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Science Grid Genesis
Cranial Dome writes "According to this Cnet.com story, the Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which will form the genesis of the DOE Science Grid, a virtual supercomputing system which will eventually encompass many more systems at several locations. The larger of the two machines: DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors. This machine, together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system, will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system with 1.3 petabytes(!) of storage space. And this is only the beginning..."
<insert witty comment linking this story with this one >
I submitted this a good hour ago, and now it pops up under someone else who wrote it the same way. WHERE IS THY JUSTICE!
And yes, I know "grousing" is offtopic, but I'm apt to do it anyway. I've got enough karma to bitch a little.
A Beowulf cluster of DOE Science Grids? Maybe if each country got one, and they linked them together... *G*
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I guess it's going to be enough space for a full install of the latest Red Hat distro.
AOL/TW starts mailing out free sign up DVD's to access their portal to the Science Grid. Within days messages start appearing in highly technical discussion forums that simply state "Me Too!".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Have you downloaded your copy of Nethack 3.4.0 already????
Why in the hell did this guy get a -1? The moderators are sucking today.
(I've still got enough karma to bitch)
...the large amounts of hardware scattered across the country being linked together to solve (process?) larger problems. There is so much hardware sitting on desks that goes largely unused, this seems to me like the next logical step in computation resources.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Even the Internet Wayback Machine with its 10 billion web pages can claim only 100 TB (.1 PB). We could fit thirteen archives on it.
A use for this type of power and storage is simulating nuclear detonation. It's possible we noo longer have to actually detonate nukes on a test basis.
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
not simply in the joke and drool senses, but an actual cluster of supercomputers.
Beowulf is great, it allows smaller, slower pcs to be used as part of a parallel-processing cluster. But why not a cluster of supercomputers?
even these multi-million dollar supercomputers have a somewhat limited lifetime...
(ive seen a few on ebay) but why not take these aging number-crunchin behemoths and cluster them?
This would provide the massive power or more of the newer ones, while still allowing to use the older hardware for longer periods of time.
Just a thought
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
Win 2004. With all the options.
Best Slashdot Co
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Using the current prices, this amounts to roughly 150.000. It's not that impossible to store your entire life on a single computer anymore. These guys show that such a thing can be built.
Probably because of the URL from the shortcut - http://rd.yahoo.com/M=220133.1897448.3390990.80383 3/D=yahoo_top/S=2716149:NP/A=966590/*http://www.go atse.cx/ (which was not intended to be a link for the picky people)
It looks like they post with an automatic -1. Ck their posting history.
Well it seems as though we may now know what Sony Engineers mean by "Distributed Computing"
Seriously though, What type of security system is the DOE building into this, which is essentially a large mainframe? Its understandable to be worried when the DOE handles things such as nuclear secrets that sometimes slip into the hands of certain researchers, much like they were picking them up at a drive-through.
Im curious to see how the data will be encrypted/decrypted along such a vast system.
There is no spork.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of DOE Science Grids SHOVED  UP  YOUR  ASS?!!!!
(I think Stanislaw Lem wrote about that, IIRC, the story was "The First Sally, or The Trap of Gargantius".)
Sweet, first the military creates the internet. Not to be out-done the DOE creates the... electronet? Does this sound familiar to anyone else though?
I suppose it wouldn't have the same reach, as it isn't grounded with scientists / universities as the original. Wishful thinking I suppose.
Remember back in 69 when a few government agencies and universities put together a small little network called "ARPANet?"
It started off with something like four nodes. Look where it is today.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
So it should become self-aware some time soon? If my name was Sarah Connor I'd start running now.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Ok, now if linking all the DOE computers into a large "science grid" doesn't give you a slight chill at the thought of some cosmic event happening, well then nothing will. *heh* Still, it would definately be interesting if we need the Turing Police to be formed. *laugh*
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Wow, imagine a DOE Science Grid Virtual Supercomputer of those!
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
my god... i want to pet it and stroke it and i want it to have my babies... -- but seriously, how big is a petabyte exactly.. i gues i could do a google search on it?
2944 + 160 = 3328 ?
I just wonder...these must be those first
generation Pentiuns with faulty math
anyway.
-><- no
I wonder if they'll run the SETI client on it during non-peak times. We could find nothing that much faster!
And what Operating System will DOE be running on this state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge, faster-than-God-intended computer?
.Net accessability, where 16-y/o girl geeks can write C# virii to prove women really do hate M$ as much as their fellow male geeks.
Windows NT 2k2 (laugh thee not, M$ doth speak of such a beast)...
Oh, and don't forget that wonderful
-TG, more power = faster virii production, woohoo!
PS: In all seriousness (ack, there goes my Funny)... It would be cool if we could put this bad boy to work on some nasty stuff, like Superstring Theory, Proteins, and other Monstrously Huge Data Crunching Projects. But somehow I get the feeling this is going to be a toy for atom-smashers... never something practical or real-world.
No penguins were harmed in the making of this post.
According to this paper, the entire human life takes roughly a petabyte of storage.
Looks like interesting times for AI researchers. Does AI require as many transistors as the brain has neurons? Does it require the same amount of storage and information? Is there something else needed? Looks like we're soon to answer at least one of these.
Nope, no sig
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
Well, I just think it's great we're talking in petabytes now. Hope we don't get too many coments about petafiles *sigh*. Of course, being the neder-geek that I am (that's the opposite of ubergeek, right?) I had to look it up. For the similarly clueless(call me a karma whore);
petabyte - 2 to the 50th power (1,125,899,906,842,624) bytes. A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes. (i.e. 2 to the 20th power gigabytes)
terabyte - 2 to the 40th power (1,099,511,627,776) bytes. This is approximately 1 trillion bytes or 1,048,576 gigabytes.
Gigabyte - 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes.
1/9671406556917033397649408 yottabyte = 1/9444732965739290427392 zettabyte = 1/9223372036854775808 exabyte = 1/9007199254740992 petabyte = 1/8796093022208 terabyte = 1/8589934592 gigabyte = 1/8388608 megabyte = 1/1048576 Megabit = 1/8192 kilobyte = 1/1024 Kilobit = 1/8 byte = 1/4 nibble bit = 1 bit
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I copied some of the text into the wrong section.
:P
It should read;
This is approximately 1 trillion bytes or 1,048,576 gigabytes.
under petabytes, not terabytes.
Slashdot regrets the error.
I could care less.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
what kind of Graphics Card does it have?
Fat lot of good all that super computing is going to do you if your frame rate sucks. You'll be fragged in minutes.
Misfit
Woohoo! I learned a new word today! I am assuming a petabyte is either 1024 Terabytes or something that happens right before the cops knock down the door and take away the 12 year old in your lap.
Call me crazy but I'm not impressed. All they did was hook a bunch of processors together. They didn't develope anything new. Or am I wronge?
Hacker Media
Some time after, the DOE discovers the machine is being abused by employees for personal use, with it running 42 Quake servers, hosting the worlds biggest pr0n archive, having the top ranking on distributed.net, and taking on Kasparov all at the same time. One official was quoted as saying vague stuff and not really making any sense.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Here, for the lazy, are some of the objectives:
Thus, the applications are enormous. Not that you couldn't do it distributed across desktops à la SETI, but here we're talking data integrity, and let's not forget that even SETI has a kick-ass centralised server setup or the whole thing wouldn't work anyway.
But especially interesting is the document filename:-
DOE_Science_Grid_Collaboratory_Pilot_Proposal_03_1 4.nobudget.pdf
Now, who can get me the version WITH the budget? I want it. Hehe.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I couldn't find how they plan on interconnecting the nodes... I've always thought setups like this were rather hindered by their ability to pass messages quickly between nodes. If it's just standard slow WAN link like a T1, I suppose this would end up becoming more like a distributed.net model, and less an actual 'supercomputer' like the headlines imply. If I'm correct, there's a rather large difference in the applications.
dude, having supercomputers build bombs is a GOOD thing. remember that the alternative is to test bombs in the real world. SETI@home is a very nice proof of concept, not much more. United devices is where it's at. distributed cancer drug testing. boo-yah!
Blaze a trail to the New World
and in the end it's the stupid, neglectful or unethical, US energy policies and hands-off that screws rate payers when the govt is in bed with the likes of Enron.
Yeah, I'm impressed. Now imagine parts of it caught in a rolling blackout...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of DOE Science Grids ON WEED?!!!!
- Dan I.
Otherwise it will be illegal under the CBDTPA.
Quick, someone tell Linda Hamilton to head for the mountains! Her unborn child will be the only one to stop all of this madness!
Under the DMCA, a device which records everything you see and hear will eventually be considered a "copyright control circumvention device." The white paper assumes what would be technically possible today and this century if a person is not hindered by laws from taking full advantage of the raw technology available. However, when you do take into account the wording of the DMCA, a bill that MicroSoft helped promote, and the fact that the Dimitry case shows that this law also applies to citizens/actions outside the U.S., it seems clear that this paper has fallen short of discussing the legal realities which will effect such a method occuring in this century.
To be really effective, all existing and future US government computers oughta be networked to this or a similar system. I think it would be a real boon:
1) could reduce the future (taxpayer) costs for "supercomputer grade" applications.
2) could be applied to help solve socio-economic problems in addition to the 'hard' sciences
3) would get "bang for the taxpayer's buck" by utilizing the idle horsepower of publicly purchased computers
I do think, however, they should employ a commercially available distributed computing platform, such as that from www.ud.com
I don't feel that tax dollars need be spent on duplicate research in that area.
-
Pretty soon we'll have three of these in a big underground control room that make our every decision. We'll call them Malchiar, Balthasar, and Caspar. But then we'll need litle kids to fight to save us from atacking angels in giant part human machines...
sigh... oh well, i guess Evangelion is getting a little closer though.
I want 2D games back.
...if they used it to run a simulation of climate and discovered that the Science Grid was responsable for global warming.
(insert your comments about how hot Company X's chips run below)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a little surprising that it got posted and all because it's not all that earth shatterning news, but I'll provides some additional information about grids in General.
There are a wide variety of systems like this that are either currently available or are being developed. Among them are Particle Physics Data Grid, NEESGrid and various European and Asian counterparts.
The basic premise is to allow access to various resources you don't have at your desktop. This is not to be confused to with putting all these computers together an forking a process a billion times and having it run it run all over the globe. It's more like saying I have a process that requires 128 processors and 4GB of ram, go find it an run it for me.
Most of the systems use Globus which is pretty much the defacto standard. There are other systems out there such as Legion and Condor which serve slightly different purposes.
I've also seen some issues about security raised, so I'll mention them quickly. Globus is built upon an API called GSS (Generic Security System), I believe it will soon (if not already) have an RFC published. This is a layer on top of various other security systems that may be local to the server running it. It can use Kerberos or PKI to do encryption across the network (don't flame me if it's wrong, I'm not security expert).
When I wish to start using the grid, I start up my proxy that takes care of all authentication for me. Then my proxy connects to the gatekeeper on the remote machine which authenticates me based on my private key and then authorizes me via a mapping (usually just a text file). The task is then executed by the gatekeeper via the mapping on the remote machine. Input and output can be redirected over a secure layer if you so desire.
My certificate is issued by an authority. In this case the Globus CA. The nice thing if that if you want to set up a grid of your own computers, you can get a cert from them too. Install Globus and it will tell you how.
Certificates also allow you to get access to data. This allows me as a user A to run program B at site C providing results to user D at site E for a period of time F.
It's all terribly neat and remarkably easy to install on your favorite Linux or Solaris box. It's also fairly easy to write programs to utilize the Grid thanks to the various CogKits for Python, Java and Perl.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Imagine a Beow...
--something witty
Most of the UNiversity and REsearch Sites in the UK and Europe are already doing this. Of course we have LHC going on line in 2007 which means we need to since the amount of data generated (10+ PB a year) as well as our other experiments make todays stuff look kinda small.
The goddamed crack-addled mods did it again! DPB was simply making a point on the size of 1.3 petabytes, and a good use for it. Why the blazing hell it got modded offtopic, when it was dead-ontopic.
Get a fucking clue, moderators! I hate to see unnecessary downmodding.
I'd like to see this type of massive computing power used for a comprehensive effort to map the human brain (in an undertaking similar to the Human Genome Project.) Large numbers of optically scanned brain slices (or high-res MRI data) could be input, and abstract representations of the nerve cell connections could be generated. Then a massive effort to simulate and explore large chunks of the brain could begin using this behemoth. I wonder if something like this could be in the works in the near future. Anyone have any information about this?
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. --George Santayana
These grids are all great and wonderful as far as peak performance is concerned, but I'm wondering how the latency associated with long haul networks affects peformance for a range of applications that are not embarrassingly parallel.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Did we get the skynet^H^H^H^H^H Grid achieves consciousness at 2pm EST time joke yet?
DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors WINTERMUTE , together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system NEUROMANCER , will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system ... And this is only the beginning... expect alien artificial intelligence to be contacted very soon.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
"religion is a crutch for the weak-minded" -- jessy ventura
:)). Maybe one day people will learn that the human being is pathetic (it's pretty obvious for me).
every revolt against religion is a sign that you're one of those pseudo-intelectuals that just choose to criticize everything they don't like (instead of thinking about it before saying stupid lazy-minded marxist slogans
This is the fallacy of "supercomputer centers" and "supercomputer networks". You don't want 1% of a supercomputer; you want a machine of your own.
There was a time when sharing big number-crunching machines made sense. Until the mid-1980s, there were commercial scientific computing service bureaus running big iron and selling CPU time. They're all gone, along with Control Data Corporation, Cray, and the commercial market for supercomputers.
If you really want a shared big engine cheap, cut a deal with a big hosting provider for off-hours time on the server farm. Set up a Beowulf cluster of a thousand rack-mounted 1U servers, crunching from midnight to 6AM every night. All you'd really need to do is negotiate a bulk buy of offpeak-only shell accounts. All the machines are identical and the cluster has lots of internal bandwidth, so you can get real coordinated work done, not just the low-bandwidth stuff like SETI and cryptanalysis.
NERSC? Designed and built by the dot-com effluvia of the 1990s (Eugenics Wars)
But the good news is, Nimoy will have a final resting place when he dies.
First, nothing begins if not opening
Well, I'll see your grousing, and raise you a karma point.
/.ers who have your point of view... join their ranks. Or participate in the upcoming "slashdot blackout".
Do you realize just how many submissions every hour these poor folks get??
You may submit one... and just maybe it was your submission that stood out from the hordes of trolls and tweaked their interest enough to look into the story.
So what if someone else's submission with similar verbage was chosen over yours, it made it onto the site. Good enough for me.
As long as they aren't practicing nepotism in the submission choosing process (which they probably are,) then it won't bother me.
A suggestion: write in your journal, post your rants and leave comments enabled. I am sure there are other
You never know, maybe the person who's story was picked is a subscriber.
oh well. <soapbox>
(Moderation totals: Insightful: 1, Troll: 2, Offtopic 3, Total M=mc^2
GRID Computing is the current sexy term in scientific computing, but its something that is so vague that it can mean all things to all people. Which is perhaps why its suddenly so popular, everyone can get their pet project funded.
To some people it means actualy hardware, routers, fibre, supercomputers, that sort of thing. Certainly in the UK and Europe this group consists mostly of Particle Physicists, see the GridPP Project Homepage for details of whats going on there...mostly the Particl Physicsts seem to have ridiclous amounts of data on their hands (Petabytes/day) that they have to ship. Fun stuff!
To the astronomical community it means software, virtual observatories, data mining and intelligent agents. In the UK and Europe have a look at the AstroGrid and the AVO projects. Although some of us are talking about hardware, the project I'm working on for instance, eSTAR, is putting robotically operated telescopes onto the GRID. However even here the main focus of the project is on the fun stuff we can do with the software, intelligent agents and data mining spring immediately to mind. In the US the NVO is the main focus of GRIDs for the astronomers there...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Think they will let me run WinMX on it. With a petabyte of storage I could share a whole look of Divx.
...is nowhere near as good as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Serial Experiment Lain. The dubbing totally sucked!
So, um, how fast can this thing compile a kernel? ;)
Hire me...
i just can't stand this, a company where a certain relative of mine works telekurs (they do all bank transactions in switzerland+they do the stockmarket for switzerland)
that company buys 1 PB storage boxes like once a year!!!
and the boxes in which they come aren't that big! (4x1 large tower) so think about the storage space on that kind of thing
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of DOE Science Grids DANCING BALLET?!!!
With a French Made Superscalar computer...
Mururoa (the French Atoll where we explode our Nukes) has been used for the last time 2-3 years ago to collect the latest correlation data for confirming the mathematical model, and since that time, they just process the whole shebang 8)
I think the US attained that level 3 years ago, which allowed development of your new nifty "micro"nukes with only an end-of-project, final-test explosion...
Yours Faithfully,
(Hello, I live where you're aiming at 8| )
Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which...
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