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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 $53 million to four U.S. research institutions to build and deploy a distributed terascale facility...' A link to the press release is here." An anonymous reader contributed a link to coverage on Wired, and GreazyMF to one of this story at the New York Times.
In fairness they're going to be used for the next generation of particle physics experiments at cern, fermilab, slac and a couple of other places, some bio work on protein folding and a few other things.
While I'm sure many members of the audience would like to see NSA's hand in here somewhere the processing power is needed since CERN's sending out data from the experiments at 40TB a second (ok, ok I know it gets filtered down to only 100MB/sec)
Which is the problem, while these 4 systems make a nice addition to the GRID we need more supercomputers!!!
Always nice to see professionals understand the benefits of open source that no closed source movement could possibly replicate.
While I am in broad agreement, do not take the announcement of this machine as another blast in the direction of Micro$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.
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
- 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.
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"
We're heading towards a massive parallel global computing system controlled by no single entity
Unless, maybe, it's controlled by MS... Take a look at these two articles on The Register:
- MS poised to switch Windows file systems with Blackcomb
- How Microsoft's file system caper could wrongfoot the DoJ
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
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.
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.