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SAPAC Unveils New Australian Supercomputer
Sean Burford writes "The South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) has unveiled its new AU$1.7 Million supercomputer
named Hydra. It is an IBM 1350 Linux cluster with 126 compute nodes (xSeries 335), 1 head node (xSeries 335), 1 storage
node (xSeries 345) and 1 managment node (xSeries 345). Hydra has a peak theoretical performance of 1.2 Teraflops, and has currently benchmarked at 682 Gigaflops. The current benchmark
places it in the fastest three supercomputers in Australia and equivalent to the current number 80 in the world.
The cluster has a total of
258 2.4Ghz Intel Xeon processors and 258GB of RAM. SAPAC expects to achieve a benchmark closer to 700 Gigaflops with further tuning. Hydra is hosted at The University Of Adelaide, who already host a
40 node cluster of Sun e420 machines."
Yeah, but what I want to know is why they can't stick to the standards and use Quake3 fps for benchmarking? It works for everyone else.
An American cartoon makes a joke about the Australian government booting a kid in the arse.
Yet, Australia has outlawed any form of corporal or capital punishment, but the US still lets teachers hit kids and kills people with death sentences. This isn't the pot calling the kettle black, it's the pot calling the fine cutlery black.
Australia has sane, civilised laws. The USA kills people, hits people, and arms its citizens to the teeth with guns.
Ah, the irony of it all.
So for about a million US$1 you could get in the top 100 supercomputers in the world.
For $1M you could buy a load of computers, sure. But what is the cost of a building to put them in? A while ago I did some consulting for a major telco/colo provider. Their single biggest expense was electricity to run their air conditioning and dehumidifiers. It cost more than renting the building. They were seriously considering buying a utility company to get a better rate on electricity. Also on the cards was a relocation to Alaska, but the technology just isn't there yet to run truly "lights out" so they would have adopted an oil rig model - flying sysadmins out for 4 weeks on 2 weeks off, like oil companies do for rig workers. (The story ends before they could actually do any of this when the dotcom bubble burst and all their customers stopped paying their bills).
The building, the environmental controls, staff to run the system, staff to run the building (security, janitors, canteen staff and so on) - it all adds up. You would need to spend a lot more than $1M to get into the top 100.
Touchy?
Arrogant?
I think you're forgetting who got all upset about a few building falling over and then got retribution by forging evidence of 'Wigwams of Masturbation' and blackmailing the rest of the world into supporting an illegal invasion of a defenseless country. All for your stupid American pride.
So who is touchy?
And arrogant?