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IBM Blue Gene/Q Sequoia supercomputer, at ORNL

In a globe where quad-core computers are currently the norm, and 8-cadre processors available for buy are somewhat rare, computers with more than cores might a picayune unimaginable. A team at Stanford has dwarfed that rare eight-core processor by using a supercomputer that employs over 1 1000000 cores to solve a complex trouble.

The supercomputer, IBM'south Blueish Factor/Q Sequoia, is located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and sports 1,572,864 cores, not to forget its one.6 petabytes of memory — a far cry from the MacBook Pro's Intel Core i7 quad-core processors. Sequoia isn't used for multi-playinga lot of MMO alts (unfortunately), as a team at Stanford Engineering science'southward Heart for Turbulence Research (CTR) used the supercomputer'south massive amount of processors to prove that one thousand thousand-core fluid dynamics simulations are possible. These kinds of simulations can assistance researchers notice how to build quieter shipping engines.

The computational data gathered using the supercomputer is vital in helping researchers cut down on aircraft noise, as researchers can't exactly stick their heads inside a jet engine to see what'due south going on in there while it's in utilize. Director of the Center for Turbulence Enquiry, Parviz Moin, noted that thanks to supercomputers with an enormous corporeality of cores, "only recently… have engineers been able to model jet engines and the noise they produce with accuracy and speed."

Engine sim

In terms of how the supercomputer performs the computations, it'due south like to any standard computer with multiple cores: Each piece of the complex math is cleaved down, delivered to various cores, and computed. The more cores the estimator has bachelor, the more than math tin can be simultaneously candy. Interestingly, when a computer reaches a sure number of cores — previously set at around one million — something of a processing clogging would manifest. Also many cores pumping out data would create a blockage, and then to speak. Led by Joseph Nichols, researcher at the CTR, a team was able to refine the processes and code — dubbed CharLES — enough to bypass the bottleneck (and whatever other problems may take arisen), and put those 1,572,864 cores to worthwhile computational use. (See: Exascale supercomputer hardware is easy – it's the software that'due south holding u.s.a. back)

To put the supercomputer'due south massive amount of cores into perspective, the $999 MacBook Air comes with a dual-core processor. Newegg just has 5 eight-core processors, half dozen 6-cores, and 38 quad-cores currently available for buy.

Along with aircraft noise simulations, the CharLES code is being used to spruce upwards other areas of aircraft, such every bit to simulate turbulent flow over a wing, and propulsion systems used in hypersonic flying. Basically, without the supercomputer's ability to run such staggeringly circuitous simulations, researchers couldn't actually examine and exam certain complicated theories. I day, maybe this research volition aid people living near an airdrome not get woken upward by the constant roar of engines overnight.

Now read: The history of supercomputers