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...

Comments

Uh oh

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

NOAA forecasts rain? That can't be good....
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Re:Uh oh

[Mike Schiraldi]

I don't get it.. can someone explain why this is funny?
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New accuracy

[mind21_98]

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 ;)

Re:New accuracy

[crumley]

Anyways, I'm glad that the FSL is the first government lab to buy Linux systems.

Hardly the first, since NASA Goddard invented Beowulf.

The press release says that they are the first to buy a "turn-key" Linux supercomputer.

Re:New accuracy

[InsaneGeek]

Depends upon what period you want to be accurate: weather 10 seconds from now, pretty darn accurate, 10 days from now not so accurate, a month... well throw a dart at the guessing board. This will allow them to add more variables into the equation, but I don't think it will get show the public any noticeable differences.

You can throw as big of a machine as you want at these problems and you will only marginally increase it's effectiveness, this is all due to chaos theory. There are so many items that seem insignificant (I seem to remember the phrase insignificantly significant from a professor somewhere) that can not be accounted for; that makes any long-range forcasting of weather impossible. Extremely small items added into an equation that at first glance would seem to only add maybe a .0001% variation can infact greatly change the results as you increase the period that the equation is used with. i.e. For small periods it doesn't add much variation but for longer periods it adds significant variation. There is no possible way for anyone to take in all these suttle complexities: if a raindrop rotates clockwise after it hits the ground and hits another one on it's way down moving it's position how does it affect weather 6 months from now?

Re:New accuracy

[jarv]

CHAOS
MAKING A NEW SCIENCE
By James Gleick.
(A Penguin book nonetheless!)

I would completely recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

I couldn't put this one down.

Here comes the Sun...

[ElPresidente1972]

Somebody please tell me they're using STORM Linux!

Maybe more impressive ...

[lovebyte]

but not in the news much is this article from Linux World.
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.

$15M price tags.

[Ho-Lee-Cow!]

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 :)

Re:$15M price tags.

[jbarnett]

You and I aren't going to get our hands on this weather package anytime soon ;)"

Contray to popular belief they did release these weather package under the GPL, I have it running on couple of 386's Beowulf'd together over 10BaseT in my bedroom.

It is pretty decent software to, do you release that it has never predicted rain, and you know what? It has yet to rain in my bedroom, amazing software.

Tommorrow there is no chance of rain in my bedroom and the temparture will be around room temparture thoughout the entire day! Great weather I am having here

Also since it was release under the GPL, a couple hackers have teamed up with Dr. Evil to create a weather control machine, that not only predicts the weather, but can alter it on the fly! GPL, you can do amazing things with it, including, but not limited to Total World Domination by bringing the United Nations down with a hail strom from uh hell. When Linus made a joke about gaining Total World Domination though the use of free (as in speech) software, he was serious!

On a site note, if you check your preferences Nate has made a slashbox that displayes in real time the number of nations that have sumbited to Dr. Evil and his weather machine, recently they have gotten Russia and China (who would of thought), the part I found assuming was that Canada was the first to go...

It's the Software, stupid.

[SEWilco]

I expect that they probably had to spend just a little money to write the software to run on that machine.

Can I help them, and next year send in a couple of nodes instead of paying taxes?

First forecast

[jabber]

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?

High cost? Probably not, actually.

[The Dodger]

Anyhoo 276 nodes, but its costed $15M?

$54k/node does appear rather expensive at first glance, but let's bear in mind here that this is a HPC installation. That's "high performance", kids. Also, let's remember what it's purpose is: to "help researchers improve forecasts of severe weather such as thunderstorms, tornadoes,and winter storms, and ultimately, to save lives and property".

Basically, this ain't a couple of 386's Beowulf'd together over 10BaseT in someone's bedroom and you can bet that this system ain't going to be using EIDE hard drives. In order to achieve the peformance, reliability and scalability which the NOAA would have specified for such a mission-critical syste, it doesn't surprise me that the cost per node is this high.

Furthermore, this amount undoubtedly includes the two upgrades and maintenance over the contract period (three years plus)and that good old 24/7 4-hour response don't come cheap!

All in all, I'd say that it's probably not that expensive after all.

D.

Re:Let's see if Taco can be clever

[Grape Shasta]

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.

Hehe

[TheTick21]

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

Interconnnect costs

[slashdotsux]

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.

You must be kidding.

[paRcat]

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.

Why it cost $15 million

[Greg Lindahl]

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.

Beowulf still not WS compliant

[Ukab the Great]

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!

Costs

[Corbet]

The system may seem expensive, but there are a few things to consider here:

• 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....

The truth about weather predicition

[ian.layton]

First let's me qualify myself...I was a meteorology major for a few years back in the mid 90's. With that said:

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:

Why is Forecasting so difficult?

Consider a rotating spherical envelope of a mixture of gases -- occasionally murky and always somewhat viscous.

Place it around an astonomical object nearly 8000 miles in diameter.

Tilt the whole system back and forth with respect ot its source of heat and light.

Freeze it at the poles of its axis of roation and intensely heat it in the middle.

Cover most of the surface of the sphere with a liquid that continually feeds moisture into the atmosphere.

Subject the whole to tidal forces induced by the sun and a captive satellite.

Then try to predict the conditions of one small portion of that atmosphere for a period of one to several days in advance.

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

Re:The truth about weather predicition

[jericson]

There is very little chance in the foreseeable future that weather predicition will be 100% correct, no matter how fast the computer get

Change that to no chance and I'd agree with you. It turns out that the fundimental equations of motion for the atmosphere are unsolvable. That means that computer models need to be based on equations that are already approximate. Further, models divide the atmosphere with a three dimensional grid. The finer the grid, the better the forecast, the faster the computer needed to run the model in a timely manner. But no matter how fast the computer, models will always have grids and will always be approximate. Then there will be rounding errors in the floating point calculations, approximations to prevent small anomolies from propigating through the model, and bad, incomplete and under-representative input. This stuff makes rocket science look easy.

Re:Lets see now...

[Detritus]

What about reliability? If I am building a cluster of hundreds of computers, I don't want bottom-of-the-line boxes that fail all the time. Something like this requires reliability engineering to make sure the system's MTBF is acceptable.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Somewhat related

[grappler]

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...

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grappler

Gah!

[Rain]

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/