Slashdot Mirror
Birth Of A Terascale Baby
Seanasy writes: "Want to follow the construction of the most powerful unclassified computer in the world? The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will be publishing status updates on the installation of the Terascale Computing System. Right now you can view an MPEG movie of the first clusters to be installed."
Now, with all the really interesting personalities gone from /., I'm just so tired of it. I guess it could be ennui, and a jaded sense that it's all been trolled before, but nothing here seems original anymore. It's all so, so... I don't know, mature.
/. I'm tired. It's all sooooooo boring. Won't someone at least try to be a filthy karma whore and start the flames of /. again? Please!!!!!
I mean, it takes all the energy I have just to read the blurb for the articles, let alone actually reading the article itself or even 1/3 of the posts - I know they'll be on-topic mostly, or if not, really not have the bite and flame-inducing stupidity of the old guys - you know, siggy, oog, grits-boy, pertriphile, and so on. Sometimes it's just not worth going on!
I've been here too long, I think. My uid is below 1000, and I've just seen and read too much on
Hey, it's free, works with Solaris/SPARC - what's not to like, if you can use it?
Umm, "a lot" is two words. ;>
Between this box and the previous 3D display, we should be able to view high-framerate, fully 3D porn like never before!
Now, where do we sign?
Do 'they' ever do anything useful with these things? It's fun drooling, but I personally think something with this much power would be well-suited to intense graphics work or something equally resource-consuming. So far all i've heard is done with supercomputers is number-crunching.
That's because that's what supercomputers do -- crunch numbers. Mostly big physics, chemistry, and engineering problems. Where I work (a supercomputer center), that IS what's considered useful. The target audience for this thing is NSF-funded scientific researchers, and they (NSF) didn't pay $36M+ for a really nice Quake server...
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
When my eye passed over the title of this posting, I could have sworn that it said "Birth of a Testicle Baby".
Paging Mr. Freud...
And another thing....
If you touch my car I will fuck your dog.
Juan Epstein
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
But this would have been in the ear of serials - works on film somewhere beteween TV mini series and full blown TV shows. The Lone Ranger comes to mind.
...how much "Terascale" looks like "Testicle" when you read it quickly.
Believe it or not, the main goal of the people who build these supercomputers is not to get into the Top 500 List.
;)
In other words, the engineering part is more important than the popularity-contest, awe-factor part.
Compare and contrast with the "open source" software community...
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
the site is pretty slow, so i've mirrored the
_ movie.mpg
movie for those folks in AU/NZ who want to get
it a bit faster.
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/movies/misc/wec
-jason
Jeremy
Glutious
Jeremy
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one..."
Got any stats on those? I bet it's a bit more impressive. The NSA measures its computers in acres...
Umm just FYI, in your .sig it should be beset, not bisect.
----
Dave
MicrosoftME®? No, Microsoft YOU, buddy! - my boss
- Dave
Even valuable, conscientious posters have to kick back and be silly now and again.
You're quite right about all your criticisms -- especially 1 tera = 10^12, not 10^16, which was a mental lapse on my part. I'll be more careful about posting lighthearted stuff with a +1 bonus in the future.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Apparently PSC is feeling the slashdot effect...
I'm sitting on a gigabit 1 hop away from PSC (in CMU) and this site is taking FOREVER to load...
heh, gotta stop glancing at headlines.
That would be one sweet machine to work on.
-motardo
...even a Beowulf cluster of these things can't
stop them from being slashdotted.
Like IBM hasn't had terascale computers for two years. Hell, even Intel's ASCII Red has been chugging over a teraflop for a couple years, and it runs Pentium Pros.
$45 million and all they can come up with is 6 teraflops? IBM's budget for Blue Gene is $100 million and they expect to reach 1,000 teraflops (1 petaflop). I am unimpressed.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
The article mentioned that the software rendering systems used for this display were proprietary. Why doesn't the company use an already-available rendering system like OpenGL?
OpenGL is already widely used in the scientific visualization community, and it has the advantage of hardware adaptability -- for example, SGI's Cave, mentioned before on Slashdot, uses a library derived from, and directly compatible with, OpenGL. If you have a program already written to use OpenGL, it's trivial (as in, adding only a few lines of code) to get the software to work in the Cave.
Having to rewrite major portions of software to support their 'proprietary system' will be a pain (read: expensive). However, having to add only a few lines to your existing OpenGL code to get it to work would make it EXTREMELY desirable for many scientific and even home users.
kugano
Looks like I replied to the wrong article! This should have gone on the 'volumetric display' article. Sorry 'bout that!
kugano
Andrew J. Tosh, dropping his karma since 10.03.2000
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Frag without lag, hell yes.
The issue of power requirements for all the hardware that the "new economy" runs on is big, big, big and is going get bigger in the next few years.
It's been estimated that 8% of total U.S. power consumption is related to IT, and that figure is going to climb. In addition to pressure on the demand side, there's a problem on the supply side as the last several summers have shown. Power companies are offering people rebates for allowing them to install thermostats which they can control remotely to manage power demand in peak periods.
The first issue of the Huber-Mills Power Report (PDF) at www.powercosm.com is very interesting reading.
The Wall Street Journal has also run a few interesting articles recently. "Got a computer? More power to you," (September 7 page A26) is available here. The WSJ ran another article entitled "Cisco opposes plan for new power plant" (September 18 page A2) which I couldn't find, but Google has related things here. It's somewhat ironic that Cisco is against more power to run its hardware; it wants to build new office space nearby and is concerned about quality of life issues. A power company executive said "if this plant isn't built I'm guaranteeing you outages...I'm guaranteeing you an economic disaster in the valley." That's hardly coming from a disinterested party, but it's still a hot topic.
I can't look at the site because it's flash, but I think your numbers are wrong. 1000 liters a day is on the order of two truck engines. It's hard to believe that Schiphol doesn't use more than that (and it would make it irrelevant - a 747 does a gallon per second, so a single 747 would burn more in five minutes than Schiphol in a day?!).
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Do 'they' ever do anything useful with these things? It's fun drooling, but I personally think something with this much power would be well-suited to intense graphics work or something equally resource-consuming. So far all i've heard is done withsupercomputers is number-crunching.
-You're wearing...A bag? I have misplaced my pants.
when I realized the article title was not "Birth of a Testicle Baby"
No slashdotting it please! Carnegie Mellon University connects through these folks and we've got enough problems as it is :)
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
It may be powerful, but I bet we could still give it a taste of the ol' Slashdot effect
Perhaps I should send them that little 'earth simulator' perl script I knocked together the other night...
For the love of God, quit banging up the PSC site. It's taking forever to download the movie....
10.000 meters square
:)
er, thats square meters. 10,000 meters square(d) is HUGE
I thought it was about a real baby. Damn, I was soo lookin forward to that.....
"Right now you can view an MPEG movie of the first clusters to be installed."
Translation: "The first 2 people to see this new topic can view an mpeg movie of the first clusters to be installed. After that, the server will stop responding due to the SlashDotDOS attack."
As in, a couple G4s?
Where are the thoughtfull, quick witted comments I have come to expect from /.?
I, although surrounded by high-end, high-performance computers all day, am quite impressed by the sheer numbers involved with this thing.
Unlike some of you, I can think of a few OTHER applications for such a monstrosity than prOn or that pathetic excuse of an FPS Quake III.
How about the S.E.T.I. league? I'm sure they could put it to good use. Or the Human Genome project?
Or that article posted about electron fission, a beast like this could definately be put to use on the location of electrons at a point in time which would be required for my matter teleportation device.
Then again, it sure would be a lot of PrOn.
Hmmmmm, Pooooooorn. (dribble dribble)
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
perhaps when they fully assemble the supercomputer they can use some of that massive computing power to compress a video clip of 42sec (with no sound) to something less than 6MB! tsk, tsk...
:)
that's the kind of bloat I'd expect from you-know-who
I misread the title to be "Testicle Baby" and figured it was news on that wacky new method of making babies with 2 men...
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Is it too late to add one of these to my must-have Christmas present list?
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Wow. I'm using 4 of these servers right now and I thought that was pretty impressive.
UBU
Tru64 Unix
UBU
comparable to (682*4) Alphas? Why would you want to use Intel processors in a supercomputer?
For a vivid demonstration of power usage in a supercomputer, try switching off the cooling system. The Cray-1 would, apparently, become a molten mass with a few seconds (not sure if this is true or not).
I LOVE YOU
great comedy company.
Heck if this thing can play the star wars chess game let it play some ice hockey or football video games. Even better have ESPN broadcast live games you can watch on one of these. That's where we're going in the future.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Hiya. I work for the NCSA in Urbana/ IL at U. of Illinois. We were contesting against Pittsburg for the endowment to build the supercomputer, but lost. Well, I don't know if it's public knowledge yet, but we're planning on building a competing computer, anyways. We have some funds and are lobbying for more, and hopefully will still beat Pittsburg to a finished product. Apparently, the final computer will consist of 1,000 1GHz either Pentium IV or IA64 processors.
O to be a dragon, of silkworm size, or immense!
It seems so cool! rows of machines whirring away... until you look at the nameplate. 45 Million for a compaq? These pinheads brought us the ipaq. How sad. I would be VERY curious to know how many rack units arrive DOA. I heard there was a bidding war for this project, too bad Amiga couldn't beat compaq's bid. ;)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Does anyone know if this system will support OPENMP?
Probably. The building blocks are ES-40s, which are 4-way SMP systems. The individual ES-40s are connected via Quadrics, which is a fairly fast (and *very* expensive) network fabric. One way you could write a parallel application for such a system is to break your problem up across boxes with MPI, and then use OpenMP to parallelize the loop structures within the program running on each box. I've written a couple codes this way, and it's not really any harder than doing pure MPI.
OTOH, you wouldn't be able to use more than 4 processors on it using just OpenMP (unless Quadrics does some funky shared-memory-between-boxes stuff I don't know about). To get larger processor counts for a purely OpenMP application, you'd need a large SMP or ccNUMA system like a Compaq GS320 (up to 32 CPUs), a Sun UE10k (up to 64 CPUs), or an SGI Origin (up to 512 CPUs).
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Man, this is weird...
:)
When slashdot has been plagued by trolls for so long that a "classic troll remark" is funny because it's nostalgic, now THAT is pitiful.
Who's going to resurrect meept? You realize that eventually Natalie portman, grits, and stoning will all be classics too...
As much as some people hate them, slashdot ain't slashdot without the trolls.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I never liked 'terabyte' as a computing term. Just doesn't fit in with the 'million, billion, trillion' nomenclature.
:)
;)
I would like to propose that we redesignate one thousand trillion bits as equal to one Electronic Ton. After all we have british tons, metric tons, even a volumetric ton. Why not an Electronic Ton? When you realize that 10 tera-tera (10*(10^16)^16) electrons actually weighs about a metric ton, it seems especially relevant!
Welcome to the age of the 1 ton computer! Next year I predict we'll all have half-ton palmpads!
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
If Hemos posts any more stories on this bad boy, they'll have to build another one just to handle the Slashdot Effect.
ALG
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
What kind of framerate would such a thing give me in Quake??
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
This could make a great Newsreel. Remember Newsreels? The "current event" programming (ahem: propaganda, sometimes) that used to run before feature films in theatres. Well, I don't remember them either, because I was born in the 1970s, but I visited the Smithsonian museum in DC not too long ago and saw a bunch of these. I really enjoy some previews, but sometimes I think it'd be nice to have something Newsreel like beforehand. This "birth of a supercomputer" thing loosely reminds me of seeing some of the "look at the Hoover Dam being built" newsreels. Sure beats reading the infoblurbgraphic in USA today.
Just some random thoughts.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Quote from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Pittsburgh's terascale computer will use 682 of the next generation of Compaq's AlphaServer computer, each of which contains four computer processors. In addition to a 6-teraflop peak speed, the computer will draw on 2.7 trillion bytes, or terabytes, of random access memory, will have 50 terabytes of online hard-disk storage and another 300 terabytes of additional tape or disk storage"
:)
hmmm... Compaq has shown interest in linux, i wonder what the OS will be? (anything but windows
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Just in time for November's Top 500 list. Oh, "scheduled to be installed." Guess not. Sorry, guys!
-Chris
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
OK, Fire the moderation beam!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
NSF Awards $45 Million to Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center for "Terascale" Computing
Looking into the future, I can see the next one to be posted...
Project cancelled, following $48 million bill in bandwidth due to excessive setup movie download by 'Slashdot' readers
The Japanese are carrying out an insanely ambitious project,for a 640 node, 40 sustained TeraFlops computer, housed in a building the size of a large hockey arena. They call it the "Earth Simulator" and its main purpose is to carry out atmospheric/climatological research and simulations of the simmering ball of lava we live on (volcano and earthquake research).
Construction is in full swing now; hardware to come online first quarter 2001, software "will take a little longer".
More tech-oriented info here.
Funny how a site dedicated to such a powerful system is now slashdotted and not responding.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Did you know that computers like this use real much power? Like, *real* much?!
In Amsterdam (the Netherlands), no more computer-centers (e.g. co-locations where you can put your servers with a fast net connection) can be built because there is not enough power for them! Level 3 Communications has a co-location building there which is about 10.000 meters square (this is not as big as it sounds, it's just 100x100 m), filled up with ISPs servers and the like. This single building is actually using more energy than Schiphol airport (which is rather big - many trans-athlantic flights go through Schiphol. If you've ever been in the Netherlands you'll know)
They also have a diesel power generator that can power the entiry building in case of a blackout - it burns around 1000 liters (about 250 gallons or so) a day.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'