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Most Powerful Computer in Canada - for a Day

Posted by timothy on from the fleeting-fame dept.

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.

6 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Dup by HRbnjR · · Score: 3, Informative

    This story is a Duplicate

  2. As this will asked anyway, from the FAQ by jukal · · Score: 5, Informative
    "Why didn't they just make a client program for distributed computing so the entire country/world could help out?" (From a Slashdot posting.)

    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.

    1. Re:As this will asked anyway, from the FAQ by jukal · · Score: 3, Informative
      Because of the complexity of the molecules, the energy needs to be calculated at many thousand points. Each point may require several hours of computing time on a modern workstation. In computational terms, this is an ideal parallel problem which can be distributed onto as many processors as points needed and is therefore ideally suited for the CISS Experiment

      Yes, security (and data/result integrity) is probably one of the main reasons why they want it to be run in a trusted enviroment. Otherwise it seems that this would be a good case for a massively distributed solution (although apparently the application required big amounts of memory, and maybe bandwidth). But the dataintegrity in non-trusted network probably makes it impossible. I don't know if anyone has come up with a good solution to overcome the dataintegrity problems - other than performing occasional checks (running the same task on multiple machines) to find the forged results. In a non-trusted environment, you might soon find a big percent of the cpu cycles used just for dataintegrity checks.

    2. Re:As this will asked anyway, from the FAQ by jukal · · Score: 5, Informative
      SETI currently does integrity checks by having the same unit calculated several times then taking the most common result..

      Yes, and imagine the case of the distributed crypto-crack efforts such as those run by distributed.net and by us too for the rc5-56 challenge (the cyberian.org effort). Imagine, that someone fakes the results for just the keyspace, which contained the correct key - and that this forged result passes the controls. Now, as result the progress counter might reach 100% and you still did not find the correct key. The only solution would be to calculate the whole keyspace again. I mean, even if you check the integrity - calculate same task for 10 times for example - still, it is possible that the forge gets through. Ofcourse, there is a number of counter actions to make the forging harder but still, I think the key problem is still unanswered. Or, if someone has some good fresh pointers about this subject, please post them here :)

  3. Re:In Other News... by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Informative

    While it's fun to joke about Canada, it should be noted that when it's actually needed (i.e. not against a bunch of two bit little shithole nations, or just to continue to push a military-export policy) Canada quickly becomes a military powerhouse.

    "The Canadian Navy began the Second World War with half a dozen vessels and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian Soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the War with the World's 3rd largest Navy and the fourth largest Air Force. The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had in previous times.......In film, Hollywood abandoned the notion of a separate Canadian identity"

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion