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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.
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
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'
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.
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!
Ah yes, good old-fashioned Canada bashing. It seems to be the American national sport these days doesn't it? Ever heard of Steven Cook (the guy who originated the concept of NP-completeness, FYI)? He's at the university of Toronto. Or how about Jack Edmonds (you've probably never heard of the Edmonds-Karp algorithm either). He's at University of Waterloo. I could go on, but why waste my breath. Granted, Canadians are waaay too smug about not being American, but fools like you give them a reason to be.
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
... 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 :)
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
First the alarming lead in Zamboni technology, now this!!
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.
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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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.
Oh yes, everybody knows American beer is far superior...
Check out beeradvocate.com for some high quality US brew.
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.
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)
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
The stuff on South Park isn't real Canada bashing. Often it is in fact making fun of Americans' Canada bashing. In the case of the South Park Movie and its song "Blame Canada", it is mocking the tendency of parents to blame the bad behaviour of their children on anything and everything but themselves - even on something as obviously harmless (from an American's point of view) as Canada.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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(/me ducks)
bah... sue me. I've had a few too many Molsons today....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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
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?
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)
Actually, you're wrong. The movie was ironic, but in a tongue-in-cheek way. When they sang, "Blame Canada," you'd better believe they fucking well meant it.
HHOS.
I write in my journal
hey, no canada bashing here.
mad props to Canada. all the time.
we kid because we love.
I mean really Canada is just about the only place on Earth an American can visit without fear of being blown up, kidnapped, or er.. blown up.
lived in Canada for a month. best people on Earth. talk funny though. and you folks do say "eh" alot. don't deny it. you do. I heard "eh" roughly 40 times in one 10 minute conversation.
it just sounds funny. love you anyway.
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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
Bitter little geek, aren't we? Go upstairs and kiss your mom g'night for me, eh?
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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.
Which part don't you understand? The article says that the problem would take 3-6 years using one of the installations. Using 20 such installations can provide a maximum of 20 times the computational horsepower. Probably less depending on how parallel the problem is. So how are they planning on getting a 1000 times + speedup?
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
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.
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.