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ASCI's Debutante Debut
yoshi writes "Apparently, Lawrence Livermore Lab had an open house yesterday for ASCI White, the world's most powerful computer, and CNN has a story on it, including a picture of one of the sys admins!
One of the great things about the system is how much information is available. Check out the hardware and software environments."
"Does it run linux?"
"can I get root?"
"(AYBABTU clone on ASCI white)"
Now lets get some real discussions going here...
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
"The mammoth computer is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997."
So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?
First and third post... is it just me or is there something not right here?
:)
I've been reading slashdot since.... well... since Rob owned it and 20 comments was considered 'a lot', yet this is the first time I have been able to claim first post.
Something is definately wrong.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
With that kind of power, there's got to be some kind of emergent intelligence in there.
Hey ASCI, what's the meaning of life?
Dancin Santa
http://www.holymac.com/
Check out the vampir pre-processor. Notice how it runs parallel in-sync with the nearest node? I've been waiting forever for someone to try that. I can't believe they figured that out.
I like the idea that this computer is necessary in order to "simulate how the nation's aging nuclear weapons arsenal would function if launched". Perhaps this means we could just fight the whole nuclear war inside a few of these machines.
That VIC's a sly little devil.
Doesn't sound too featurefull.
I guess we have to call it "GNU/ASCI".
can you imagine a beowu...hell, can you imagine ONE of these things?
this is one hell of alot of power
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
Install that into a 87 black Trans-am!
Geek Hillbilly
Why the hell is the story submitter so excited about the picture of the sysadmin?
The DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) is building simulation capabilities to predict performance, safety, and manufacturability of U.S. nuclear weapons systems. The program has several mandates, among them:
Determine nuclear weapons' behavior upon deployment using high-resolution, three-dimensional calculations and high-fidelity physical models.
Monitor possible accident scenarios and changes to stockpiled weapons caused by the aging process and variations in the manufacturing of replacement parts.
Extend the lifetime of existing nuclear weapons systems into the indefinite future.
Reduce the overall uncertainty associated with the costs and risks of weapons testing.
Don't htey have anything better to do with all that power?
this is my sig.
Isn't this "most powerfull" computer thing getting a bit out of hand? When we start questioning 1 billion FPUs vs. 4 trillion IPUs, where do we point at the leader?
Bryan
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Baah... I've had my fun.
"Don't they have anything better to do with all that power?"
Yeah! Brother, i know what you mean...what an astonishing waste of computer productivity!
can you imagine ***ANYONE*** take cutting-edge start of the art h+s/w and using it to create and develop a wide variety of different and imagined scenarios where a large assortment of weapons of differing powers of destructiveness are used on imaginary foes, hour after hour after...., day after day after...????
and futher imagine that simlarly creative people on the background had to create the deployment scenarios (call them the maps or levels?) and use their powers of imagination to create fantatically unlikely foes and enemies that could never exist in the real world. Yeah Verily, a horrible waste of precious talent and ability
BUT, i understand that they're just biding their time with that awful "nuclear contingency" stuff at LLNL, until the Q3Team(EntireUniverse) port to ASCI White is finished and then they'll productively game all day instead....
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
How many Gkeys do you think this thing could go through in about an hour or so??
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
They should have called it WarGames.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
yeah you can't post goatman ascii anymore either
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
I sure hope they don't waste all those extra CPU cycles. Someone throw a RC5/SETI client on there.
Probably should get permission first though...
sure this is one hell of a rig, and you can plug in all the theoretical numbers you like to predict what would happen if these theoretical numbers are *accurate*
But the reason they actually tested nukes is because they needed to find out if the theoretical numbers are coorect in the first place right?
I mean if they allready knew what percentage of errors would occur and why they occured they wouldnt need to test in the first place, unless im missing something really big this will be the worlds most advanced *garbage in - garbage out* dependent system. but hey its still one hell of a cool toy!
This deserves to be modded up as Funny!
The last place I worked, IBM Storage Systems Division here in Tucson, had a bunch of these class of machines.. The test cell where I worked (for most of the time) was a roughly square area lined with 13 RAID arrays usually loaded top to bottom with 15K 72GB drives down one side, 3 IBM SP/1s (The same boxes that handed Kasparov his ass a year or two ago..) about 10 RS/6000's of varying horsepower, and a couple desks. One of the racks had exclusively nothing but 16-port Brocades in them, and what seemed like a mile of fibrechannel cable spewing out of it. I remember one slow day in particular, a friend of mine at work sat there, looked around, and tried to figure out how much money the company had stuffed in our little 9 by 14-square test cell in order for us to conduct our testing on the arrays... At $86,000 a piece, the Brocade rack was the priciest piece of real-estate in the lab, weighing in at $1.12 million dollars, or about $300,000 per square foot of floor space. Just within eyesight, we were encased within close to $20 million dollars worth of hardware, not including cables and the small stuff.
The Whopper may be King in the Land of Burgers, but IBM is God when it comes big iron.
Bowie J. Poag
I really like this part:
ASCI White is roughly as powerful as 50,000 desktop computers. It can store the equivalent of 300 million books, or six Libraries of Congress.
:*)
I see ASCI White runs AIX and IBM said gladly replace AIX with Linux someday so we could see the fastest computers running Linux not too soon.
heh, it looks like it is running seti at home:/ pressreleases/2000/Nov/sp_space.html
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/news
--
i'll show you my gun. my uzi weighs a ton because i'm public enemy number one.
ASCI's Debutante Debut
I first read that as "ASCII's Debut"... sorry, Slashdot, you're about 30 years late reporting that one!
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
There is a theory that there are two parallel universes. One universe knows the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything, but does not know the answer. The other universe knows the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything, but does not know the question.
Should the question and the answer ever be present in the same universe at the same time, both universes would instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more inexplicable.
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.
[ A better eulogy to Douglas Adams, I can not think of. ]
"So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?"
no you get to see it do something useful. go to "MPEG Movies"
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Thank you! ;)
www.themes.org has a cool walpaper of ASCII White but they are down again so I can't get the URL right now.
Anyone else notice that that machine has, total, about 10 terabytes of memory? Damn. They must have gotten one hell of a deal from tiger.com.
Second - these machines only work on simulated nuclear testing for a short while (a few years). Then they go up for other "Grand Challange" problems, like immense weather calculation machines (who wouldn't want to know the exact minute it starts raining in your neighborhood?), particle calculations for the solar system or the galaxy, etc. We're up in arms about ASCI White, but what about ASCI Red, Blue, Mountain?
Furthermore, the research involved to build something like this benifits us down the line. Super-advanced routers, ultra-fast fail-safe network storage, improved networked processor topologies, distributed algorithms.
The most important fact about this computer is that it is used to study how best to kill people and destroy their property.
Bush's education improvements were
Some folks in this thread have already mentioned SETI@Home, but I thought I'd point out that the collective (albeit highly specialized) processing power of the current SETI@Home array is twice that of ASCI White.
So how long would a kernel compile take? Half a second? Less?
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
God... I post on the new one and I lose karma.
Excellent.
Soon Linux will get around it's clustering shortcommings - it's all part of the World Dominiation tm plan!
The title page and story header say ASCI. The link above the comments and the <TITLE> on the Post Comment page say ASCII (youre a few decades late to be reporting ASCIIs debut, mind you). Someones corrections arent proliferating correctly.
Liberty in your lifetime
Finally a computer that meets the minimum requriements for Windows XP.
he funny bit is that, we'll probably get the same power on our PC in about 30 or 40 years ... Now close your eyes and imagine what you could do with this little baby at home ... PLAY GAMES ;o)
Login/Password is Joshua
LOL! Excellent. They ought to give an award for the funniest post of the day. Yours would win hands down. Because it was funny with a lot of truth.
I should check my own site more often - and so should everyone here :)
http://beyond2000.com/news/Aug_01/story_1255.html
This is just me testing comments.
You can't grep a dead tree.
Such an expensive lava lamp.
Okay, I know you were being funny, but it's worth noting that ASCI White isn't being used for warfare simulation - it's primarily used for physics codes to understand how nucular weapons work, particularly as they age.
AC because my employeer doesn't like me talking about our machines without their approval first.