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New Linux Supercomputer Forecasts Rain
buzzcutbuddha writes "Linux PR has a press release about a new weather forecasting supercomputer running Linux built by High Performance Technologies, Inc. that will be unveiled on Wednesday by NOAA. There is even a phone number to call to tour the High Performance Computer Center. " (let's see if the trolls can be clever for a change ;) Anyhoo 276 nodes, but its costed $15M? Them must be some spendy nodes...
NOAA forecasts rain? That can't be good....
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Just kidding, I thought I'd beat the trolls to it.
In any case, that does seem like a high price tag... by my calculations you could build a 1200 node cluster (using 8 node cubix boxes) for that kind of money...
BlackNova Traders
What's the accuracy of the current technology? 75-80%?
;)
Anyways, I'm glad that the FSL is the first government lab to buy Linux systems. I'm wondering if they would have gotten any better results by using another version Of Unix or even a proprietary system.
Is running SETI or RC5 on one of these practical also? They'd need to win in order to start paying back High Performance for the $15 million supercomputer
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Somebody please tell me they're using STORM Linux!
I quote:
[Incyte Genomics] now has about 20 farms with up to 200 processors each. Each farm behaves like a supercomputer, at about one-hundredth of the price -- or less.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
This isn't good news, people. Weather forcasters have traditionally been wrong. All this advance means is that now they can be wrong faster. Using the miracles of distributed processing you can be assured within minutes that despite the fact that there's a big black cloud belching lightning 10 miles away the weather is still "95 and sunny" today.
In preparation for the forecast deluge, NOAA's Atmospheric Research Center (ARC) is fully staffed and stocked for over a month of independent operation.
-- Bah! Trying too hard.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Just because the machine runs Linux, doesn't mean that there is a free software solution to predict the weather. Let's be a tiny bit realistic about it: they built a BIG box, put a 'free' OS on it, and then had someone write unique, custom software for it. You and I aren't going to get our hands on this weather package anytime soon ;).
By the time you count up the costs of that contract, I can readily see $15M. In fact, that figure is probably cheaper than if they had used, say, NT. Besides, absolutely nothing with the Government is 'free': defeats the the whole idea of pork barrel :)
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Can I help them, and next year send in a couple of nodes instead of paying taxes?
Forecast calls for rain. In fact, scientists predict a 95% chance of cats and dogs; which, correcting for their poor forecasts in the past, means we'll be seeing frogs and locusts.
Wha? Whaddya mean I can't skip to the next chapter?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
$15M for 276 nodes. That works out to 54,347.83 per node (including networking, storage,etc...). Not exactly cheap. However looking at their site (which has a lot of missing pages) it looks like this thing is composed of Alpha boxes connected with fiber channel and some other goodies (like a big raid array data center). Alphas and fiber are not cheap so the price might not be so far off for (their claim) 3-4 Teraflops.
The real question is this: If the same money were spent on, say, Athlon nodes connected with channel bonded fast ethernet (or even myrinet); could you get even more performance? I figure that you could build a cluster of stripped down Athlon-700's on channel bonded ether for around $2k per node including switches, etc. That would allow up to 7500 nodes (though I imagine that network bandwidth/latency would kill your performance at that scale). Hmmm...
-JeremyH
And I Interviewed for a SysAdmin possition there, had an offer even *SLAPS FOREHEAD*. Definatly some sah-weet stuff going on at NOAA for Linux folks, send in your apps!
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Ah, but you... yes, you are very clever. It's nice of you to help out all the poor Linux folk who don't have access to Windows Calculator to perform those types of big calculations.
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James
The stereotype is tired. Weather forecasting is one of the most mathematically and scientifically complex undertakings of modern science. Forecasting has improved dramatically over the past 5, 10, and 20 years.
95 and sunny usually leads to storms anyway.
They must have charged them for labor... Like giving birth to each alpha or something.
Eh...
That CMDRTaco, He cracks me up. Clever trolls. Whew (wiping moisture from eyes) I'm sure THATS gonna happen. Costed was pretty funny too...I wondered what he thinked when he writed that.
Apartment6
You might be able to do RC5 quickly with a bunch of cubix boxes, but to get real work done, you often need a good interconnect. 100baseT just doesn't cut it from a latency or bandwidth perspective. Later in the press releases, they mention that they've partnered with Myricom. I presume that a big chunk of the money went to Myricom for a large Myrinet interconnect (>1Gbit/second, programmable NICs, ultra-low latenccy). Also, they mention a fancy storage system; depending on the size and performance, a good storage system (many drives, all hooked up to the myrinet) can cost a bunch of money.
Um.. when will you figure out that you're wasting your time? By making comments like that one, and using you life like you are, you're just showing your immaturity. Why not, for once, spend your time doing something constructive rather than tearing things down?
I mean, come on! Build something, compliment someone, smile, contribute. Trolls only exist because they, for some reason, get pleasure from annoying people. AC's get moderated up when they have something good and on topic to say. Get over your little childish views and start doing something with your life.
Well...
Let me see now. I would think that the most calculations would be floating point stuff. (Kind of like games =) )
But alpha is real 64 bit computer, when playing around with lot a highprecsion floating point that really really helps. At least my intution tells me that. But anyway it would be really fun to play around with 7500 athlons, to bad that they ain't smp yet.
It's called new wave but it's just the same.
This contract includes 2 substantial upgrades; this is just the initial installation. The AlphaLinux cluster (yes, connected with Myrinet) is most of the initial equipment. There's also a tape robot from ADIC with 70 terabytes of tape (1400 tapes) and 20 tape drives, and a storage area network (SAN) using CVFS, a SAN filesystem being ported to Linux because of this contract.
The main software used on the system is actually all free: Linux, the PBS batch queue system, mpich as modified by Myricom for MPI, and the SMS scalable modeling system, developed at FSL. FSL has demonstrated some of their software scaling efficiently up to around 100 nodes. Limits in scalablility, the Alpha's superior floating point performance, and Compaq's great AlphaLinux compilers are the reason we used Alphas.
As everyone knows, forecas^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hresearch agencies like Gartner Group have been using paraller supercomputers for the predictions. However, without cheap equipment that Linux makes possible, their predictions have been less than spectacular, because they haven't been able to include all the important factors - like the antitrust coefficient, PocketPC parabolism, /. effect and Natalie Portman.
Now that they can be taken into account, let us see what some of the older predictions might have looked like.
In March 1999, IDC predicted that Linux will 25 % each year until 2003. The real result, of course, is that Linux will grow without bounds until it hits /. barrier (this is
known as the /. effect). An immediate conclusion
is that Linux will run all computers by the
end of 2003 - if IDC were to run this forecast
again, they would tell you this, except they
don't want to create wide-spread panic.
There are been a couple of surveys that indicate a lot of companies would like to start using Linux instead of Windows. This is completely false. The more powerful forecasting engine would consider the antitrust coefficient and find that all these people have been paid by Microsoft to speak favorably of Linux, so that the trial would proceed to the right direction.
Quite recently, some analysts predicted that PocketPC is no 'Palm killer'. What futility ! Careful forecasts would show that since PocketPC can run Quake (well, at least it can play mp3s) and Palm cannot, PocketPC would beat Palm on Quake death match every time. Palm is dead. Case closed.
Any apparent inconsistencies concerning my predictions are caused by Natalie Portman.
Isnt the NASA JPL running a few beowulfs ?
"THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT"-Death
42
Yes, it can predict the rain, but can it run in William Scott emulation mode? Will there be some daemon that notifies the administrator of birthday of a 103 year old lady in Texas? Does it have tupee error correction? We want to know these things, dammit!
Can't imagine what kind of damage a scr1pt k1dd13 could do with r00t access :)
- The cost is for the final system, which includes an eventual replacement of the current nodes and the addition of lots more of them.
- Don't forget the I/O subsystem as well.
- Don't forget the onsite engineer
This system is a true supercomputer, and will carry that sort of price tag.I can't resist pointing out that LWN wrote an article about this cluster, complete with pictures....
Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net
There is very little chance in the foreseeable future that weather predicition will be 100% correct, no matter how fast the computer get
One of my faviorite quotes along this line:
This quote came from a government manual for the NWS. This quote doesn't even touch the lack of quality observations in the atmosphere along with the unkown physics involved with it all.Yes...it has been improving over the years. Going into the 80's, the hits were generally 75% for 24 hours out, 50% for 3 days out, and just above a crap shot for beyond that. Going into the 21st centruy, it's generally running about 90% for 24 hours, 75% for 3 days, and 50% for 5 days.
Even after studying it for years, I'm still amazed that they can get it to nearly 90% for 24 hours off.
Congrats if you made it this far.
Ian Layton
I'd better get my umbrella!
--- Speaking only for myself,
Sure forecasting weather is cool, but when you get down to it, it doesn't matter if it is correct 100% of the time. Weather occurs whether you know what it is going to be like or not (theoretical discussions about knowledge of the future changing the future aside). This is therefore a waste of massive CPU cycles.
If there is a phone hooked up to it though, I'd like to call it up and ask other, less mundane, questions. Eg:
- What's the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
- Why do I like dried leaves in water? (tea)
- What's 6 x 7?
Cap'n BryDepending on what spot of earth you live, simply assuming that it will rain/not rain gives you higher accuracy. Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is very accurate in a lot of places.
If on the other hand you have a program that in a very desertic region can predict rain with 10% of accuracy, I would argue that it is a superior method.
rmstar
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
That's "Willard Scott", not "William". Funny post though, gotta admit.
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Here in hungary there was some big news about the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences linking 50-60 PCs into what they called a supercomputer. I looked on their site, but couldn't find out what OS these 'client' PCs actually run. Linux is popular, especially at universities, so they could be running that... They have a 'visual programming environment' that aids development of applications taking advantage of the distributed & parallel system. Quote: "It is aimed at creating a professional graphical programming environment for supporting the development cycle of parallel and distributed programs." I myself am not familiar with distributed systems, so I don't know know how advanced it is, but I like seeing things like this in Hungary!
-
cat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The weather has non-linear dynamics, and has been shown to be chaotic (have strange attractors). It is therefore theoretically impossible to forcast the weather very far ahead, even with unlimited computer power, regardless of how accurate the models are.
I think not. I seriously doubt they spent over $54,000 per node, even if the nodes have 2GB RAM and Ultra160 RAID5 disk arrays. More likely, they spent a great deal of money on high speed networking equipment (possibly fibre switches). Don't ya think?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
NOAA is, strangely enough, the first introduction I ever got to the world wide web. It was 1993 I think, and I was on a tour there as a seventh grader, and some guy gave our group a demo of Mosaic, letting us try surfing the web. Man, I thought that was just so cool...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Okay, why is the NOAA stalking me? I mean, sure, I complain about the NOAA sometimes, but when they start forecasting my actions, I have to get a little worried.. Of course, I do find it a little mysterious that they're announcing the fact they're stalking me... The government works in mysterious ways, I suppose!
Ben Winslow..........rain@bluecherry.net
bluecherry internet..http://www.bluecherry.net/
Frost Post!!
Sorry couldnt Resist
Those People Who Are Crazy Enough To Think That They Can Change The World Probable Can
Too bad Apple G4's don't have better memory bandwidth. Because if NOAA needs high precision, it can do 128-bit floating point math. Not to mention its peak of 3.6 GigaFLOPS (for the 500MHz version).
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." ~Confucius~
The cost of $54,000 per node is not so surprising when you consider they went with Compaq boxes.
Of course as they still have a stranglehold on quad CPU and up Alphas it is less surprising.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Who azz do I have to kiss to get a gov contract
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I once worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is just up the hill from NOAA in Boulder, and knew several people who worked at NOAA. They swore that the first question everybody asked when given a tour was "Where's the ark?" Since that was my first question, I couldn't argue. Anyhow, the "look out for rain" joke first surfaced about five milliseconds after the agency was named, and has ever since popped into the mind of everyone who first hears of the agency.
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