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Science Grid Genesis

Posted by michael on from the birth-of-skynet dept.

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..."

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's nice to see... by mobydobius · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Yeah, except that anytime someone gets the idea to pool PC power, the only thing they can think of to use the hardware on is wanker projects like calculating mersenne primes or processing SETI dumps. Personnally, I'd rather my machine sat around wasting cycles...

    --

    "I like to wear big boy pants."
  2. Spare me by ackthpt · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    ...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...

    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
  3. Supercomputers - oink by Animats · · Score: 2, Flamebait
    Supercomputers are mostly a Government pork program. Notice that there are very, very few of them in the private sector. It doesn't make sense to have a supercomputer unless you have single problems that require large amounts of time on it. Supercomputers aren't economic as crunch engines - they cost more per MIPS than good desktop machines. That's because they're low-volume, hand-built machines.

    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.