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:I'm just glad it's not the NSA...

[it's a culture thing]

In fairness they're going to be used for the next generation of particle physics experiments at cern, fermilab, slac and a couple of other places, some bio work on protein folding and a few other things.

While I'm sure many members of the audience would like to see NSA's hand in here somewhere the processing power is needed since CERN's sending out data from the experiments at 40TB a second (ok, ok I know it gets filtered down to only 100MB/sec)

Which is the problem, while these 4 systems make a nice addition to the GRID we need more supercomputers!!!

Weather forecast

[halftrack]

I've heard that the algorithms to calculate tomorrows weather exists, but todays super-computers uses two days to calculate it ("And yesterdays weather was: %s" % (calculate_weather())" Will this do it? If so, they'll need two, one for the weather and one for all the stuff they planned to use this for.

users, big money & perspective

[Multics]

Is it just me or does it strike you too that NSF is very busy funding the next big iron but not funding initiatives to teach the masses how to program massively parallel systems?

Every cluster I know of (around 20 systems, 14 sites) is not for want of cycles, they need programmers to write the codes to eat the cycles. There are not enough small 'education' clusters to allow everyone the education & experience.

Even just $1m of that could be much better spent in education instead of feeding the 0.0001% of computer problems that currently need this class of hardware.

-- Multics

This is the future of the Internet

[pieterh]

Seems to me... fast networking, collaborative computing, peer-to-peer information sharing, autonomous virus communities. We're heading towards a massive parallel global computing system controlled by no single entity.