Slashdot Mirror
IBM Constructs New Fastest Computer
scoobysnack writes "MSNBC is reporting that IBM has once again created the world's fastest computer -- it will be used for simulating real-world nuclear tests. With 12 teraflops it would still take it 3 months to simulate the first 1/100th of a second of a nuclear bomb explosion." There's coverage at CNET as well.
Simulation, to be even remotely believable needs a hell of a lot more than pure processing power.
So, the answer is no.
I don't understand why people bother simulating nuclear reactions. Now, before you think i'm being facetious, let me explain. Nuclear physics is hard (as if you needed me to tell you that). Most of the theories as to how the fundamental interactions work are flawed. For example, the liquid drop type models (on which most current simulations are based) are incredibly simplistic. They don't even take into account the Pauli exclusion principle, instead relying on a fudge factor to ensure that their particles follow the Fermi-Dirac distribution.
Thus, my argument is: you're better off doing the experiment.
What scares me isn't that technology is advancing at this dizzying pace, but rather that we are still utilizing that technology to study the use and effects of a weapon that has been in use for over 50 years.
If we can properly simulate the beginnings of FUSION, that could be an important step towards commercially viable fusion power plants! Cheap, clean, unlimited energy... worthy goal, I would think.
:)
Very worthy, seeing as the Pentium 6's and the K9's are gonna need a fusion power supply just to boot, and we won't even talk about those in SMP...
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
The "old" systems, though they aren't the most powerful, are still used every day (and every night, too) by a wide variety of projects. There is a heck of a lot of research going on around the clock at LLNL.
When they mention the nuclear simulations, that may be the biggest problem that they tackle, but there is no shortage of smaller (relatively speaking) projects which need CPU cycles on a regular basis.
Check out http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news /feature-techno.html for all the cool non-nuclear stuff they do at Livermore.
Nate
...and hi to Brooke if you're out there at the lab again. How's the rice?
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
There are quite a few supercomputers out there doing things other than nuclear bomb research, but one must understand that that research requires intensive computing. Anything that deals with simulating the motion of large numbers of particles requires intensive computing, not just bomb research.
.... On top of those they need to worry about where roads go and where unmovable objects go and, of course, people.
Q: Why are such huge computers are needed for bomb symulation, or fusion power research etc...?
A: For each particle that you want to simulate you need nine dimentions to specify where it is and where is it going, three for position, three for linear momentum, and three for angular momentum. Each dimention specified takes up roughly one FLOP (floating point operation per second), over simplified but it gets the point across. Therefore each particle requires nine FLOPS. So a 12 teraflop machine can keep track of ~1.33E12 particles. This may seem like a lot of particles to keep track of but considering things like Avregadros(sp?) number...
An example roughly of how intense this is. This new machine could do a decent job simulating a mid-sized tokamac fusion facility, if you use the quick and somewhat inaccurate way of simulating.
If you were to take a look at the top 500 most powerful machines you would find that most of the ones at the very top are either doing nuclear weapons testing or fusion power research.
Oh, in case you are wondering, the government changed one of their supercomputers that was doing weapons simulation over to traffic simulation last year. Traffic simulations also require several dimensions per car, again, three for position
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
It is possible for unclassified simulations to be run on the machine with a Q-cleared "proxy" user running the code on behalf of someone else - but in this day and age of ultra-tight security in the wake of Wen Ho Lee and missing disk drives - that is highly unlikely to happen.
However, there is a mighty impressive machine available on the "open side" which will be used for things like weather sim, drug design, etc... In this case it will be the machine ("ASCI Blue") which is currently behind the fence, which will be moved outside. 5000+ PowerPC 604e's, and not a bad parallel environment to work in, I must say...
The ASCI program is also funding 5 university ASCI centers. These centers are targeted with solving unclassified "grand challenge" type problems which involve similar complexities to nuclear simulations. ie - solid rocket motor simulations (Illinois), Astrophysics (U Chicago), accidental fire scenarious (Utah), turbulence (Stanford), and material modeling/response (caltech). These centers get time (or "fight for time" if you asked them) on the unclassified ASCI machines.
The unclassified machines are usually just one step behind, or slightly smaller, so they don't make splashy headlines. They are, however, still very very impressive machines, and there is lots of groundbreaking research being done on them which would probably not have been possible (yet) without ASCI
I (and others) don't particularly like the fact that these machines are used mostly for nuclear simulations - but it's better than the alternative (craters in Nevada), and it's definitely helping push the envelope of parallel computing - which is all I really care about. :-)
Los Alamos has a similar contract with SGI to supply large machines for them. Sandia has a large machine from Intel, and have subsequently been concentrating on massive linux clusters (ala CPLANT) as their future.
More information here
I'm pretty sure your post is a troll, but here goes. While it is theoretically possible to double the number of states that a quantum computer can evaluate by adding a single extra "qbit", noone has yet developed a quantum computer with the capacity to handle something of this magnitude. Furthermore, the simulation of the weapons is done through an iterative differential equation solver that is deterministic! That's right, no search, no funny stuff of any kind, just solve a set of DE's to a specified tolerance, and repeat. So, until some other kind of computer comes along that can do that faster than ASCI White, that's what we're going to use.
Walt
Personally what bugs me most is people who don't understand the meaning of a figure of speech, and get it the wrong way round. Like "I could care less"
Oh, and the use of literally to mean exactly the opposite - like when people say "He literally put his foot in his mouth"
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
There was an article a while back about a really really really fast computer which only did gravitational computation; wouldn't that be usefull here? they seem to be wanting to calculate the interactions of zillions of particles, and this could be the way to do it. okay, prolly not -just- gravity, but i'm just noticing the parrallels.
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
So why are they using Power CPUs rather than say the latest MIPS? I haven't seen the latest Power stuff but MIPS has been screaming lately.
What's with this +1 bonus stuff anyway? Who asked for it and why do I have to explicitly turn it off?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
How long until a distributed nuclear simulation project? I guess that wouldn't happen becuase of "security concerns," though. originally posted in response to a thread in the first, and now deleted, item. The collective community here has been over this scores of times already. To reiterate: Seti@Home, all of the various key breaking projects, and any other distributed processing project all have one thing in common: the data chunk being processed by one computer is largely independent of the other data chunks being processed by the others. Hence, it is feasible to send a chunk out from the central distributor, have it processed by the proccessing computer, and then return it directly to the processing computer.
In this application, however, this is just not a possibility. Consider the simulations this computer will be used for, nano-second scale simulations of the initial criticality of a chunk of uranium or plutonium. This is just not something that can be broken up into chunks and handed out for processing. For the simulation to be even vaguely useful, each atom or particle of fissionable substance simulated must interact with all of the other atoms in the simulation. Thus, if someone were to be given a chunk of, say, a million atoms/particle/lattice points, to process, their sub-simulation would need to communicate continuously with all of the other processors sub-simulations. If we look at the system conservatively, and say that each particle will only be affected by the particles closer too it, this still requires the exchange of vast quantities of information at each step. And that's not even taking into account the effects of simulating the neutrons and other sub-atomic particles zipping around. The processors would have to have huge amounts of data transfer ability to make this feasible.
Of course, if i misread your intent, and you're actually suggesting that every citizen should be given this huge amounts of banwidth to enable the distributed processing, i'm behind you all the way.
--Use this space for notes--
Are you nuts or what?
The reason we have an international ban or nuclear reactions in space is so that we dont destroy not just ourselves, but the rest of our known universe..
If a nuke was set of in near-vacuum space, the chain reaction would still occur, but at huge distances - I'm not sure of the mechanics between explosions in space and bodies of large mass (which will have an awfull lot to do with type and size of atmosphere, if any), but there is absolutely no reason to assume that chain reactions among the far more dispersed matter of near-vacuum will not be absolutely catastrophic.
Feel free to correct me on this, but isn't there good reason to suggest that based on reactions that happen on Earth, the chain reaction in space could basically rip through all known near-vacuum, impacting every large-matter-body in space aswell?
In other words, wouldn't it be like, instead of one point nuke within Earth atmosphere, simultaneous nuking of the whole outer atmosphere of every planet or star or comet everywhere?
Since I am relying on memory posting this, I will research further over the weekend - in the meantime, feel free to reply candidly.
[ insert meme here ]
Perhaps because only ASCI can afford those way too expensive computers?
I think when ASCI Red was unveiled, they allowed for up to 50% of the CPU time to be used for non-ASCI research projects.
The top of the line supercomputers are listed in TOP500 Supercomputing Sites latest list. Clearly there are more than ASCI Nuclear Research computers. I don't remember Slashdot reporting installation of the two new non-ASCI teraflop computers, though. Perhaps only the best is of interest to the slashdot crowd.
Maybe the SP software came a long way since I last saw it, but what I saw tells me that using the box for anything other than one application that will benefit from massively parallel computing is a waste of money. IBM hypes the massive parallel potential for a good reason, but the sales droids will sell it for applications that just don't work out.
Which is a pity. The hardware is nice.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Would you rather they did open-air explosions to do their tests?
From the article:
"They're trying to solve a very important problem there, "Josephs said, adding he thought the $110 million price tag for ASCI White was actually pretty reasonable. "The only other way to do this would be to take old nuclear weapons and blow them up. This really is a bargain."
Hold on, because there's no other way to test it, it becomes an important problem? I mean, unless someone plans on shooting off a nuclear missile, it's not that important. Which brings up the interesting question of who in the US is planning on shooting off a nuke? And if you argue that the US is testing to see what happens if someone nukes the US, then I don't see how these calculations are going to make a difference when a nuke is coming our way.
You mean a packet with the 'OOB' (out of band) flag set... right?
I'd like to take into example how I was just at the PC Expo in NYC the other day and was looking at the 1GHz Athlon chips from AMD. Now, it's certainly quite impressive that these chips are running that fast, but how are they showing it off? A TV tuner card showing a video, a windows machine doing nothing special and someone playing a 3D car racing game. What does this show? a) how well your video card works with the TV tuner card, b) nothing and c) how fast your 3D rendering card is.
What I WOULD like to see in future tests is how fast the Linux kernel compiles. That is, at least , how I test how fast a machine is. Of course, it also then takes into account how fast your disk is (interface and drive), but there is still the raw processing power. Granted, you could argue Gaussian algorithms, but that is FPU speed. I want to see the processor as a whole.
So, my proposition is: The new benchmark for Slashdot readers should be how fast it compiles the kernel with the default options :)
My two cents; no refunds.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
How come almost every time there is a post about supersomputers, they are being used for nuclear bomb explosion simulations?
As usual, there's a good article over at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on why there's so much government desire for bomb simulation.
We have treaties and treaties on why we can't test these devices "for real". Given the desire to upgrade them without "upgrading" them in a way that affects counts or treaties, there's currently a lot of interest in how to re-use existing designs and components in ways that give functionally new weapons, without being listed as such. Converting air-burst devices to near-surface burst devices turns town-killers into bunker-killers, but it doesn't have to appear as building new weapons or changing the type of existing ones.
The 'euphemism' "Stockpile Stewardship and Managment program" actually aims for a way of not having to make any more nuclear weapons by maintaining and conserving the current ones.
:-)); doing the experiments virtually, would be a boon.
If it turns out that the expiration dates of the weapons is far enough in the future, no new weapons will have to be made for a while, BUT to verify the durability, some experiments will have to be made, and since real-world nuclear tests politically sensitive (how's this for a euphemism?
Personally i wouldn't mind seeing all of those weapons passing their expiration dates, but spontaneous detonation would be rather nasty.... (though highly improbable i guess)
Sander
I couldn't agree more. Testing of nuclear weapons should only be done on humans or anuimals. There is no need to bring computers into this.
Why? Bogomips means "bogus - mips" and is only a relevant rating between computers of the same architecture. A bogomip rating comparison between an Alpha 500MHz and a PIII 500 MHz isn't as reliable as a comparison between 2 PIII's with diffenent clocks speeds. The "speed" difference isn't reliably represented. It'd still be cool to see the rating, though!
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
By the way, the weather service did get themselves their own parallel computing cluster (running Linux, by the way). Incidentially, the progress made in simulating nuclear blasts carries directly over to astronomers who simulate supernovae.
When the machine is ready for "general" use ("general" as long as you have a Q clearance!), then the plan is to move the current machine to the unclassified side, and open it up for use by the ASCI alliances and other unclassified users.
They should be able to simply add it on cluster style as you suggest, since the current machine on the unclassified side is basically the same architecture. I can't tell you for sure that it's what they'll do - but if they do, they should have about a 4-5 tflop machine for unclassified use by the end of the year.
As far as what will happen to ASCI White when they're done with it - it's only being rented from IBM - so it'll go back to Kingston or whereever...
--Rob
maybe it needs to run an application that tracks DOE hard drives
onk the caveman wants 12 teraflop computer so onk can look at super high-res pictures of nude cavewomen. maybe even 3-d vr simulation of them. unf.
a Beowolf cluster of these?
Seriously though. This is using the Power III-3. Isn't the INSANELY fast Power IV just around the corner? When will that sucker arrive?
Actually, they could hand them out to the public.. these are not tactical simulations, but actual particle simulations.
I believe the problem arises in the amount of shared data required between nodes... it's not like cracking a key where you can just chop they keyspace up into as many pieces as you like and work on them all separately.. you have to have the entire dataset in order to work on it properly..
They aren't working to improve the explosion. It works well enough already.
They are ensuring that the bombs will go off reliably. The thinking is that if we have a working nuclear stockpile, enemies will think twice before attacking us. If our weapons get old and fail to work, the deterrence will be lost. How do we know if our old weapons will work? Blow one up for real, or simulate it.
I'd rather them simulate it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Yes it does, 1600x1200 @ 5 billion frames per second ;)
---
How long before the Beowulf cluster posts?
... a Beowulf cluster of these puppies
Should this article be given (-1: Redundant)?
They already used 'Blue'. Twice.
Asci Blue Pacific (Livermore) 1999
Asci Blue Mountain (Los Alamos) 1998
And Red.
Asci Red (Sandia) 1999
So, being American.. it's time for white, yes?
I went into the machine room for a major animation company during an interview and among the racks of Origin 2K's and disk arrays they had
a couple of midrange Cray's.
I assumed they were for graphics processing (that's what the Origins were for), but it turns out they were simply the fastest fileservers on the market at the time of purchase (an important thing if you're pushing around mutli GB files).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
efficiency.
More kill for the buck.
Screw that where's my damn flying cars???!!!
There aren't nuclear weapons simulations per se because such things require tuned parameters from actual tests and are not directly useful for anything other than making nuclear explosion, but there are open source (mostly public domain actually since they were government sponsored) particle simulations which can be used for things like simulating the propogation of radiation in the human body.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I think they should put this super-computer to the real test, not just trust IBM for it. They should ask it to provide the answer to life the universe and everything... of course we already know the answer is 42, but the computer doesn't.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
IBM Constructs New Fastest Computer
IBM's ASCII White Super Computer Unleashed
It's CmdrTaco coming down the stretch on New Fastest Computer, but here comes timothy on ASCII White, it's Taco, it's timothy, Taco, timothy....timothy by a nose!
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Maybe they should have just listed the floor square footage or cubic feet (or centiliters) for volume. There ya go, a tough to grasp representation. I'll admit the elephant thing is a little dumb (as is the calculator analogy), but the basketball court analogy seems to be right on target with giving a semi-useful description...
;-)
Of course, they could have just said, "It's way bigger than a regular PC" but that wouldn't have helped
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Could Slashdot have a section for these editorial errors, so that the comments that people posted won't go wasted?
It also shows that you acknowledge your mistakes.
The Spanish people at Barrapunto have a "Gazapos" section for this kind of articles.
to get an idea of the scale of this, the whole SETI@Home project is generating about 8 TeraFLOPS. This thing tops that by about 50%. So it could process about 500000 SETI units per day. or just under six *per second*.
:)
Keywords: Quake 3, Kernel compilation, Beowulf, Toy Story 3 in realtime?
Fross
Isn't there anything better to do with all this CPU?
Generally only government will buy computers that cost over $10 million, so the high-end configurations are rarely tested. The ASCI program buys one of these every few years for a national lab. The long-term goal is a petaflop in a decade or so.
I guess there were some bad experiences with companies like Thinking Machines that had promising designs, but became too dependent on the government trough and couldn't survive in the commercial world. Now it is the case of the "rich get richer". No one is going to chance $20 - $100 million on second-tier computer company you aren't sure will be around for the life of one computing generation, as short as they are these days.
The supercomputer industry is fading. Only the government is willing to shell out big bucks for top end machines. They only have a handful of applications that qualify- weather prediction, bomb simulation, airplane design.
This compter isn't on the list yet... ASCI Red is... ASCI White is about three times faster than ASCII Blue - with a few less procs than ASCI Red (top of the list). I can't wait to see the linpack results, though...
I'm not sure what types of uProcs the Fujitsu and Hitachi systems use, but I remember reading that the number of nodes is fairly comprable between the IBM machines and the other maufacturers...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Large scale distributed computing over heterogenous networks are only suitable for computation that can be broken into discrete computational work pakets.
This is exactly what Distributed.net and Seti are doing, as far as sending a discrete block of data, having the client crunch it, and then return the result.
Some computations require a network of interdependencies int he data set. Such as large scale simulations, which is what this computer will be doing. In such scenarios, there is no way to 'break up' the computational tasks into neat little discrete packets, since they are interdependant.
This requires lot of very fast networking (ccNUMA, very large SMP, etc) on hardware designed specifcally for this type of task.
AdCritic.com - IBM: Yottabytes
Pretty amusing. And as a bonus:
AdCritic.com - Spoof: Wazzup Grandmas -- Friggin' Hilarious!!!
TossableDigits.com: Temporary Phone Numb
I wish I had this computer for 1 month to attempt a protein folding expt., however IBM is proposing it already. To date the longest protein folding simulation using molecular mechanics force fields (not quantum) is 1/1,000,000 th of a second. 6 months on a 256 processor Cray with all atoms crammed into Cache. see http://www.amber.ucsf.edu/members/yduan/983445.htm l As questionable as the results are, it is an interesting accomplishment to break the microsecond barrier. I share sentiments with those who are troubled that such resources remain with the military machine. Let us hope it is put to some humane use! If I were an atom in this simulation and I told my wife I would be home in a split second, how long would it take me? Love AlgoRythm
When you get down to it, a "new" (just off the assembly line) nuclear device is relatively controlled and predictable. It won't blow up until you tell it to, and you know how it'll react when you push the button.
As they age, though, you don't really know what'll happen. And that's why we have simulators. As others have pointed out, there's only 2 ways to know if a device that's been stockpiled for 15 years will work - simulate it or take it out to the desert. Now, since we can't exactly take one out back and set it off, we buy a bigass computer and simulate it.
Or would you prefer that one just randomly go off while sitting at the dock inside an Ohio-class submarine at Groton, CT? Or maybe, if we return to the 50s mindset of 24-hour alert for bomber crews fully loaded for WWIII, with the occasional scrambling to test readiness, that B2 flying over Topeka hits some turbulance and levels half of the already-flat state of Kansas?
That said, the group I'm in at SGI is working on some software (about to be release in Irix) to partition single systems up into multiple smaller systems. That software will eventually run on Linux (it actually is a combination of hardware and software) and allows multiple kernel images to run on the same physical address space and communicate with direct memory copies between them. In this way we plan to build a 512p Linux system (maybe even more) where the size of a single kernel image is only 16, 32, or 64 processors.
So basically, the only way to scale Linux well past 8 CPU's without modifying the kernel heavily (I can elaborate on exactly what that means if someone wants) is to build some sort of a cluster.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
You know, more goes on in a nuclear weapon than fission. If we can properly simulate the beginnings of FUSION, that could be an important step towards commercially viable fusion power plants! Cheap, clean, unlimited energy... worthy goal, I would think.
Additionally, even if the data from this box *IS* indeed ONLY ever applied towards nuclear weapons, that's still MUCH better than the alternative: which is to withdrawl from the Test-Ban Treaty, and start setting the things off for real again.
SIMULATING something is NOT morally equivelent to DOING that very thing. Otherwise, quite a lot of Quake, Carmagaddeon, and GTA players would be sitting in jail right now.
And, hell, even nuclear bombs, as they exist now, and as they could be refined, have potentially non-military uses. No, I'm NOT talking about Teller's harbor in Alaska; or the ridiculous scenarios in Deep Impact or Armagaddeon... Although nukes COULD be used for the noble purpose of deflecting incoming Comets/Asteroids. The implimentation, as presented, just sucked.
Actually, what I'm talking about *WAS* mentioned in Deep Impact. I'm talking about the Orion drive. If we are ever smart enough to withdraw from the ridiculous treaties which prevent it's deployment, Orion could be the answer to all of our short term space exploration problems! Until we perfect fusion, it IS the most powerful drive system proposed for deployment. Imagine how FAST we could get to Mars, and how much equipment we could take along if we used Orion, rathar than ridiculously inefficent chemical rockets!
Or, for the peaceniks out there... Wouldn't that be the ULTIMATE "swords into plowshares" situation? Imagine... the nuclear stockpiles of the world, ultimately directed not towards mutual annihilation, but towards the exploration of the final frontier!
We HAVE the way, all we need is the will.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Why is it that the Pentagon still gets to spend so much money on fancy new toys for a war that will now never come?
It is because they spend this money that the war will never come.
The USSR has collapsed and since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III
They aren't the only ones that have the bomb these days.
poor people starve on the streets and can't afford even basic health care thanks to the Randite social policies of the US, despite what their Constitution supposedly guarantees.
The Constitution does not guarantee free food or antibiotics. The Government is here primarily for national security. In other words, to protect us from other contries. Sounds like this spending is right up that alley. If you want free food, go to another country with a different type of government. (Note: You may have luck in any one of a number of countries to which the US ships free food all of the time.)
Santa will likely just move you. As your current house would be made into a pancake as the ASIC White came down the chimney, the best method of delivery would be to deliver you to the computer.
Hope you like your new digs.
The whole point of maintaining a military, is so that those lesser nations that we are not friendly with do not become more powerful than us. As long as the US is far enough more powerful than everybody else, of course we will be at peace. Do you think that Iraq likes being bombed, without even having the chance of striking back at our country's actual territory? Of course not.
The way I see it (IANAMS), we are not at war with anyone at the moment, because we would win. And they know this. Sounds elitist of me, yes, and it probably is (see IANA military strategist,) but think about it... if you've got the great big army, don't you think that you will suddenly have a lot more friends?
--
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Isn't the idea of these aggregate computers (clusters, whatever) that you can just keep on growing them?
Add a couple hundred nodes, buy another switch or two, increase your flops by a couple of hundred g?
Johan
Actually, its only barely even relevant between processors of the same exact model... in which case you can usually just compare the MHz.
The speed rating between different models is isnt only not reliably represented, it isnt represented *at all*.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Maybe with the 28 semis that it took to get it from IBM to Sandia... Does Santa still run that freight line?
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
An AC posted below that the Hitachi/Fujitsu machines are vector processors, like the good ol' Crays. Very good at some things, not so great at others...
Favorite fun fact:
The microprocessors inside ASCI White contain 2,000 miles of copper wiring, enough to stretch from Washington, D.C. to Phoenix, Arizona.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
These things must be the latest fashion in international peeing contests - It used to be that the US was upset that the USSR had enough missles to blow up the US 20 times over, and we USians could only blow up the USSR 15 times so we (USians) had to make and deploy more missles to acheive 'parity' and get the USSRians back to the negotiating table.
Now-a-days, I guess the US is afraid that China will have better nuke simulators than the US so we gotta beat 'em at it, it's "Keeping up with the Chin's" all over again.
I'd rather see the funds go toward a modern super-collider but, pfft, I only pay 1/3 of my income to taxes, I don't have any real say in how it's going to be spent.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I can get the same result by receiving an out of bandwidth data packet on an unpatched Win95 machine running on a 486DX2.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
The nuclear simulations do help in the stockpile stewardship program, by stopping those large creators. Also, from what two lab officials working heavily on the NIF project (and worked on past projects) told me, much of the work allows scientists to keep the stockpile updated. Old bombs become dangerous, and the government ruitinely signs treaties requiring that new techniques must be created. The advancement in the research alone helps numerous industries, and building the machines of course fuels that technological research. So, its not all that horrible, but this research (in treaties) help stop other countries from conducting nuclear tests. Simulating them in the lab is far better than on bikini island.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Nuclear simulation, like fluid dynamics, is basically a cellular simulation -- make several bazillion cells, time step each one, communicating only with the neighbors on each step.
(I think. I'm actually making this up as I go along, so add salt to taste)
Now the problem is that since the entire simulation goes in lock-step, you limit the number of steps by not only computation speed, but also communication speed between the nodes.
I presume that there are smart approximative approaches that can be used to assauge this, but it remains the case that distribution and cellular simulation just don't go.
Johan
Possible Explanation:
Fascination with WWF
Fascination with NASCAR
TV Babies doped on Ritalin
Possible Explanation on Why we even need a bomb in the first place:
Obsessive Nationalism
Might vs Right
Ethno-Egotism
Stop whining and learn to love the Bomb, citizen. It's the Right Thing to do.
By the way, when you say "Randite social policies", is that Ayn Rand, RAND Corporation, or Randy of the Redwoods? Just curious.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Isn't the idea of these aggregate computers (clusters, whatever) that you can just keep on growing them?
Add a couple hundred nodes, buy another switch or two, increase your flops by a couple of hundred g?
Any idea if that's what they did? None of the articles have said whether they just plugged 9 more teraflops worth of power into the existing 3 or put a whole new 12 tf system in. That would be interesting to know.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I didn't say we shouldn't try to find out whether the nukes still work. I'm sure some models last longer than others, so maybe the US should let all but a few of them go. (i.e. dismantle them once they're no good.) It's always good to know what you do have, and that's separate from what you think you need to have.
I don't have any good solutions, but I do know that the current state of affairs sucks.
> argue all you want that we shouldn't have nukes; write your congressmen, campaign on Capitol Hill, etc.
I live in Canada, the only country in the world (AFAIK) that could build nukes, but chooses not to. (Of course, we are cheating by living under the umbrella of the US and NATO, but we do get to say we ourselves don't have any.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Most people who ramble on about NP have no clue what the N actually stands for. Your question has no real meaning in the sense that it asks about an attribute that is not associated with the question (rather like saying "How many doors are on the dog?"). The simulation is polynomial w.r.t the number of particles being simulated, but exponential w.r.t to the mesh granularity; it's entirely practical to approxiamate systems of non-linear differential equations to as much precision as one wants to wait for. In this case, a more powerful computer means that one only has to wait months instead of years to get results starting from physical first principles (instead of experimentally derived hueristics).
"With 12 teraflops it would still take it 3 months to simulate the first 1/100th of a second of a nuclear bomb explosion"
Shit, perhaps they should hire someone to optimize their code a bit.
With distributed computing so big, why doesn't the government just make a huge ad campaign so the average computer users know about it, then have them all download it? If the ones going now could make so many calculations with what little membership they have, imagine if all those computers in buisnesses have it running, and every Compaq sold, every Gateway, every Dell, every Micron every... Now thats some computing power.
Cost? $0. (well maybe $5 because it would force Intel and AMD to put better fans/heatsinks on their chips)
NO!!! The operating principles are as removed from a beowulf cluster as a bicycle from a car("Yes, they both have wheels, gears, and are made of metal."). The RS/6000s are not commercial off-the-shelf parts; they are substantially modified to allow greater internode communication bandwidth and lower backplane latency. The network switch for SMP (known as an interconnect) is orders of magnitude faster than even gigabit Ethernet; it is entirely custom built and accounts for a majority of the developement cost of the machine.
The US Constitution guarantees heath care? Guarantees food? Would you happen to be a product of the public education system in this country? I only ask because you seem to have a fundemental misunderstanding of the document in question.
The OP's comment is utterly moronic. Solving ODEs and PDEs is a task perfectly well suited for a conventional computer. Quantum computers do *not* double their performance each time a single atom is added; not even when a single qubit is added to the device. Obviously, you are a troll or otherwise attempting to exploit the moderation system.
....only because it reminds me of the old supercomputers (ENIAC and whatnot). In 20 years we will all be laughing at this machine because we'll have something 100 times more powerful sitting in our home offices.
Yeah the Japanese machines are probably TCM based sysplex units a-la older IBM type ES9000 mainframes. I believe the largest off the shelf TCM machine is a 12-way. These processors are enormously fast, consume tremendous amounts of electricity and throw off vast quantities of heat which is why they're water cooled. If we compare the performance of TCM units vs. the latest CMOS mainframe class CPU's it still takes about 3 CMOS to match the raw performance of 1 TCM. Now moving down the scale, the IBM-like mainframe class CMOS CPU's themselves are built specifically for mainframe machines and have very very high performance baselines. How high? Hard to tell since IBM will not publish performance benchmarks for mainframe machines that can be compared to other types or brands. Instead they use an internally derived benchmark that uses a 'commonly' know basic performance figure based for example on some well known IBM class mainframe like a 9021-831 or something like that. Any other machine is evaluated as a factor or that. At any rate the latest mainframe class CMOS machines have complexes or the rough analog of SMP cages that contain at least one CPU (up to..I don't remember, you can check). Each complex or base machine model is then sysplex'd to other same-type machines up to 12 or 14 machines or even higher. This is what the Hitachi/Fujitsu machines do. They build an x-way complex and then sysplex all the complexes together. As a rough comparison a VERY large commercial sysplex is typically a 12-way with each complex containing 12-24 individual processors for a total of 144 to 288 discrete CPU chips. This honestly is the high end of the high end for standard (non custom built special purpose) mainframe class machines. Compare this to an IBM RS/6000 SP2 frame with say 8 nodes of 12 processors each and ganging 20 or 30 or more frames together across a second level backplane switch for a total assembly of at least a few thousand discrete CPU's to more or less the same work. At least in the commercial world. In the nuclear simulation world obviously you want the highest possible FP performance so a TCM based mainframe design is enhanced with additional or different vector processors compared to simply exploiting the general purpose FP performance of whatever RISC CPU you're using. Another reason why the numbers of CPU's in the two classes of machines is so different.
Here's a link to an article, but's it's a bit dated:
http://www.ibm.com/news/1999/12/06.phtml
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
Actually it can be useful - if you know your CPU's expected bogomips, and its way off, it's probably a sign that something is horribly wrong with your system.
--
http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Okay, I know that this post was not really in line with the topic, but why the hell is it flamebait??!
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Dear Citizen,
We have built this giant computer to simulate Nuclear Explosions. Previously, we couldn't predict the outcome of a Nuclear Explosion. We did not know if it would kill a few million people, or a few billion. Until we had the ability to simulate it we couldn't be sure, and if we aren't sure, then we can't protect you. So please continue to send us more tax dollars to support the electric bill for our new Nuclear Explosion Simulator(TM) and we can continue to protect you. Also, it's good for children.
On an unrelated note, please feel free to update your PGP keys to the longest possible key length you can use, we believe you have every right to your privacy.
Yours Truly,
Big Brother
-----
On a more serious note, how much ass would we kick if we could get this badboy to join Team Slashdot over at distributed.net?
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
If they had posted an article (or two) stating that the U.S. was going to resume above-ground testing, how would that make you feel?
This is the "alternative" that they are always talking about in those debates. So, quit whining or we're gonna have to make Nevada glow.
#VRML V2.0 utf8
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You're talking nonsense. exponential performance increase is doubling with every addition of another computing element. You just claimed that quantum and conventional computers are the same.
It would be sweet to have a quantum computer that could be scaled up enough to process such big problems, we don't. Therefore, IBM's kick-ass computer is a good start. Right now, no quantum computers can approach that size of problem! Nobody's figured out how to not disturb the quantum states for long enough.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
What's going on here?
This is a fair complaint, and not a troll. If you believe otherwise, than please ignore this. Someone else deserves that karma point. Thanks.
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Since the other story is gone from the home screen, jump to it and steal all the +5 stories and repost them here for free karma!
How come almost every time there is a post about supersomputers, they are being used for nuclear bomb explosion simulations? While I realize that this is a better thing to simulate than to actually do, aren't these computers being used for anything else? Is it that the people who these computers are being built for only want them for those purposes? I just think it would be great to see an announcement mention that a supercomputer would be used for analyzing weather patterns, help with the human genome mapping effort, or something else, well, different. :-)
Ok, What I want to know is where did the old computer go? They had a 3.??? teraflop computer before. Now they havea 12.??? teraflop computer. What did they do with the 3? Scrap it? Give it to another branch of science? Sell it? Stick it in a warehouse? Why can't we take it and set it up in a big room and let every research facility around that wants time on it buy some. Or even just allocate X amount of time per month for each scientific institution and let them use it to further research. It would very much suck if they just threw the thing away....
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
You need internode bandwidth and low communications latency; this type of simulation can only be done with a large, monolithic memory space machine.
We could just grab a warhead and test it in his basement.
hmm... on second thought, it might make a mess. Nope back to the computer then.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
I can tell you exactly how the US will enter WWIII. It will involve china trying to gain control of taiwan. China has the largest population and the largest standing army and they are gearing up for a war with the US within the next 30 years. You can think bill clinton for his selling secrets to the chinese, now they have nuclear warheads as acurate as we do.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"How the power of this computer compares to that of Distributed.net or similar projects?":
A comparison is not really possible. d.net can do more raw operations per second if one just adds up the total power of all the machines involved. However, ASCI White has far better internode communication. For the purposes of during highly paralizable calculations like distributed FFTs on blocked data and brute force sieving or key searches, d.net is probably faster. For the purposes of doing tasks like numerical linear algebra, nuclear/non-linear dynamics, weather forcasting, etc. ASCI White would be faster.
"How feasible is the distribution of such a computation? Are all the calculations similar, or would a lot of different computational code have to be written?":
It would essentially be impossible to distribute the computational task, even if the intial value data could be distributed (and it can't; even simplier FEA simulations routinely have datasets exceeding 30 GB), the process would require so much internode communication that any d.net type system operating over a heterogenous, low-bandwidth, high-latency, public network like the Internet would never work.
"Are there any such systems already in place? Currently, I'm only aware of one "useful" system, and that's ProcessTree (damn, I lost my referral number). SETI@Home is arguably useful, depending on whether you believe there is extraterrestrial life that uses the same radio waves we're scanning and is sending signals we could interpret.":
Not for using distributed computing for these kind of tasks.
Pullybank also talked about deep computing in general, and mentioned several applications, none of which involved nuclear simulations. So, not everyone has nuclear bomb simulations in mind when building supercomputers.
- India want to go to moon
- People think India go to moon to help nuke research
- badass computer made
- India use badass computer, rocketry, and Open source video game to create ICBM
- India gets sued by RMS/GNU over violation of GPL in precedant setting class action lawsuit
- End result: Penguin has nuclear power
- redmond automagically disappears in a puff of smoke
wow, funnier than i thought that would beLemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
My favorite part of the article was the statement: It requires 1.2 megawatts (million watts) of power, enough to power 1000 typical homes.
If the typical home uses $50/month in power (which is a conservative estimate), this thing will cost some $50,000 a month to power (well, perhaps slightly less as I'm sure anyone eating that much wattage gets a bulk discount). Wow. Perhaps uncle Sam ought to pay for some Transmeta chips.
IBM's ASCI
Draws 1 Point 2 Megawatts
The West Coast Goes Dim
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
> no new weapons will _have_ to be made for a while
(emphasis mine)
US (and most other) politicians sicken me. Can't they sleep at night withouth knowing that they have enough firepower to end life on earth? Do they honestly think to themselves, "our nukes are expired, so we can't blow up the world anymore. We have no choice but to make more." Why can't they just let some/all of them go?
(yes, I know about MAD, and all that.)
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#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Platform advocacy warfare rises to a new asanine level:
"P4s are better!"
"No, g4s!"
"No, P4s!"
"G4!"
"P4!"
"G4!"
"P4!"
"You suck!"
"I hate you!"
"Waaaaaah!"
"It's OK, my sheet's got a hole in it!"
And my vote for worst processor name in current production: IBM's Power3-III!
Jeez, get some imagination ya nerds.
Hotnutz.com - Funny
I'm not trying to say it's a good thing to spend money on (what do I know anyway?) I'm just curious about your bizzare number...
License: By reading this you are agreeing that you agree with me.
And how come they only give us the flops count?
how about more information like frame rate?
__________________________
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
I believe it is time for us to reconsider the role of the military. After WWI (or was it WWII) we renamed the War Department into the Defense Department. This reflected a more peaceful mindset. Since we haven't had any defense of land and life in the US for over 50 years, it seems appropriate to rename it to the Foreign Economic Interests Department, since the military is used as a pawn to secure American economic interests.
Of course, this is a separate matter again, but certainly there is something better to simulate than an explosion. What possibly could they seek to understand about it other than how to improve it? This being the last thing society needs.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Uhmmm... yeah. Actually there's just an extra bullet in the article. Trick (Oh... irony. We haven't had any of that around here since 1985. And back then I was the sole practitioner.)
No shit! How much information do we actually need on the devestation that a nuclear bomb can produce. Do we really need a supercomputer to study the effects? What difference does it really make? How about using the superstupidwasteoftimecomputer to solve a more relevant problem, of which I have no example, anyway get the point.Do we really need to have so much information of how a weapon works.
A few questions to the slashdotters:
How the power of this computer compares to that of Distributed.net or similar projects?
How feasible is the distribution of such a computation? Are all the calculations similar, or would a lot of different computational code have to be written?
Are there any such systems already in place? Currently, I'm only aware of one "useful" system, and that's ProcessTree (damn, I lost my referral number). SETI@Home is arguably useful, depending on whether you believe there is extraterrestrial life that uses the same radio waves we're scanning and is sending signals we could interpret.
--
If it takes that long with a super computer, why not have thousands of other computers helping?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Didnt you say that in the other thread about this story ?
Do you think anyone else will notice ?
what i wanna know is, how long does it take to boot up quake 3? ;)
perhaps it could get that all elusive 'perfect framerate'.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
The greatest bottleneck in computing speed for applications such as nuclear simulation isn't the speed of a regular computer, it's the fact that it's a regular computer. Simulation of a nuclear explosion is a process that is best served by a quantum computer, and no electromagnetic computer technology can approach the usefulness of a quantumn computer in this arena. While electromagnetic computers follow an exponential trend of increasing performance, quantumn computers double their performance each time a single atom is added to the device! No electromagnetec computer can approach that level of performance and capability.
Discuss trolling and moderation
the difference between the 16 way nodes in the ASCII white and a standard RS/6000 node is largely a matter of packaging. they are half-width 4u rackmount boxes instead of standalone or full width. you can buy the same (electrically) 16way smp node as a standalone webserver or workstation.
the switch is what puts the super in this supercomputer. but when you break it down, it is just a fast network. yes, orders of magnitude better in all ways than 10base-t but still just a fast network.
and as far as operating principles, it is just IBM's flavor of MPI. nothing special there. all the money went into the switch.
maybe the horsepower equation deserves the bicycle/car comparison, but the operating principle is the same. i.e: a bunch of standalone unix nodes, connected by a high speed network clustering software and MPI (or PVM).
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Anyone have any idea on the bogomip rating of this puppy?
Wheeeee
With these computers, you can test nukes without having to actually blow them up.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Must be, as I can think of at least a million better uses of technology than this. Then again, there are lots of people around the world who like violence and war more than anything, some of them are in Iran, some are in Iraq, some are in France, some are in the USA, some are in Japan, some are in Australia, some in Africa, some are even in Canada. There are lots of THEM, I just hope none of them are slashdoters. Regardless, IBM again stands for Instill Biogtry and Machosism. Thanks, but no thanks. I'd much rather work on finding solutions to world problems than on fighting machines. Losers.
Actually, if you read the MSNBC article in the original posting carefully, you'll see that it would take a 100 teraflop computer a month to do the first 1/100 sec of the demo. The 12 teraflop machine they've built would take considerably longer.
Trick
This is a nice piece of kit to say the least, who wouldn't want one for themselves, but look at the use it's being put to - running simulations of nuclear bombs being used. Yes, it's again part of the $1 trillion USian milatary machine, even if it is given a more publicly acceptable face through the Department of Energy's "Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program", a euphamism if I've ever heard one.
Why is it that the Pentagon still gets to spend so much money on fancy new toys for a war that will now never come? The USSR has collapsed and since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III that US military leaders have been hoping and planning for for decades. And whilst this $1 trillion goes into the military black box, poor people starve on the streets and can't afford even basic health care thanks to the Randite social policies of the US, despite what their Constitution supposedly guarantees.
No, on purely technical merits this computer is interesting, but I don't think that we, as reponsible people, should be praising something which is part of a group that contributes in a large way to the suffering of the poor and needy.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Blue Mountain (at LANL), for instance, was on the order of 6,000 RS10K processors; if you hunt around enough, you can still find the webpages about it at the Lab. (Again, I'm lazy. Sorry. :-)
...for Slashdot to post it twice. In the same day. In a row.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Does this thing have enough power to make my copy of Via Voice work correctly?
Or as Via Voice would ask:
Bug distinct avenue feaupau Ship! raise line, race lion, erase lion {erase line}....
--mm
Sorry to rant a little. My point is just this: argue all you want that we shouldn't have nukes; write your congressmen, campaign on Capitol Hill, etc. I wish you luck. But until that day comes, it makes sense for us to do this sort of simulation.
This machine can run 100 hours in a row? It takes 2 hours to boot? It takes an army of white suite programmers to support? Damn! I was hoping I could use it to check my email, but now...
You can't handle the truth.
since the other (first)thread of this story got shitcanned, I thought I'd repost this here.
ASCI white is basically a bunch of rack mounted, 16 way SMP RS/6000's running a (slightly)special version of AIX with a proprietary network switch.
the operating principals are very similar to beowulf, as well as the concept of a "commodity" workstation making up the base computing node.
the major difference is the power of the individual nodes and the speed of the network.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Nuclear explosions are the least useful part of the research, the information does have other uses. Consider that in simulating the chain reaction in a nuclear event you are also probing the extremes of physical laws. Whilst I HATE nuclear arms and would never contribute to a defense project of any kind, because I dont wanna be part of that machine, I have to applaud basic research in any form.
Sure the press releases always quote the big atomic boom thing, its a good example to show Joe Q Public just how mind-buggeringly-awesomely-powerful this machine is. It just aint all its useful for.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
Now if I had the money to build this machine, it would be strictly for q3a tournaments ;-)
Maybe they could get it down to a couple weeks.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
They might have collected the data during the testing at White Sands. Then again, maybe not, since they had a timetable to meet. Maybe other countries will test out more bombz.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Because that's who the customers for multi-teraflop computers are.
I just think it would be great to see an announcement mention that a supercomputer would be used for analyzing weather patterns, help with the human genome mapping effort, or something else
Supercomputers that aren't the biggest don't make the news. Kind of like whoever takes 11th at Indy doesn't make the news. Supercomputers are used for things like weather prediction, pharmacuetical research, and even Airline route planning.
How long until a distributed nuclear simulation project?
Hopefully never, some things were never meant to be the domain of the public, and I count nuclear weapons research among them.
Who gives a flying Nuclear fuck? Do we really need more information other than it will level cities? We already know that the damn things work why waste more money on additional information?Just another fine example of stupid governments doing stupid things with tax payers money. Definitely a sad commentary on the future of a population that has already put humanity to shame with its insipid obsession of the WWF and Nascar.
The day you realized that atoms, too, had subparticles, that was an epiphany.
The day you realized that splitting an atom would release megatonage of energy, that was an epiphany.
The day you realize that it would take over 25 years to simulate one second of the blast in a computer, that was an epiphany.
It's a new kind of physics, you need a new kind of software.
If it takes "it 3 months to simulate the first 1/100th of a second of a nuclear bomb explosion." Well, I'd say : there is nothing like the old good nuclear explosion of our grandfathers ;)
"which will take up the floor space equivalent to two basketball courts and weighs as much as 17 full-sized elephants"
And while we're at it, I hate "hail the size of golf balls" and anything the size of Rhode Island!
(posting from RI :))
Gotta agree with that. I also want to know what they are hoping to discover about the first 1/100th of a second anyway. We know what happens, there's a bright flash, shit loads of heat, and lots of people die, either immediately or later. What else is there to know about a nuclear explosion. Surely if they're going to spend this amount of money on a supercomputer, they could put it to better use. Bill Gates could always use it for his bubble sort, eh? ;-)
Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.
If this computer can simulate nuclear explosions, could it simulate the real world?
What pill do you want to take Neo the red or the blue?
Get your own Red Swingline Stapler
At least we can run our own weather simulations at home with the Casino-21 project. How long until a distributed nuclear simulation project? I guess that wouldn't happen becuase of "security concerns," though.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
nuclear simulations, my ass.
Making wicked simulations of nuclear explosions on chunks of big steel is more impressive than some wussie DNA strand or cell division...
Is it just me, or is the ibm web site slashdotted?
How quickly do you think they could get apache up and running on their new box?
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Why can't they use like a 1000-unit cluster of linux? That would do the trick.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
The article on this claims that the nuclear weapons in America's arsenal today were simulated in two dimensions on computers less powerful than a G3. So, my question is this: now that we can simulate in three dimensions, what added capabilities will our new, advanced little bundles of death have that the current ones don't?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
At 1.2M watts (assuming MWh), it'd cost over $100 an hour to keep running. ComEd would love me...
what do you bet that IBM won't try and have this computer play chess too!!
I envision a challenge by IBM that has every grandmaster in the world sit down and play against this fat beast of a computer all at the same time.
Or perhaps IBM would like to donate this new computer to investigating Paper-Rock-Scissors algorhythms!!
WHY?? Why do they want to use it to simulate nuclear blasts? I'd rather put it to use abolishing such horrid devices. Hm, wonder how fast that sucker'd play Q3A tho. :)
since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III
I think this is far from a fargone conclusion.
I can't find the link I want with more specific information on this topic, so this weak one will have to do, unforuntately.
It is only because both sides have nuclear weapons as a deterrent that people like you and me haven't been nuked on the whim of a politician.
thanks to the Randite social policies of the US,
The US doesn't have Randite social policies, if it did, it would be hard to find a starving person on the streets.
On the other hand, if the US government had socialist social policies, they'd be trillions of dollars in debt... (hey wait a minute)
Learn to read. The US Constitution doesn't guarantee free food or free (as in beer) services of any kind. It guarantees free (as in libre) speech and press and things like that (which unfortunately current US leadership doesn't guarantee either).
OBOnTopic: as far as the use for this computer, I'll take a simulation of anything fission-related rather than have the actual reaction any closer than 8 light minutes or so away.
Wow, Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!!
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
With this thing weighing in at 106 tons, how on earth is Santa going to put one in my stocking this Christmas/Hannakah/Kwanza?
Some aerospace critics lay some of the blame of recent rocket failures on just this point, that too much emphasis is being put on rocket simulation at the expense of actually building prototypes and testing them. Certainly it is cheaper to simulate them, but you can't skip too many prototype iterations in the design phase.
What's kinda funny is to do a little comparison of this machine computer to the others on the Top500 list. Right up in the top 10 are two Japanses machines (Hitachis, I think) BUT they only use ~100 processors, not ~8000 or ~9000. Dang impressive. Not only that, but all the Hitachi and Fujitsu machines seems to be much, much smaller. Curious -- does anyone know what the $/flop difference between the two kinds of computers is?
Zorn
/ is the root of
Since you've posted this same comment on both threads (no, I don't know why they posted it twice, either)...
The point is more the fact that greater leaps are being made in computing and raw power. I'm not going to touch any of the political aspects of any of this, but the object itself is deserving of praise, though the reasoning behind its present use may be questionable. Some would claim otherwise, but you can't blame the hardware for what it does. It is still just a computer. A damned fast one at that.
By the way, the Constitution doesn't guarantee a whole lot of anything, certainly not health care, food, or material wealth. Of course, you probably haven't read it, judging by that statement, but you don't live here, either.
Also, the money wouldn't have been budgeted in the first place for welfare, etc., it would have just been cut and redirected to another branch of the government - this project doesn't directly contribute the way you seem to indicate. People, not governments, are responsible for taking care of other people.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."