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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.
How can one be *too* smug about being non-American? Seems to me that not being American in my home town, is more important than being Canadian.
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)
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.
As an American living in Canada, I find it very surprising to see the pent up anger that a several Canadians seem to have for Americans. This post seems to bring out that sentiment that I see on a daily basis. Most Americans are ignorant to the anti-American sentiment that exudes from the Canadian media and the general population.
The crack made that fired this guy off isn't exactly what I call Canada bashing. It's our brand of humor we like to call sarcasm.
Why is it that a faction of the population seems to dislike the US so much?
Americans don't create beer commercials that express an annoyance or hatred for Canadians. (Molson) We don't produce shows that attempt to depict the American population as ignorant fools. (Talking to Americans)
Most Americans love Canadian culture. We love Canadian sports. We love Canadian comedians and entertainers. I don't know why there seems to be a hatred that isn't reciprocated.
Having seen both sides of the coin, I'd have to say that America bashing is far more prevalent and mainstream here in Canada. (Per capita of course)