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!!!

Time and Space don't like you either

[karb]

From wired:

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!

for comparision

[Alien54]

For comparision there is the Cosmology Machine in Britain, which among other things consists of an integrated cluster of 128 Ultra-SparcIII processors and a 24-processor SunFire, and has a total of 112 Gigabytes of RAM and 7 Terabytes of data storage. With all of this power it can perform up to 456 billion arithmetic operations in a second (228 billion floating point and 228 billion integer operations)

This is impressive, but the nasa machine will blow it out of the water.

Re:OS/software

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.