Slashdot Mirror
Most Powerful Computer in Canada - for a Day
An anonymous reader writes "On Nov. 4, 18 Canadian universities and will create the most powerful computer in Canada for a day to solve an important computational chemistry question in one day -- a task that would normally take six years to complete." Here is more information on the temporary supercomputer available at the project's home page and at UofG's News.
There goes Will Wheaton, showing off again. That bastard. I thought Picard got rid of that young twerp once and for all.
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When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Sounds like they want to play DoomIII (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/03/15202 40&mode=nested&tid=127) alpha witha good frame rate.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
news! canada is gona link some computers together to solve one complex problem. a totaly and unheard of idea. lets see how it works out
- Most powerful computer in canada
- World's tallest midget
- Esquilax (the legendary esquilax, a horse with
the head of a rabbit and the body of a rabbit)
- Garfunkel and Oates
- The world's third most famous belgian
- deluxe english breakfast
Museum of mediocrity!This story is a Duplicate
Coincidentally, on Nov 4, Canadian Universities will create the world's first beer-cooled supercomputer, "Drunk Blue".
When asked why beer, the researchers involved explained that it was both plentiful and "what else would you use Blue for?".
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
find it also here
Can it survive with the Slashdot effect?
imagine a beowulf clu... err.. wait.. dammit..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
For when you absolutely, positively need that chemistry problem solved by the next day.
They should have built it before they announced it. That way, maybe they could survive the low-grade Sunday Slashdotting.
>>18 Canadian universities and will create
If the anonymous submitter happens to be from one of the 18 universities, I don't have much hope for this.
Unless they're trying to analyze the sentence structure of All Your Base.
It's not only Canada's most powerful supercomputer, it's the only one controlled from space.
Carousel is a lie!
First, we had to keep CISS-1 simple enough for us to manage. Second, the computational chemistry application has significant resource requirements (e.g., large memory, significant disk space, etc.). Third, we are not interested in "cycle stealing" for CISS-1; the machines that we use will be dedicated to the task at hand. The rest of the FAQ is here.
*** and now to the commercials, for the final time, here is an analysis of the Slashdot effect.
why not just send out the problem to thousands of more machines nationwide via UD.com?
just a thought..
Canada is clustering all of their fishing ships to create the most powerful Canadian navy yet.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I go to SFU and i'm taking some chemistry classes there and never heard a word about this. I thought it would make the school newspaper at least. We are on the list though. :S
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Why Canadian Beer sucks? ...or is it the more trying...
What can we add to hockey rinks to make hockey more interesting?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
maybe they'll reach about 35 fps.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm a great believer in 'use what you have' network building and the power of Metcalfe's law (and all that). Maybe this is even better than going out and haranguing the government for money for a super-expensive super-computer. If this works out, (and, I guess, that might be seen tomorrow) then even little universities (and little research departments in not-sexy areas of study) could get big computing power when they need it but not have to ransom their entire research agenda just to afford the big computer
Dcobbler
Cobbling together your digital environment: www.digitalcobbler.com
Maybe if we kept it up for a week we'd find those darn extra terrestrials and cure cancer in one fell swoop.
-ascoe
Please list a few. Also please don't forget to cite your sources.
Sounds like final exams are coming up pretty quick on them, maybe they shouldn't have procrastinated.
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
... Actually this means I'll have to wait an extra day to work on my project for my distributed / parallel computing course. So this experiment also gets to help me procrastinate :)
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Eh?
now I find that very hard to believe. The government of canada has some very powerfull supercomputers used for weather. Also, I know for a fact that the Nortel labs in Ottawa have some very powerfull supercomputers. I think it is just plain ignorance that you would say someting like that. Plus, there are millions of personal computers in Canada. Well I can certainly believe that there are bigger supercomputers in the US, not even ten US universities come even close achieving your statement.
Couldn't they come up with more than one important chemistry problem?
First the alarming lead in Zamboni technology, now this!!
Can anyone hack into this box so we can finish tivocrack?
Sounds like a bunch of nerds trying to calculate how to get a date instead of going to the bar and trying it the good ole' way ... clue fellas: This is NOT the way!
{offtopic?}
DrPascal: Not the language, the mathematician.
Is Albert Johnson's Amazing Vic-20 World Tour taking a detour through Toronto?
The government of canada has some very powerfull supercomputers used for weather.
.
I don't think it takes a supercomputer to predict the weather in Canada
The site appears to be solidly withstanding a thorough and complete slashdotting!! The only rational explanation is that the most powerful computer in Canadia is running their web site right now! As they say in French-Canadian, c'est incredible.
Don't you know those Canadians are terrorists?
Don't get me wrong!
Give IBM a few months, and I'm sure they would be more than willing to sell them some CPU time on their on demand supercomputer.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
its to the pub for some good quality Canadian beer.
Not that Yankee bottled goat piss they call beer south of the border.
Tournament Management Online &
That they quote my Slashdot posting about wanting to borrow my Commodore Amiga in the FAQ ;-)
:-(
Shame they didn't credit me on the quote, though
We just wanted some beer! We weren't building an evil supercomputer to SMURF attack M$.com again.
I do no that SMURF attacks don't require a powerfull computer, so don't reply calling me a moron.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It's a cluster of vic-20's.
wtf is with all the trolls, my god the first 30 posts are from trolls! Jesus! Admins, just quietly slip up their IP's and I'm sure we could round up a posse and set their houses on fire (or more accurately their mothers basements).
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
...the Benton Fraser Paradox, or the Canadian tendency to pronounce 'about' as 'a boot'.
Hahahaha... I get it... Canada's perpetually buried under a mountain of snow, so it's always the same weather there...hahahaha.
Such ignorance brings contempt, contempt brings hatred, and hatred brings forth the Dark Side.
1. Encourage people to install Microsoft software
2. Bust them and fine them for $15,000 as soon as they forget to keep up the licence payments
3. Use the money to get more suckers to install Microsoft software
4. Repeat! Er, I mean, profit!
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these! Oh wait, nevermind.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Of course not. Say...didn't I see you wearing a winter coat during the Toronto International Film festival the other month?
Perhaps I should rephrase that. I'm referring to computing power available for scientific computation in universities. This information comes from my brother who is completing a masters in physics and has intensive computing demands and is well in touch with the computing demand. The university I attend does not have as bad a situation as most but the fact remains that there ARE american universities with more computing power than is available to the combined scientific community in Canadian universities.
I stole this Sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's spelt Beowulf. With a u. And "never mind" is two separate words. Fool.
I don't think it takes a supercomputer to predict the weather in Canada.
Yeah, yeah. This is only funny to those who don't live in Canada, of course.
If you live in Newfoundland, for instance, you'll know that no supercomputer in the world could ever have a hope of predicting the weather for the text fifteen minutes. I once visited for a week, and I saw sunny, cloudy, windy, calm, cold, warm, not to mention rain, snow, and even hail.
Now if you'd said Vancouver, on the other hand...
int main() { printf("rain\n"); }
:-)
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Hmph. I remember back in January of '98 when I had the most powerful computer in Canada! Just me, my laptop, some cold soup from a can, and some candles...
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Yeah, yeah. This is only funny to those who don't live in Canada, of course.
.... 99.5% of the world's population?
That would be.... let's see
And probably about 70% of Slashdot's population. Not sure if you noticed, but there is a very high percentage of Canadians who visit Slashdot. I suspect it's due to that national program to integrate high speed into our igloo clusters.
They're planning to slashdot slashdot :(
He's right. Believe me. I'm Canadian and living in Canada. The weather here does suck. All the freakin' time. So don't bother moving here. You hear me? Our beer and women aren't much to talk about. The mountains and forests make the country really rather ugly and unaccessible too. The stories you've heard of clean water and metropolitan cities like Vancouver and Toronto are untrue. So don't move here. Stay away. The weather sucks and it all goes downhill from here. Do not move to Canada.
national program to integrate high speed into our igloo clusters.
I am sure that was made practical by the fact that Canada is the first country in the world to have ambient temperature superconductivity materials in all of their communications and power distribution systems.
To get away from the lazy humans.
I am sure that was made practical by the fact that Canada is the first country in the world to have ambient temperature superconductivity materials in all of their communications and power distribution systems.
That's right, this is the superior technology we're going to use in our grand scheme of conquest! First, we take back Alaska. Then, the rest of the U.S. Then, the world!
MUAAA HAA HAA HA HA HAHAHA!
Ha Ha Hahahaha!
Ho Ho Hohoho.
Heh. Heh.
Whoooooo.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Some Newfie in St. John's managed to get his IBM 9595 in the loop...
How true, I suppose the amount of snow varies from season to season?
Interesting paragraph from the site:
If CISS-1 is a short-term vision, then we hope that CISS will become a long-term vision. Canada Foundation for Innovation requires that the computing sites share 20% of their resources. One can envision CISS being a monthly event where, for example, 3 days a month are set aside for large-scale national computations. This would be unique in the world, and a tremendous opportunity for Canadian scientists.
This is pretty cool.. I wonder if they plan on including p2p clients in the future?
If it's going to solve in a day what would otherwise take 6 years, it has to be almost 2200 times as powerful as their baseline. With 18 universities cooperating, that's about 120 times the baseline provided by each uni. From the article: "The University [one of the 18] will have 108 computer processors helping work on the problem." So, their baseline is a slow single-processor machine - who thinks that's anywhere near a fair comparison? Wow, we built a cluster! And it's lots faster than a single-processor machine! Never would have guessed!
So they've got 2000 processors working on this problem. Probably about as much horsepower as 1000 recent CPUs, or 250 U of rackspace. About 7 racks full of 1U systems with 4 Athlons in 'em. A million dollars would easily cover that, and if you stick it in northern Canada, you get cold clean air for free so the ongoing costs would be much less as well.
What I'm getting at is that I'm not real impressed, either with the article or with the project. If they spent more than 3 weeks organizing this, it would have been faster to just have one uni run the simulation in-house.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
It does. Seriously. The computing power necessary to accurately predict the weather is several orders of magnitude greater than that needed to calculate the necessary space vehicle trajectories to put a person on the moon. Try a massive vector mechanics + thermodynamics problem scaled up to the size of the planet earth. You'll see what I mean.
Remember: Today, we can't even predict the weather accurately for the next couple of weeks, but we can predict if a distant asteroid will hit the earth in the next few thousand years.
How many computers would it take to count all the world's Canadian jokes?
Wil Wheaton is an actor. Wesley Crusher is a fictional character...
In other news, Canada, its ego buoyed by its success in the computing arena, declares war on the rest of the world, citing the rest of the worlds "blatant inferiority".
The site states that Canada has over 20 serious supercomputer installations. It also states that the problem being tackled would normally take 3-6 years. So how do they intend to solve the problem in less than one one-thousandth of the normal time by using only 20 times the computational power? Something here doesn't add up.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
It is well known that Canadians have 57 words for 'snow'. So knowing which one could be needed tomorrow could be useful.
Does that require a supercomputer? Or 6 coins?
#357 IBM Netfinity Cluster PIII 1 GHz - Eth Government Canada 2002 Classified
put the buddha down.
Great lyric.
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(/me ducks)
Why the hell do *I* get modded down when I post something similar?
Someone should write a General Distributed Comuptation client (ala seti@home or TivoCrack) screensaver and make a 'pseudo-cluster' out of all the Computers Lab/Office PeeCees...
A group of some kind could be created to provide access / approval of proposed usages etc etc and it would create a new massive-computation resource... of some kind... just a thought.
I do no that SMURF attacks don't require a powerfull computer, so don't reply calling me a moron.
Okay, you're an illiterate moron.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Isn't this how the SkyNet came to be?
According to Seti@Home, Canada has 213307 machines working on SETI problems, which have contributed 71519 machine-years. The academic project has about 1% this many machines. Some of them may be faster than the average SETI machine. My article also commented about Canada's place on top500.org.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He was probably using Acadian Peninsula "Franglais". Flippez le switch, s'il vous please. And close the porte, c'est froid.
I swear, if any French or English professors ever visited Bathurst, they'd have a heart attack during their first conversation...
The American Version will do it 48% faster and not try to compare itself to the Canadian version.
First, we take back Alaska.
And Alaska was part of Canada exactly when?
With the introduction of the TABLET PC, I wonder how fast can those computers really distribute a supercoolant solution.
Hey, do you predict a BEAR market ahead!
The way I see it, we're ahead of the curve.
All languages in natural use adopt bits of the languages they're exposed to (English is ridden with French words, and is adopting slang and geek-speak at almost alarming rates). Acadia is free from the dictates of the Academie (which lowered the barriers to entry), and was abandoned in a sea of English (or forcibly exiled there), that any french is spoken at all is mostly a testament to Acadian resilience.
There's a similar situation in Switzerland where they speak an incomprehensible Swiss-German to each other but can get on just fine in regular German (and usually English). All the Acadians know can speak properly in English AND French.
I guess I should say my language is just as valid as yours.
My list of multiplayer
And I thought my residence bandwidth sucked now...
This whole thread seems a bit offtopic, but to humour those in it...
Alaska wasn't actually a province, Canada lost out when the failed to buy it from the Russians, who sold it in 1867 (though it didn't become a state until 1959).
Look up "Seward's Folly" on google for more info.
It's always seemed somewhat odd having a American state attached on the northwestern borders, far from the rest of the US, but this page seems to cover most of the details
If you have read the articel more carfully then you would have noticed that they are NOT using 20 times the computing power they currently have. They are using the computing power currently SPREAD over 20 SITES in a parallel effort.
Funny that so many people comment but appear to not read what they are "discussing" about.
Umm, it is not just Canada, it is the entire planet. Sorry to ruin your day. :-)
But (semi)-seriously I think large, powerful neighbours (note spelling!) are universally resented, even if they have not invaded recently.
I think the big difference is that Canadians are actually interested in the U.S. As tacky as "Talking to Americans" is, it is really about the US, if in a completely distorted way, where say South Park essentially makes fun of the idea of hating Canadians. I mean who cares about Canada really?
--Canuck in exile
In case you're lost:
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The '57 [or 54 or 64 depending on who you ask...] words for snow' thing' is a bit false. The inuit language combines adjectives and nouns into one word. ie. "wet snow" becomes "wetsnow". When whitey was first learning the language the different 'words' used for the different kinds of snow were counted as seperate, and thus the urban legend began. Saying that the inuit have 57 words for snow is about as fair as saying that the scandanavian tongues have 100 words for 'ham'.
Dont forget that when the chips were down and the USA had a war with Canada - Canada KICKED THE USA's ASS.
It wasn't the Canada's capital that was burned down!
"what is the atomic number of molybdenum?"
The GRID computing project http://www.gridcomputing.com/ is a set of software standards for linking computers into super computing networks. Most of the world's supercomputing centers particpate in one way or the other. However it appears from the webpage of the this Candanian project that they are not using GRID and going their own way.
Today I am a proud Canadian as we all unite, and together with the processing power of our 26 Commodore 64's, are able to solve a problem in a day that would of taken 6 years to calculate. How many times over does Canadian beer have in alcohol content over American beer? (we all know the answer but we just want to double check..) So take off you hoser, eh! Golden...
Oh Canada, Our home and native land...
I don't think it takes a supercomputer to predict the weather in Canada .
It would take a hell of alot more than one actually. There's a saying, "if you don't like the weather in Canada, wait 5 minutes".
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
For the record, Cook was born in Buffalo, NY and obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard.
o k.html
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/DCS/People/Faculty/saco
I joke about the weather where I live, why can' t I joke about it where you live.
Lighten up.
Not a secret anymore now, is it?
Traitor.
Isn't that a group project?
Yes... 5 minutes from now, you'll like it even less.
A Large amount of computing power is used to decifer and merge radar data and atmospheric data from across the country. Much of this data is used to keep Canadian and American planes safe, and the US and Canada have an agreement detailing standards on wheather data which is exchanged between the two contries. BTW, Canada has better weather radar coverage than the US, especially in Ontario.