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During the winter, does the Arctic Regional Supercomputing Center spend money (energy) heating their offices while cooling off their computers at the same time?

I think the reason this will work when the eyetoy didn't will boil down to subtle differences and the fact that it's on an XBox and not a PS2. The XBox has a pretty good following and if M$ can manage to properly market the device (as Nintendo did the Wii) I think they'll have enough success to keep the top slot a while longer. However, what they're working on has been in the lab for at least a decade now see BLUI for example... and that has nothing to do with Microsoft.

I'm actually a bit surprised by this. UAF (where AVO are located) have plenty of computing capacity.

This is true, and just underscores the silliness of the whole discussion.

The datacenter will be kept at a reasonably comfortable temperature. Some sort of heat exchanger will probably still be necessary to keep things consistent, although traditional air-conditioning shouldn't be necessary in the wintertime. (Mean outdoor temperature in February is -20C, -2.2F)

The difficult thing for subarctic climates, however, is the fact that (contrary to popular belief) the summers are actually quite pleasant. Irkutsk's mean temperature in July is a balmy 64F, 18C. To keep a large data center going at that high of an ambient temperature will require at least a modest amount of air-conditioning (or a whole lot of ventilation).

Although their cooling requirements are probably a bit less than a typical datacenter down south, ARSC in Fairbanks, Alaska does indeed maintain a large bank of air-conditioning equipment to cool its server room. (Fairbanks is colder in the winter, and warmer than the summer than Irkutsk, and claims the largest temperature "gap" on the planet).

http://www.arsc.edu

you're welcome.

for use in the ImmersaDesk system. I called it "Head Woggle Navigation" and the user's head attitude synced up display navigations with wand input (3d mouse) never caught on though. But I do see things like this from time to time.

Over the last few decades, there have been many exotic parallel architectures. Dataflow machines, connection machines, vector machines, hypercubes, associative memory machines (remember LINDA?), perfect shuffle machines, random-interconnect machines, networked memory machines, and partially-shared-memory machines have all come and gone. Some have come and gone more than once. None has been successful enough to sell commercially in quantity. Very few of these machines have ever been purchased by any non-government entity.

There are two ends of the parallelism spectrum - the shared-memory symmetrical multiprocessor, where all memory is shared, and the networked cluster, where no memory is shared. Both are successful and widely used. Everything in between has been a flop.

Despite decades of failure, people keep coming up with new bad ways to hook CPUs together, and getting government agencies to fund them. It's more a pork program than a way to get real work done.

By the time one of these big wierdo machines is built, debugged, and programmed, it's outdated. A few years later, people are getting the same job done on desktops. Look at chess. In 1997, it took Deep Blue to beat Kasparov. Kasparov is now losing games to a desktop four-processor IA-32 machine.

Figuring out more effective ways to use clusters is far more cost effective than putting a National Supercomputer Center in some Congressman's district in Outer Nowhere. There's a whole chain of these tax-funded "National Supercomputer Centers". The "Alabama Supercomputer Center" has ended up as an ISP for the public school system, hosting E-mail accounts and such. It's all pork.

• The Scripps Institute of Oceanography Visualization Center
• The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center

I worked at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for one summer when I was an undergrad. I didn't do any FORTRAN programming, but almost everyone else there did. If you want some information about FORTRAN programming on high-performance systems, check out their newletters, or just try searching their site for 'FORTRAN'.

I worked at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for one summer when I was an undergrad. I didn't do any FORTRAN programming, but almost everyone else there did. If you want some information about FORTRAN programming on high-performance systems, check out their newletters, or just try searching their site for 'FORTRAN'.

What other industry can you get a job in Alaska or Hawaii doing the same thing? You might even end up inventing the next Mosaic out in the cornfields. Gotta love them pork-barrel politics!

Details are here

And yes, you get to play with the new Cray.

For more information, please contact:

Pat Babcock, Administrative Assistant Arctic Region Supercomputing Center Butrovich Bldg, Suite 108 P.O. Box 756020 Fairbanks, AK 99775-6020

Thanks! We're looking for someone with experience with supercomputers.

Just in case you want to play with toys like these, the ARSC is looking for an admin.

Y'know... at first I didn't like the new "sgi" logo and wanted the cube back. But I'm starting to really like the new logo.

http://www.sgi.com/o2/images/hp_o2.jpg
http://www.arsc.edu/resources/hardware/images/Octa ne.jpg
VS.
http://www.reputable.com/sgipix/0.jpeg

Regardless of what other people think:

http://www.beyondboxes.net/sticker.jpg
http://www.arke.de/TC/sgi-homer.gif

Alaska United has put in an OC-192 to complement the 9*DS-3 North Pacific Cable. Alaska really is the end of the road, though, traffic to the pacific rim still has to head down to the lower 48. The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks has an OC-12 internet2 link to the pacific northwest gigapop to support research and defense work. Bandwidth is there, but does it make sense to have major data centers at the end of the road?

(...missing my woodstove heated cabin with a DSL line but no running water, in fairbanks)

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center does use Cray/SGI systems (currently on are a Cray T3E and J932). One previous machine was a YMP. I don't remember any non-Cray supercomputer ever being powered on over at ARSC.

You can read more about the current hardware at http://www.arsc.edu/resources/Hardware. html