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1) Very, very few power plants burn oil.
2) Even if they did, modern power plants are generally 40-50% efficient. Gasoline engines are only 20% efficient at turning fuel energy into wheel torque. This directly relates to CO2 emissions. Even on a joule of fuel per joule of fuel basis, thanks to scrubbers, while coal plants release more sulfur than cars, they emit less nitrous oxides, VOCs, and CO. And the pollution is displaced from population centers.
3) Transmission losses are tiny.
4) Our current generation and transmission infrastructure, according to the DOE, is enough to convert 84% of existing vehicles.

OK, I didn't realize that there was a minor hydro plant on the upper Mississippi. Thanks for filling me in.

It is a minor plant by comparisonl

http://www.xcelenergy.com/XLWEB/CDA/0,3080,1-1-1_1875_4797_4014-16651-2_171_256-0,00.html
"Power production capability (in-service dates): 12 Mw total
Units 1,2, 3 and 4 (1954); Unit 5 (1955)
The five units produce 2.4 Mw each."
"The dam and falls create 49 feet of "head," or the height from the water surface to the turbines. The amount of electricity generated is determined by the amount of head and volume of water flow. "

This dam is less than 50 feet high and has a total of 5 generators.

How much power is this?

Even a few windmills scattered cross the Eastern side of the state out producte the Mighty Mississippi.

"The Stateline project straddles the Washington-Oregon border between Pasco and Walla Walla. Its first windmills began turning out power in July 2001. When complete later this decade, the wind farm's 400 turbines will be able to generate about 270 megawatts of power at peak capacity, with an average yield of about 100 megawatts."
http://www.pnl.gov/news/2002/02-32.htm

For a comparison of just one of the hydro plants on the Columbia, the largest is the Grand Coulee;
http://dams.org/kbase/studies/us/us_finalscope_sect2.htm
"The Grand Coulee Dam is over five thousand feet long, stands 550 feet tall"
"Grand Coulee Dam's hydroelectric generating facilities include four powerhouses"
"with a total of 24 main generators, three station service generators and six pump/generators. These provide a combined generating capacity of 6,480 megawatts."

At 12 MW to 6,480 MW, it would take 540 dams of the same capacity of the entire generating capacity of the Mississippi river to equal the capacity of just Grand Coulee on the Columbia. We need to work on wind power near the windy city, not build dams.

There is no more water sources to feed any major hydro left in the USA. There are a few places where some very minor plants could be built, but they would be just that, minor.

The "Holy Grail" of multitouch without the touch is a pretty old problem. I've been working on something at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for a while called the HI-Space table, and it was around before I came to the lab. It uses infrared and a camera and detects multiple inputs simultaneously, as well as object placed on the table. It doesn't require touching at all and works fairly well, detecting not only single fingers but each of the fingers, allowing the user to do different things with different arrangements of fingers. It understands motions as well, and can detect a swipe, circle, etc. Objects aren't tagged with anything special; they're just cardboard shapes.

Here's a video of the HI-Space table in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFBoq1i81V4

Here's an old link to some of the work: http://infoviz.pnl.gov/hces/

No. It shouldn't. The potential damage that could occur with random Joe Q Public having access to the entire methodology behind the storage of people's most private data, without even the legal protection of an NDA is just... astronomical.

What kind of damage could Joe Q Public do if they had access to database schema and application code? Medical records are already protected (or so we think) by elaborate security measures, without the proper passwords just having the codebase poses no risk to the data itself. You sound like you are arguing from the same vein that OpenBSD is much more vulnerable because the source is available when history shows the opposite.

I think the poster of the root of this particular thread is just another of those anti-copyright zealots who think that every single thing developed should be public domain.

And I think you're the kind of idiot who over-generalizes someone's entire position from a single question. But then I've got evidence for that opinion.

I know very well the difference between public domain, BSD, GPL, and various closed-source licenses and the reasons people might choose each; I've got my own ~45,000 LOC project out there on Sourceforge licensed under GPL; I've written ~100,000 LOC over the last 5 years for both private employers and government entities; I'm reasonably good about avoiding both video/music and software piracy.

Yet I still think most government grant-funded software should be public domain ala BSD. My research area is currently at the mercy of a dozen or so proprietary programs developed at significant public expense. I want those programs we have all already collectively paid for to be available to the rest of us like they used to be, and I would even be thrilled if several private companies developed competing forks. As it is, we have to tread very carefully to use the programs our colleagues have developed over the last 30 years lest we incur their wrath and lose the ability to publish our results.

See the web site http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/ for an example of this behavior. Ironically enough, one of the people responsible for BannedByGaussian has their own program, NWChem, only available to PIs at http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/nwchem/download.html . Two competing programs, one originally funded by government money and now closed source, and the other still government funded but only available to established scientists. Both used in publications, both costing hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money in development, yet neither available for everyone to use as they wish.

Researchers found, in the Midwest and East, there is sufficient off-peak generation, transmission and distribution capacity to provide for all of today's vehicles if they ran on batteries. However, in the West, and specifically the Pacific Northwest, there is limited extra electricity because of the large amount of hydroelectric generation that is already heavily utilized. Since more rain and snow can't be ordered, it's difficult to increase electricity production from the hydroelectric plants.

How about some real numbers?

This will guarantee year-round brownouts, blackouts, and other power problems.

The Department of Energy disagrees with you:

http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=204

"If all the cars and light trucks in the nation switched from oil to electrons, idle capacity in the existing electric power system could generate most of the electricity consumed by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles."

"off-peak electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of these 198 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics."

If all the cars and light trucks in the nation switched from oil to electrons, idle capacity in the existing electric power system could generate most of the electricity consumed by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. A new study for the Department of Energy finds that "off-peak" electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of the country's 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics.

I think it may be related to the rise in natural gas prices, and the natural urge for gas producers to go plug up leaks at those prices.

Natural gas production is the leading source of Russian methane emissions, for instance. And in 1990, Russia leaked as much as 26 million tons of methane. It was probably worth their while to plug some of these leaks at current prices.

If you want to be a real financial hound about it all, it's not just saving the power for the lights - it's also knocking down the air conditioning to remove all the wasted heat from the air. I live in Texas - this is a major reason folks down here are making the move. They kinda get the more efficient light thing, but talk about air conditioning and they'll pay attention. It's what got my Uncle motivated, anyway.

Replacing a 60W bulb with a 15W CFL and you just removed 45W from the air. Well, what's that worth? Air conditioners today must have have SEER ratings of at least 10. Older ones go down to 6. SEER = BTU cooling / 1 w-H. 1 BTU ~= 0.29 w-H. That 10 SEER air conditioner will remove ~3 watts of heat for every watt from the electric company. I'm intentionally ignoring the part where SEER is an average over the summer, YMMV, etc

So, in the Texas summer, when you swap that light bulb, you're saving 45W from the lightbulb and 15W from cooling down the house from the lightbulb. It's almost like free light. Damn thermodynamics for not making it so.

- Tash

I have a different experience with national labs. The bureaucracy was not too bad at PNNL, and friends at Oak Ridge have never complained about it.

On the other hand, a lot of Los Alamos employees have complained about it.

You could visit potential employers and ask people there about the work environment, office politics, etc. That would probably also give you the best feel of your possible future co-workers.

Do you have any preference for which part(s) of the country you would like to live in?

BASF Research
Batelle
BBC Research & Development
General Electric Global Research

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Motorola Labs
Microsoft Research
HP Labs
IBM Research
Intel Research
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Philips Research
Corporate Research
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Toshiba Research Europa
Toyota Central R&D Labs
Viewpoints Research Institute

Actually, for my field (Chemistry), what GCC -O3 does is irrelevant, except during the development phase of a program, or as a last resort for portability. We care about what the fastest native compiler we can find + optimized libraries does. The Cell will be no different; a few hand-optimized routines such as BLAS, FFTPack, etc, in libraries, then an auto-vectorizing Fortran-95 compiler on top. I will be interested in seeing how packages such as GAMESS or NWChem http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/nwchem/nwchem.html/ behave once Fortran is available, and Cell shipped in something other than game consoles.

On the other hand, the GROMACS guys http://www.gromacs.org/, who write hand-optimized code on a per-processor basis, ought to be stoked. It already runs well using single-precision, so it looks to be tailor-made to a Cell-based setup.

"I'm taking everything they say with a large grain of salt."

Well i found a sufficient supply for you... althought i don't recommend it (may be toxic to your health)

http://www.pnl.gov/energyscience/03-00/ws.htm

and it's been an issue for a very long time. Some light reading http://www.pnl.gov/isrc/foci.stm and http://www.dss.mil/isec/focifaqs.htm

Sorry, but linking a blog with a label like "most spectacular image of the month" actually had me get my hopes up for a moment. Two notes about this image:

a.) The 'image' is actually a blog. And not just any blog... we've heard from this guy before, but we don't seem to learn.

b.) What? I think we need to look up spectacular again. "Sensational or thrilling" this is not...

I'll help you cut to the chase - the full image is available at http://biomarkers.pnl.gov/media/JNN04.pdf, as is mentioned on said blog. Enjoy... or something

though I would argue that there was too much time spent discussing GigE, and not enough on the performance and scaling issues seen with the more exotic cards.

Not a technical issue, but a little note about the Infiniband cards reading, "Unlike the alternatives, just try to get information on pricing one of these without leaving all of your contact information for a salesman to use now and in perpetuity." I've been through this recently, and have considered (given the similar performance), purchasing Myrinet because they post their prices out in the open, so that you can make some informed decisions before calling their salescritter.

More technically, some analysis of the stability and maturity of the software stack would be nice. We owned Dolphinics SCI cards once (2001 ish), and while blazingly fast when they worked, on our Opterons the MPI system would mysteriously shut down. They were also very closed and proprietary about their software at that point, so we went round and round over the early 2.4 drivers. Myri, while more expensive, was also more stable.

Finally, to simply geek out for a moment, I saw numbers for the Quadrics cards once. PNNL built their Itanium-2 cluster with multiple quadrics cards per machine to get the bandwidth high enough for their chemistry apps. Light on details, but found at http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/using-emsl/tour/lab.php?fa cility=msc&lab=vr1119/ How to tie together 980 dual-proc Itanium-2 systems.

How about this:

Named the World's Toughest Bacterium by the Guinness Book of Records, the large red spheres of Deinococcus radiodurans (translation: strange berry that withstands radiation) can not only endure acute radiation doses of up to three million rads but more remarkably, can actually grow when exposed to radiation continuously.

You really don't want to meet this in a dark alley, however with that much radiation, I doubt it would be dark for long.

the main place I have ever needed an extended battery is on a plane flight -- and this is a device that I don't expect will get past the TSA screeners.

Especially not if you're dressed like this guy.

pro
more pro
con.

I'm "con" myself.

I know for a fact that the Information Assurance Directorate of the NSA uses Starlight to model all kinds of really complex systems and to get their heads around hard-to-visualize connections.

I wonder what else they use it for....

Of course, murphy's law says that if so, they will replenish at a rate at a rate matching our correct consumption divided by 2. Meaning we will still be up the creek without a paddle.

There's a part of the Dept of Homeland Security known as NVAC (National Visualization and Analytics Center). I'd suggest taking a look at their research agenda. Particularly the "Grand Challenges" section, and particularly the "Scalability Challenge" part of that.

Their target is to handle 1 billion structured messages/transactions per hour and 1 million unstructured messages/documents per hour. For reference, there are 6.5 billion people in the world, according to the CIA world factbook. 296 million in the US. When these numbers were presented to the IEEE Vis conference in 2004, questions arose as to whether they were going to get warrants for all of these transactions. The basic response was that they were going to 'anonymize' all of the data. First, do you honestly think that will happen? Second, how much do you trust the anonymizer? And lastly, do you trust the government to not turn off the anonymizer switch? It's a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling, isn't it?

There's a part of the Dept of Homeland Security known as NVAC (National Visualization and Analytics Center). I'd suggest taking a look at their research agenda. Particularly the "Grand Challenges" section, and particularly the "Scalability Challenge" part of that.

Their target is to handle 1 billion structured messages/transactions per hour and 1 million unstructured messages/documents per hour. For reference, there are 6.5 billion people in the world, according to the CIA world factbook. 296 million in the US. When these numbers were presented to the IEEE Vis conference in 2004, questions arose as to whether they were going to get warrants for all of these transactions. The basic response was that they were going to 'anonymize' all of the data. First, do you honestly think that will happen? Second, how much do you trust the anonymizer? And lastly, do you trust the government to not turn off the anonymizer switch? It's a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling, isn't it?

If you look up how the top500 benchmark, and most of the others, slapping together a heap of boxes doesn't get you anything. To actually get a decent score on parallel DP linpack, or simulation codes used as benchmarks, you need a fast, very low latency interconnect between the nodes, excellent synchronization, and fast disk access.

Even the allegedly "off the shelf" systems contain an awful lot of not off the shelf hardware. Case in point would be PNNL's Itanium cluster http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/capabs/mscf.shtml/ (at 1000 or so nodes). At SC2003 I chatted with people I know from there, and they mentioned that they had four (4) Quadrics http://www.quadrics.com/ interconnect cards Per Node, plus extra switches, in order to get the bandwidth up high enough. Even a cheap cluster will add Myrinet (at about $1500/node when the switch is factored in), and start worrying about topology after the first few dozen nodes are installed.

There are clusters (basically networks of workstations), and then there are supercomputers.

Well, not forever. Just a few hundred thousand years.

You could care less? ... well obviously you could care less! ... you cared enough to respond, so you most definately do care some! Thanks!

I just think you attack every problem with a hammer when a screwdriver might be a better tool.

Dont like my posts? Dont read them!

I wouldn't miss your posts for anything.

I think they are funnier than hell.

... or better yet, keep reading them, get more stressed, and give yourself that early heart attack you appear to be heading for.

You presume to grasp more power than you truly possess.

I'm enjoying watching you attempt to leap tall buildings with a single bound.

Or maybe you'll get my point, get a dual core processor and get enough work done that you can spend more time at home relaxing instead of pulling your hair out.

I do that without having to resort to multiple processors. When I need a job completed that uses more than one processor, I batch the job to a real computer.

At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we are implementing something we call the HI-Space table, which uses a camera to track hand motions as well. Ours doesn't need special gloves, though. You can walk up to the table and move your hands around and it watches any number of hands, doing any number of poses. It detects objects that are placed in the space and recognizes them if they are in the database. We have voice recognition, too, so it can respond to spoken commands.

One of the best things about our system is that it is completely untethered and intuitive. There is no training period, and no device to put on. You are interacting with the digital world by manipulating in the physical world.

I write applications for the table. There are a lot of issues that come up that you wouldn't normally think about. For example, with many hands in the space, it's easy to have people doing conflicting things. Actions are not so clearly defined, either. For example, when selecting a button, do you point to it? For how long? What if your finger moves a little?

We are currently conducting user studies to see in what ways the HI-Space table is better than the desktop and cave environments, and we're looking for other applications and organizations interested in using this technology.

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/hispace//
http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/hces//

contact me at bob [dot] baddeley [at] pnl [dot] gov

Eastern Washington University, Cheney

Eastern Washington University, Spokane at Riverpoint

Gonzaga University

Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS)

Intercollegiate College of Nursing, WSU College of Nursing

North Idaho College

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

Community Colleges of Spokane (Spokane Community College)

Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI)

Spokane Public Schools

University of Idaho

University of Idaho, Research Park, Post Falls

Washington State University, Pullman

Washington State University, Spokane

Whitworth College

Website: http://www.vpnet.org (a little bland at the moment, but still good info).

Apparently, this took place over a long time... I didn't realise just how long it takes to shut down a government website... (or how quickly it goes from necessary and useful to redundant...)

October 1999 http://www.pnl.gov/energyscience/11-99/art2.htm - PubScience opened.
http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/gov/pubscience02.html

2001 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010709-1.htm - they decide to cut funding, suggesting that the system be shut down.
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Arti cles/butler.html

2002 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020819-2.htm - decision to close... Comments invited...

2004 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&contentId=A17568-2002Nov20&notFound=tr ue - it's closed...

I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

WhiteCap(TM) Roof Spray Cooling System
Cooling Technology for Warm, Dry Climates

I have heard you can do it yourself as well.

The car makers want this more than you do, and it's all about the money. Getting an alternative fuel vehicle to market is The Brass Ring. It's the Holy Grail of car makers, it's a license to print money, it means the ability to buy Microsoft outright for mere pocket change. With pump prices at $2.00 per gallon around here, a carmaker who could offer an alcohol or methanol fueled vehicle (think $0.50 per gallon) would simply not be able to produce enough cars to meet the demand. They could hire the entire state of Michigan to build them, they could sell them at double or triple their cost, and they still wouldn't be able to build them fast enough.

China has not had this improvement. Beijing still relies on coal burned in individual coal stoves for domestic space heat, and some cities emit so much soot that the lack of light reduces agricultural production downwind.

Basically, China is a pretty sucky place to live. There were times when it was much better than the West (like the Dark Ages), but this isn't one of them.

Starlight by PNL labs(they made the CD) is a good visualization tool. Managed by Batelle Corporation it is resonably cheap too. I can do visual analysis in more imensions then you know existed.

I agree completely.

I live 15 miles away from the edge of the hanford reservation and do a considerable amount of work there. While there are certainly issues with an accelerated cleanup schedule, it is better than the alternatives.

Yes there is a tritium plume that may be threatening the ground water. It is being monitored using state of the art technologies. In fact this very issues has driven the technology of groundwater contamination tracking forward as millions of dollars is being spent on this topic: http://www.pnl.gov/cse/subsurface/sitescale.htm

The hanford nuclear reservation is about 560 square miles of desolate eastern washington desert. The contamination is coming from the furthest areas from civilization, the 100 and 200 areas. I know first hand the regulations that are in place for the safety of the workers and the nearby areas, and I am confident that they are as safe as can be achievable.

As I imply above, hanford is one of the scariest places in the world.

Obviously, you've never been to Cleaveland! (rimshot!)

I work at Hanford. You haven't a clue about the past history and present condition of the facility. It is glaringly apparent by your comments:

I have met many people who have gone on tours of the facility, with happy dazy reports such as yours. This is because quite clearly, any place they let people visit is carefully designed to give a sense of normality.

The tone of your comment belies your bias. No matter what someone who has *been* to the site tells you, YOU know better.

Ah, yes... Nothing like a religious experience to convince you that your form of wisdom is *the* truth.

I overflew Hanford several years ago, and let me tell you, this place is not "cool".

You can tell a lot from a seat at ~8,000 ft, can't you? What was the condition of the facility located just south of the 223E facility in the 200 East Area? What? You couldn't tell?

No doubt their seismograph is to detect intruders, not to detect "vibrations from space" (lol).

No, the seismographs are installed to detect earthquakes. If you want to see their location, you can read the Annual Seismic Report online.

From the air, the truth becomes apparent, the LIGO is fairly distant from "real" hanford site,

Which "real" Hanford Site are you referring to? The Hanford Township? The reactors in the 100 Area? The separations facilities in the 200 Areas? The fuel fabrication facilities in the 300 Area?

Just what are you talking about?

and no doubt from ground level its seems just like any old desert like area.

That is because, despite what this twit is claiming, it is just like any old desert area. It just happens to have a HUGE inventory of radionuclides in the ground.

Lest anyone fail to catch my sarcasm, it is clear that people like rufusdufus refuse to read information publicly available to anyone in the world. I would not claim that Hanford is your next vacation destination, but it is also not the scary X-files-like place that this person claims it is.

The staff who work at Hanford are scientists and engineers engaged in the worlds largest environmental cleanup project, and we intend to do it right. Even if we *wanted* to hide anything, there is a federal consent decree that requires the Department of Energy to meet the both federal and state environmental regulations, as well as stakeholder groups like the native American tribes in our region.

Is Hanford contaminated? Yep. It has millions of curies of radioactive wastes in various forms that are currently being removed, repackaged, and stored until the US comes to grips with nuclear materials. When people actively spread misinformation about how we manage the site, it provides the policy makers with the ammunition to grind the cleanup to a halt. That is NOT in ANYONES best interest.

Whatever feelings people have regarding nuclear power or nuclear weapons, one would think that they would not approve of leaving it in the condition it was 20 years ago. That's what our work is trying to achieve.

And we are certainly extremely proud to have first-rate science projects like LIGO here at Hanford.

As I imply above, hanford is one of the scariest places in the world.

Obviously, you've never been to Cleaveland! (rimshot!)

I work at Hanford. You haven't a clue about the past history and present condition of the facility. It is glaringly apparent by your comments:

I have met many people who have gone on tours of the facility, with happy dazy reports such as yours. This is because quite clearly, any place they let people visit is carefully designed to give a sense of normality.

The tone of your comment belies your bias. No matter what someone who has *been* to the site tells you, YOU know better.

Ah, yes... Nothing like a religious experience to convince you that your form of wisdom is *the* truth.

I overflew Hanford several years ago, and let me tell you, this place is not "cool".

You can tell a lot from a seat at ~8,000 ft, can't you? What was the condition of the facility located just south of the 223E facility in the 200 East Area? What? You couldn't tell?

No doubt their seismograph is to detect intruders, not to detect "vibrations from space" (lol).

No, the seismographs are installed to detect earthquakes. If you want to see their location, you can read the Annual Seismic Report online.

From the air, the truth becomes apparent, the LIGO is fairly distant from "real" hanford site,

Which "real" Hanford Site are you referring to? The Hanford Township? The reactors in the 100 Area? The separations facilities in the 200 Areas? The fuel fabrication facilities in the 300 Area?

Just what are you talking about?

and no doubt from ground level its seems just like any old desert like area.

That is because, despite what this twit is claiming, it is just like any old desert area. It just happens to have a HUGE inventory of radionuclides in the ground.

Lest anyone fail to catch my sarcasm, it is clear that people like rufusdufus refuse to read information publicly available to anyone in the world. I would not claim that Hanford is your next vacation destination, but it is also not the scary X-files-like place that this person claims it is.

The staff who work at Hanford are scientists and engineers engaged in the worlds largest environmental cleanup project, and we intend to do it right. Even if we *wanted* to hide anything, there is a federal consent decree that requires the Department of Energy to meet the both federal and state environmental regulations, as well as stakeholder groups like the native American tribes in our region.

Is Hanford contaminated? Yep. It has millions of curies of radioactive wastes in various forms that are currently being removed, repackaged, and stored until the US comes to grips with nuclear materials. When people actively spread misinformation about how we manage the site, it provides the policy makers with the ammunition to grind the cleanup to a halt. That is NOT in ANYONES best interest.

Whatever feelings people have regarding nuclear power or nuclear weapons, one would think that they would not approve of leaving it in the condition it was 20 years ago. That's what our work is trying to achieve.

And we are certainly extremely proud to have first-rate science projects like LIGO here at Hanford.

I think you misunderstood what the previous poster was trying to say.

Fuel cells can be (theoretically) used with all kinds of fuel, not just hydrogen. An example of this is the natural gas fuel cell which is supposed to have conversion efficiencies of 40%-60% as opposed IC engines that give an efficiency of 30% tops.

You are totally correct in your opinion on hydrogen fuel cells; however, fuel cells running on a fossel fuel seem like an excellent way to improve efficiency.

No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that.

Bullshit.

The Hanford Reservation has several square MILES contaiminated with tritium.

It was in the last process stream before discharging it to the ground - over the course of 40 years.

Here's a list of figures showing the groundwater contamination at the Hanford Site. Keep in mind that the area in the boundary is 540 SQUARE MILES. Check out map S-7.

That contamination doesn't include what is trapped in the vadose, the waste streams that have been treated in treatment facilities, and the tritium produced at Savannah River, Pocatello, and New York.

Then again, I've always liked the definition:

1 inch = 25 400 000 000 000 000 000 000 yoctometres

8-)

At the Pacific Northwest Natinonal Laboratory every machine excessed for schools, non-profits, or for public auction has its hard drive removed and then subjected to a machine similar to this bugger.

Believe me, no data is going to survive the bearing press.

The seismic staff at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

We contribute to the UoW by maintaining the Eastern Washington Seismic Monitoring Network.

The seismic staff at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

We contribute to the UoW by maintaining the Eastern Washington Seismic Monitoring Network.

Let's face it, the linux center of mass in the Pacific Northwest is decidedly south of BC. Where is OSDL? Where are the West Coast linux strategists for IBM and Intel? Where is the 2nd fastest linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer in the world? Where is there a large Debian based distro aimed at homes and offices? Which Pacific Northwest city has new lugs sprouting up? Which prominent lug in the north did not participate at all in LFNW 2003, the largest LFNW to that date?

The triangle of Seattle, Portland, Richland (PNL puts it on the map) is the center of mass of Linux in the Northwest. Hopefully LFNW will take this into account in the future.

I thought LFNW was awesome. I especially enjoyed the Pacific Northwest National Labs High Performance Linux Cluster talk given by Timothy A Witteveen of PNL. It is one hell of a machine. It is one hell of a machine. 9.4 teraflops and a 53 terrabyte SAN running NWLinux. It placed 5th on the last Top 500 List.

That 53 terrabyte SAN is one contiguous filesystem using lustre. The use of QSNet2/Elan4 interconnects make the use of terbyte data sets with lots of internode communication more efficient than past machines. These interconnects provide a peak bandwidth of 340 MB/sec in each direction. But even more impresive than the bandwidth is the latency, between 2 us and 5 us. Compare that with ethernet latency measured in tens or even hundreds of ms.

During the presentation Tim went over two examples of simulations performed on their cluster that could not be accomplished on other machines. These examples were outside of my domain of knowledge, but one involved simulating the behavior of water molecules and the other was an extremely detailed protein folding simulation.

One last bit that was interesting was their methodology for updating the machines. They have over a thousand and took some time to determine an efficient means to keep the machines up to date. It was determined that reimaging the maches was faster than applying patches. They utilize a multicast approach in which allows them, theoretically, to reimage all of the machines in 28 minutes. They do not always reach this theoretical maximum, but they reimage a thousand machines PDQ.

The meet & greet in the commons was fun. Pogo Linux had a free drawing for a loaded AMD64 system. There was plenty of swag to be had from all sorts of folks. It was cool to stop and chat with one of the Helix developers. All in all there was a really good group of folks gathered.

I know Slashdot is full of trolls, but I must say I am a little suprised at how many crappy comments LFNW is getting. All I have to say to those filled with negativity is screw you. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have some cool stuff going on. Whether it is the 3 new lugs in Seattle, OSDL in Portland, the Linux Cluster at PNL, SeattleWireless, PersonalTelco or LFNW there are exciting things happening up here. I think a couple people on this site need to take their heads out of their arses and take a look around. Folks up here are using linux, and getting stuff done.

That's PN N L!

Yes, I know it is pnl.gov. That domain was handed out before it was upgraded to an environmental laboratory. Looking forward to becoming a 'homeland security' laboratory soon (yeah).

Great place to work, though.

The supercomputer is housed in the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory. The pay is good and the people are friendly.

Did I mention that I work at the Lab?

PNL is hiring a Senior System Administrator for the world's largest Linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer.

PNL is hiring a Senior System Administrator for the world's largest Linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer.

PNL is hiring a Senior System Administrator for the world's largest Linux cluster and 5th fastest supercomputer.