processor

 

One of the most difficult tasks, struggling over the decision which best minds of our time, is to simulate the Earth’s climate and weather prediction in the medium and long term. The main obstacle facing the researchers is the need to take into account the huge number of parameters that affect the behaviour of air masses, and hence there is need to find solutions to complex systems of equations, which handle poorly even modern supercomputers. Nevertheless, the increased computing capabilities systems is obvious way out of this situation, and here, at the University of Berkeley plans to deploy a powerful modern computers, construction of which is to use immediately 20 million processors.

This is a RISC-processor company Tenscilla, which together will be able to show performance in 10 petaFLOPS, with peak performance should take approximately 200 petaFLOPS. Equally impressive and will prove “prozhorlivost” supercomputer - according to preliminary estimates system power consumption will be about 4 megawatts, the cost of construction same - about $ 75 million Despite such impressive figures, they are considerably lower cost and consumption of modern supercomputing, which exceed the capacity of 200 megawatts, and the cost often exceeds $ 1 billion

Such efficiency is achieved primarily through the use of processors Tenscilla LX, operating at a frequency of 150 MHz to 450 MHz. In doing so, the manufacturer assures that the relative power consumption of their chips is only 0.1 mVatt at megahertz.

As we have noted, the main objectives pursued by researchers, is seeking at its disposal a powerful tool for miscalculation and a mathematical model of the Earth’s climate. But most importantly, that in this case an opportunity to improve the accuracy of the calculations - calculations may be made with an accuracy of 1 km. Thus, with the help of a new supercomputer, scientists will be able to compile the most detailed map of the atmosphere, and a huge contribution to this success should make it computer architecture, because it is optimized for exactly this type of calculations, which usually deal climatology. In other words, plays a central role here is not computing power tool, and his “imprisonment” under the specific task.