 calculations each, over the same second. According to the respected supercomputing league table run by Top500.org, this makes it the 17th most powerful such system on earth, impressive if you consider that a number ahead of it on the list are systems run by the US military and not as open to the civilian scientific community as is HECToR.

Then there’s the electricity bill for all this, a staggering £8.2 million ($16.4 million) a year to keep it lit up, roughly a quarter of which is just the cooling.

Here is the full story.