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.

Comments

Wait just a gosh-darn minute here

[ottffssent]

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.