NCSA To Build $53 Million, 13-Teraflop Facility

Quite a few readers submitted news of a distributed system to be built by four U.S. institutions (mostly) out of IBM computers, and paid for with a whopping grant. DoctorWho and november writes: "'The National Science Foundation has awarded $53 million to four U.S. research institutions to build and deploy a distributed terascale facility...' A link to the press release is here." An anonymous reader contributed a link to coverage on Wired, and GreazyMF to one of this story at the New York Times.

Comments

Re:From the wired article

[doctor_oktagon]

Always nice to see professionals understand the benefits of open source that no closed source movement could possibly replicate.

While I am in broad agreement, do not take the announcement of this machine as another blast in the direction of Micro$haft, or another nail in their corporate coffin. If a closed-source system is built correctly, and presents consistent and well-documented interfaces to the outside world, then it can be just as effective.

Business didn't employ Unix because they could get the source code, they bought it because it followed interface standards, and it was thus easier to get your Unix boxes to talk to your S390s and your Unisys 2200s and your VAXs etc etc etc

If Microsoft had offered common external interfaces in the first release of NT, and not those bloated buggy propriety standards years later, they might actually have managed to produce a useable OS that enterprises could then integrate into their existing data centres, rather than boxes that perform tasks in independant installations.

Linux

[halftrack]

The first thing I looked for was what OS it used. Linux seemed as a good choise, but being no expert I wonder if even Linux can efficiently utilize 1300+ Itanium processors. I realise that Linux (me being a big supporter myself) will have the wanted customizability, but wouldn't making a OS from scratch (Linux-like if that's best) Afterall Linux isn't tested nor built for clusters this big.

Why waste money with Bleeding edge?

[ka9dgx]

It's going to be obsolete as soon as they get it working, so why go with bleeding edge (expensive) hardware? Why can't they crank it back a bit, use cheap 1Ghz processors, and have 3-4 times as many of them? It seems they could get twice the bang for the buck that way.

--Mike--

From the wired article

[pgpckt]

The hope is that -- as an open source network using Linux and standard IBM servers -- it will be easily expandable and able to follow a similar trajectory to the Internet.

"The only way to do this project is open source," project director Stevens said.

Interesting that researches know that open source projects are the only way they can control all the variables. After all, if you don't control the OS, you can't be sure some little bug in the code is screwing with your data. Universities have long understood this principle, which is why Unix is so popular. Now our millions of tax payer dollars will be spent on research rather then licensing costs, plus the research is controlled, scalable, and open to peer review. Always nice to see professionals understand the benefits of open source that no closed source movement could possibly replicate.