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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."
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
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.
"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...
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 wonder if "BigWhiteHacks.org" is still available...
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
"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!"
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.
God... I post on the new one and I lose karma.
Excellent.
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
Three million users. Id rather have an ASCI than 1 ½ million desktop boxes. :)
Liberty in your lifetime