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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.
Custom systems- whether completely novel, or a
scale up of a commercial system- always have
very high overheads.
First, you have a dedicated hardware and software
support crew. A production system ammortises
this over multiple deliveries.
Second, you are pushing the envelope. Though it
looks possible on paper, you don't always know
what won't scale up properly in a cutting edge
system.
Third, educational institutions (U of I) charge
large overheads (@50%) for existing buildings/staff.
The largest systems just don't get built
unless the government subsdizes some of the costs.
If you are lucky, the contracting company learns
new things to help its commercial side.
I do think it is:
I (gasp) -- LOVE (huuugh) -- THIS (aaarrr) -- COMPANY (shhhhlop)
The machine in Britain would barely rank #48 on top500.org, so what's your point?
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
13 teraflops is a pretty big toy.
"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."
Ah, but then there would be no incentive in the future to replace those machines. Microsoft, as the subscription based licenses show, cannot merely sell a product and live off the income. That's not how you maximize profit. You keep them paying, and make sure they can't pay anyone else. That's how a monopoly works - you don't play nice with anyone else.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
McKinley is the second generation Itanium CPU which is at least a year away from production. The SGI cluster is using the first generation Itanium CPU (also known as "Merced") which is actually just a technology demonstration, and not a full-blown product from Intel.
Most people can visualize a hundred or so boxen a lot easier than a thousand or so. It gets a little unreal. So the Brit site with pretty pictures of the system is a good site for those not familiar with the larger systems.
They have other pretty pictures from their work as well.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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!!!
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.
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.
Look a monkey!
to eliminate the tyranny of time and space limitations.
This time and space flaming has got to end. Granted, time and space have a monopoly on time and space, but it is a *benevolent* monopoly, which is ok with every legislative body in the world except the EU. Time and space have prevailed as the primary purveyors of time and space through quality, perseverance, and generous donations to any political party that would take their money. So, lay off, slashdot!
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
"Scientists involved in the project said the facility would help researchers understand the origins of the universe, cure cancer, unlock secrets of the brain, predict tornadoes, and save lives in an earthquake" yeah, but can it find me pr0n?
"Quite a few readers submitted news of a distributed system to be built by four U.S. institutions..."
Looks like our "Slashdot Distributed Story Submission" (SDSS) is working quite nicely.
I think any OS can be an entreprise-level OS in the hands of the right person (even M$ Windows and OS/2). A former co-worker of mine could make an NT server scream. It had uptimes of a year or more. Very stable, very reliable---in his hands. We had a similar box for in-house purposes. Almost the same hardware. It went up and down like a damned yo-yo----in our hands. A similarly gifted AIX person can do similar things. The average Joe can't though. The average Joe can't make termcaps work right in AIX let along secure the box. I'd love to run PPC Linux on our 6k's. It would really make those boxes scream. Anything is faster than AIX on those boxes.
I would personally love to have the time to get really good Solaris experience. Sure I probably wouldn't use it in the end unless I became the admin of a number of Solaris boxes but still I'd like the experience. I'd like to shadow a good Solaris admin for a couple weeks.
BTW, the original post was 90% humor and 10% sarcasm.
--Mike--
Interesting points, but you do have to remember that massively parallel systems aren't for the masses anyway, and normal programmers don't wrestle with these "0.0001%" of problems that demand this kind of power. The fact is that those small percentage of problems aren't always trivial theoretical problems that don't have impact on our lives, but are more often things of practical importance to scientists and the military. Nuclear reaction simulations (both weapons and energy), protein folding, DNA sequencing, molecular simulations...all very very intense computing problems that demand powerful computers to produce better and better simulations.
We need more programmers to program the machines? Maybe. This is an important but niche market, and throwing billions into education so that kids with bachelor's can call themselves super-computer programmers isn't the answer. The systems are already programmed by brilliant people researching these problems, doctorates all around. This isn't work for your average 15 year old 3r33t haXor, you know?
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Big deal, the article claims its going to use McKinley based Itanium processors. Which are at least 2 years away from production. Plus they are using 1300 processors, while the one in Britain only has 152 processors. Quite a bit of a difference if you ask me :)
Let's just hope it doesn't run AIX. 'When you don't understand Unix, you probably run AIX.
- Win the RSA factoring challenge, put the money in a swiss bank account, and feed Illuminati(tm) back the account number.
- Use genetic programming to predict the stock market, making billions of dollars from the $500,000 won in the factoring challenge.
- Buy and sell peoples lives, based on loyalty to myself and Illuminati(tm).
- Voila, world domination
Pinky will probably screw it up, as usual.std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
while open source is useful here, you shouldn't use this argument as a justification for the GPL. the BSD license would more than suffice for these purposes.
The GPL seriously undermines the commercial viability of software.
Modding down an AC is like kicking a baby in the face.
frist prosts r kewl
so if there's a distibuted client app that also allows for file sharing, everyone could download it and we'd all have supercomputers. I saw 40TB of content on LimeWire yesterday, granted it was mostly music and not scientific data. but after decoding a music stream and loading a webpage, what do you do with all those extra clockcycles anyhow? how about providing a globus interface in the major Linux Distros, so you could subscribe to the grid along with system updates and supoort options. sure it'd piss off my ISP but what the hell do I care?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
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.
Look a monkey!
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
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.
My blog
if the NSA would build such a computer, you think they would announce it to the world ?
it may already be out there
</paranoid>
This is impressive, but the nasa machine will blow it out of the water.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
2**128 = 3.4e38
13 teraflops = 1e13 instructions per second
Assume 1 trial decryption per instruction
which is of course unrealistically low.
You still need 3.4e25 seconds or about 1e18 years to search that keyspace.
Sorry, no cigar...
That's NOT the OS software they're using; they're using Linux. Globus is NOT an OS. It's an add-on, and one that's been around for years and years now.
will it be running the NCSA server software or will they finally switch to Apache? ;) ;)
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Actually it's in use where I work and personally I can't stand the damned thing.
Because that's some powerful encryption breaking power... if you know what I mean...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.