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Supercomputer Breaks the $100/GFLOPS Barrier
Hank Dietz writes "At the University of Kentucky, KASY0,
a Linux cluster of 128+4 AMD Athlon XP 2600+ nodes, achieved 471 GFLOPS on 32-bit HPL. At a cost of less than $39,500, that makes it the first supercomputer to break $100/GFLOPS. It also is the new record holder for POV-Ray 3.5 render speed.
The reason this 'Beowulf' is so cost-effective is a new network architecture that achieves high performance using standard hardware: the asymmetric Sparse Flat Neighborhood Network (SFNN)." Because this was a university project, KASY0 was assembled entirely by unversity students, which while being a source of cheap labor, is also a good way to get a lot of students of involved in a great project.
Imagine a Beowu... errr... Oh..
Note to moderators, Beowulf cluster jokes CANNOT be offtopic.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf cluster jokes!
How much electricity will these super computers use up?
All those wires, it looks like it takes up alot of juice.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
gigaflop
As a measure of computer speed, a gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
Supercomputer Breaks the $100/GFLOPS Barrier
Not after you factor in the SCO license fees.
I personally love to see this kind of stuff. As a kentucky native, anything related to my home turf gets extra kudos. On a more technical note, I just want to know why I can't have one of these?
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Not to mention I'm 100% sure you use Windows, and cant even take advantage of the power of that.
How would you use this super computer?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
the older kernels, they are SCOless......
Remember, everyone, this was a university project. *BSD was also a university project originally, and now *BSD is dying. So obviously university projects are not of very high quality.
Obviously, I don't get it. This doesn't look any different than redundant backbones or what is frequently done with VLANs. Multiple paths between hosts is what I see. How is this "new"?
Ponders while there are not University students pictures in the National Geographic Article on Slavery....
but super computers as in giant iron are becoming more specialized and as such would woop the pants off a Beowulf cluster when competing in the specialty.
of course, if you just need a lot of general purpose super computing, it is obvious that you cannot compete with this.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
And it was introduced to consumers just a couple years
ago. Sorry, the AMD beowulf cluster at $100/GFLOP just
isn't that impressive.
though is how many mp3's are these students sharing on this monster ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
each node has two side case fans! that's gotta be the most dedicated case modding job i've ever seen! 132 pc's with 2 fans! too bad they didn't put fan guards ... or interior lights.. or blue led's... but i guess all that junk about a supercomputer makes up for it...
The government does give financial aid to some of them, along with scholarships and other forms of payment, so they get to live for free on campus with government money, its kinda like the military deal, you work hard, you get an education, and the government supports you.
In this situation I'm sure these kids, all of them, will win all kinds of scholarships.
(payment)
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
... a beowulf cluster of these!
and it still can't run Doom III at a decent rate.
--krahd
mod me up, scottie!
mod me up scottie!
It's saturday evening and time to start drinking beer!
There's always use for Gflops. How about distributed DVD ripping, packing and then serving them to the people on the net?
What a mess of cables! I understand they were hitting a price point, but would it have killed them to spring $500 or so for a cable management system?
There's something professional looking about having the cables look neat. On the other hand, maybe i'm just anal about things.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I toured the previous cluster these guys did (KLAT2) and was very impressed. However, using AMD Athlon Thunderbirds last time, it did get quite hot. I remember standing by the cluster looking at all the wiring and being bombarded by an overhead cooling vent. I'm also assuming that these cooling issues is the reason that each case has two blow-holes. I'd also like to see these guys post in-depth specs of each machine. Being a hardware nut, I'd like to see how they got so many machines so cheap, and maybe even what vender they used. As I remember, they worked REALLY hard on their last cluster to keep costs to an absolute minimum.
I'm guessing the latter. You see all sorts of BSified numbers from marketing departments on processors, but they have little to do with reality. The number for this AMD cluster is a real, actual, measured-using-a-real-world-app number. To give you some idea of BS console numbers, the Xbox has a PIII 733 processor in it (ok, technically it's a little different, but it's a P3 core). Now the Gflop claim is 2.93. Out of a P3 733? Ya right, on paper perhaps but never in the real world, much less on a real app.
Then, of course, there is the issue of specialised chips vs normal chips. A GeForce 4 4400 can claim, roughly, 80 Gflops peak. That sure beats the hell out of any sinlge CPU I've ever heard of, including the Power4. Thing is the GeForce 4 is a graphics DSP, it isn't a general purpose CPU. It can do that kind of math when all its units are working at what they do best, but try to reprogram it to do something else and it will slow to a crawl (for that matter I'm not even sure that it is turing complete).
So don't take any hype on a console to equate to real performance in a general task. Oh, and the BS marketing number I see for the PS2's Emotion Engine is 6.2Gflops.
5.5 Gflops, I dunno if it can really do that, but ...uh..the point is that it's the first *supercomputer* to break the $100/GFLOP barrier. The Playstation2, last I checked, isn't a supercomputer, it's a videogame platform.
My journal has hot
Where I live you can also sit on your ass on government welfare and do nothing.
Which, I think, is perfectly OK. I'll happily pay taxes to keep these people housed and above the poverty line than have them begging on the streets and mugging people for a living. People who don't want to work/won't work are, after all, a minority and will never bring a society financially to its knees.
And before the libertarians jump in and start spouting crap about how they should not be made to pay for these freeloaders, let me remind you that you are free to leave the society. You can take your business and live outside it, all tax free, but you'll come crying back when you realize that you'd have to fund your own law enforcement, health care and rescue services.
Dear customer,
.. Price .. Qty .. Total .. 8,377,500$ .. 128 .. 1,118,400,000$
At the cheap introductory price of 699$ for 80 lines of code in the Linux kernel, it will cost you 8,377,500$ by kernel since we have discovered that in fact 1000000 lines of SCO IP were copied into Linux.
Designation
Linux kernel
So you must pay us only 1,118,400,000$, and in my kind almighty I will offer you a discount of 118,400,000$ so you only have to pay ONE BILLION DOLLAR if you pay before tomorrow!
Please send you creditcard number at darl@sco.com
Sincerely yours,
-- Darl Mac Bride
- Casio sues them for trademark infringement?
- SCO asks them 92268$ worth of licenses and/or sues them for copyright infringement?
- KFK sues em for patent infringement? (you know, "the method to fry one billion chicken flaps (GFLAPS) for under 100$ with AMD processors")
Ah the USofA, Land Of the Lawyers.
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
I didn't see hard drives on their parts list. Why is that? How do they boot them up?!
A playstation2 costs $199. That information is in your local newspaper. Actually, sales peg it at $179 lately, my mistake. The playstation2, with 2 vector processing units, each with 4 floats wide registers (128bit), capable of doing a multiply-add operation per clock cycle on whole registers, at 300mhz independant of the main CPU which still has its own scalar floating point coproc, handily does 5.5GFLOPS, and is well documented as such if you google around. Check out http://playstation2-linux.com/
Looks like most of the wiring jobs I've seen done by students: kasy0core.jpg.
;-)
God forbid they use cable gutters
Other than that, kick ass job guys!
-nate
These numbers for microprocessors etc mean nothing because they are usually referring to operations on data in cache.. you'ill find that real life performance is 10-20x slower because thats how much slower accessing main memory is.
Note that every PC has at least one single-switch-latency path to every other PC; some PC pairs have more than one such path.
Every host does have at least one pathe to every other host but, most hosts have multiple paths to other hosts. It is true however that all hosts do not necessarily have multiple paths to all other hosts.
The article does address this if you read it.
"...An even cuter comparison is with this, a $50,000+ system built using 70 PlayStation2 units. Not only does KASY0 have a vastly superior network and significantly higher floating point performance per node (8 GFLOPS vs. 6.5 GFLOPS for the PS2), but we get LOTS more nodes!..."
Hey! I used to work there.
Way to go Dr. Dietz!
So, mod me anyway you want, karma to burn.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Nice how you take the numbers from a marketing press release and treat them as if they are the absolute, indisputable truth. Can you show me the actual, reproducible benchmark that produced those numbers?
Also, the PS2 is not a supercomputer. It has a slow processor and very little RAM, so it wouldn't be able to do much number-crunching. You can't hook PS2s together, anyway, so comparing a single specialized machine to a cluster is absolutely meaningless.
In reality, beowolf clusters are good for only a subset of supercomputing tasks and the "real" supercomputers are still best at general purpose supercomputing.
If you can paralize your application well enough, beowoulf rules, but if you need a lot of node2node communication, the network cost quickly surpasses the cpu cost of the system
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I am a grad student at UK Computer Science dept...
... see http://www.metaverselab.org
They are working on projects to use this type of power
My favorite is the hooking together 16+ cheap ($2000 or so) projectors together adhoc to build a display that covers walls/floor, and combining that with head tracking and video cameras that look for shadows so that other projectors can fill in! This needs a lot of GFLOPS!
I wonder which universities/institutes have larger and maybe cheaper clusters, but just don't bother with running benchmarks. I for one are sitting next next to a tiny cluster with 40 dual-cpu nodes, which is connected (GRID like) to a 340 dual-node cluster in a nearby town. Non of us high ernergy physicists bothers with running any benchmarks on our clusters, other than our own applications. I wonder how many "linux-cluster-supercomputers" are out there which would easyly make it into the top 500, but noone has ever heard of....
Cheers.
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
At the risk of being flamebait- No. Using university students is almost always purely a way of getting cheap labor to do semi-mindless, or completely mindless, stuff the staff doesn't want to do- it's a common myth that students 'learn' by doing grunt work. I should know- I have several grad student friends, and they've thusfar spent a large part of their academic careers working in labs doing mind-numbingly boring stuff(according to them.)
Imagine if a Bio lab did this. The following would sound pretty absurd: "Help us move our lab, you'll learn about cellular recombination!". No. You'll learn what a bunch of lab equipment looks like, how eccentric the professors are, and how expensive/fragile/heavy the equipment is, and the next morning what sore muscles are like. Let's get a reality check here.
(from the site):Our group develops the systems technology for cluster supercomputing; the more people we can show how to apply these technologies, the better.
Huh? What cluster supercomputing "technology" does assembling a PC and plugging it into ethernet teach you? Did they give a presentation about how clustering technology works, for example? Did they explain to each person, as they put a machine in a particular place and wired it to a particular switch, WHY it was going there etc? Obviously I wasn't there, so perhaps someone from the group can contribute on this point.
Please help metamoderate.
I mean these things are Athlons! Heck, they're saving money just from the fact that they'll never have to turn on the furnace again!
Did you guys notice from the pics that there doesn't seem to be any fans in the holes on the sides? Are they crazy? These are Athlons. I hope they put enough fans in those things.
My journal has hot
Now that the university students have graduated and moved on, there isn't any documentation, nor do they know how to use the darn thing...
-1
This price/performance ratio seems to make them very attractive compared to general purpose CPUs. According to the NASA G5 Study, the P4 2.66 GHz is only able to achieve 255 MFLOP/s. And the P4 costs about 4x the price of the 6711 DSP.
It seems that DSPs should be the clear winner in supercomputer applications, what are their disadvantages and why are they not used? Granted there is a lack of mass produced hardware such as motherboards for DSPs, but that alone should not exclude them from the supercomputer realm.
128+4...
That's like 132 isn't it?
From the FAQ:
KASY0's configuration is:
128 + 4 "cold spare" PC nodes, each containing:
One AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (the 2.075GHz version)
One 512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
BioStar M7VIT Pro motherboard
Two Linksys LNE100TX NICs
Codegen 6042L case with 400W power supply
18 BenQ SE0024 24-port Fast Ethernet switches
405 Cat5 Fast Ethernet cables
RedHat Linux 9.0, modified Warewulf 1.11
So it's 128, the other 4 are spares!
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
oh ok, so then you are in favor of accepting the status quo in 100% of cases, never wanting to change anything?...
"if you dont like it leave!"?... If it weren't for people who thought the exact opposite way, America wouldn't exist in the 1st place for you to spout off your point of view.
"Where I live you can also sit on your ass on government welfare and do nothing."
Havent you heard of welfare reform yet? People on welfare must work 40 hours a week at Mc Donalds.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Yeah, good work.
What will they do with all this processing power? Farm it out? Boast? Serve a pr0n company?
http://www.us.playstation.com/hardware/networkada
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"Insightful"?!?
Yeah, right.
Guess everybody from universitys to big corporations spend tons of money for supercomputers/clusters because they have no use for them.
Sounds very likely.
Given the fact that your other posts in this topic all concern the blackout or McDonalds->
MOD PARENT DOWN (OFFTOPIC)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Nice machine, but this January, CITA and the astro department at the University of Toronto brought a 256 node dual Xenon system on line: "1.2 trillion floating point mathematical operations per second (Tflops) on the standard LINPACK linear algebra benchmark." Total cost: CDN$900K (including tax) (in January prices, that's $600K U.S. or $0.50USD/GFlop.) It's being used for some very cool Astro simulations...
See http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/webpages/mckenzie
I don't know where you got this "change anything bit", but if change means kicking people out to the streets because they can't/won't work the hours/jobs that are available, then no I don't want to change anything.
if you dont like it leave!
No, I simply stated a fact: if you don't like paying taxes in order to take care of the troublesome/sick minority you can always leave - the minority can't. You won't starve, they will.
KASY0 nodes are completely diskless; there isn't even a floppy. (from the FAQ)
So how are the nodes booted? Are there bioses out there that can netboot?
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
The key word here is supercomputer. A PS2 is not a supercomputer.
The previous price/performance champ was in fact a PS/2 cluster, mentioned here, but this AMD cluster is roughly three times the performance for the dollar. You can check the stats with different assumptions on their FAQ page, particularly the section labeled 'Is KASY0 really the first supercomputer under $100/GFLOPS?'
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Not to downplay the fantastic accomplishment, but there is nothing new about this network architecture. Not topologically, as Dietz has been claiming for years now. When did a mix of full and partial mesh suddenly become new?
:D
Sweet cluster, though
Gah feel free to mod the previous version of this comment into oblivion, I hit submit accidentally.
The numbers you're looking at are marketing numbers first off, and overly generous. Second you don't scale for free - you never get anything like 100 times the performance of a single box when you wire 100 together, for the same reason that you don't get twice the horsepower out of an engine twice the size.
The previous price/performance champ was in fact a PS/2 cluster, mentioned here, but this AMD cluster is roughly three times the performance for the dollar. You can check the stats with different assumptions on their FAQ page, particularly the section labeled 'Is KASY0 really the first supercomputer under $100/GFLOPS?'
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's not the first time that these folks in KY work around the definition of the acronym "Flop". A Flop is a floating point operation on 64 bits, not 32 bits. All entries in the Top500 used results with 64 bits HPL, nobody else in the world is running HPL on 32 bits. So claiming the moon on 32 bits is easy, useless for the sake of comparaison and almost unethical. I cannot believe that Dr Dietz do not know the difference by now.
The same machine would yield average results on 64 bits. Difficult to draw attention without headline numbers...
Yeah, and why do you think you need AI (?!?!?) to use its power?
There isnt enough computing power in the whole world for a few simulations some profs in the solid state faculty of my university would like to run.
its too bad if even a teraflop computer can only solve a 20^3 lattice...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
... they're going to have the largest Quake LAN party ever!
Come on, 1 billion dollars on a credit card? Have you ever heard of a chargeback?
On a serious note I'm sure Paypal would be more (sic) secure and convienient.
(Those familiar with the University of Manchester's Department of Computation, in the UK, will understand what I mean. The architecture is designed around the computer room. Even after the truly massive lumps of iron were removed, it still wasn't until the mid 1990s that the building had a ground-floor entrance, as such an entrance would have limited the heating effect.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Further, it would also accelerate the product enormously - Linux on a Chip would be blazingly fast, as it wouldn't take any processing power away from what it was running - thereby also reducing the cost per GFLOP.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But if they cleaned it up they couldn't use it as a hammock.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Granted there might be some heat problems, but judging by their setup, I'm guessing the room is well-cooled.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
But the "FA" says $1000 per gflop not $100
Did you RTFA?
What planet are you from, anyway?
This is why only the rich can learn in the US. Very very few poor people have degrees ...
I will grant you, there are stories of poor people who cannot get an education because they live in a cycle of violence or poverty, but this is hardly the standard. Rather than "The system won't let poor people can't get an education, therefore they're always poor", I submit that "People who didn't go for an education stay poor."
When I was getting ready to attend college, (1979) my father had been diagnosed with Alzheimers and was no longer working. My mother worked as a bookkeeper at a local radio station. I went to a 1st rate, 4 year school and got a good education. I borrowed money, I saved money working during high school and I worked summers to make it through. My situation is hardly special or unique. THIS is the standard... and there is nothing wrong with working for something.
I'm sure someone will pop in with "that was then, this is now". Well, now my state proves the HOPE scholarship. If you maintain an A or B average, your tuition is paid for. This is paid for by a state-wide lottery. "Lottery n. - a tax on the mathmatically challenged"
There are plenty of things that our society can improve on, but hopping in here with doom & gloom over why the government doesn't just pay everbody to go to college shows a tremendous lack of thought on your part. Socialism may sound great, but it rarely yields vibrant, properous societies where people actually have a chance to better themselves in life.
Besides, nobody in their right mind would run a parallel program of any importance on a "rigged" setup like that.
DEAR SIR...
My name is Mumfasa Thumbutu, and I am writing to you from Nigeria. I work for SCO, and here in my country, we have many SCO license fees to collect. But due to our bad government we cannot put our money in the bank like normal people. See, everyone in Nigeria is corrupt, except for me and my friends (and SCO, too).
So we need your bank account number, social security number, mother's maiden name, date of birth, keys to your car, wallet, and your computer so that we can put the sum of ONE BILLION DOLLARS into your account.
This is not a scam, you see, because we are working for a reputable company (SCO) who has a lot of money.
SINCERELY,
MUMFASA THUMBUTU
(I tried posting this in all caps, but was thwarted by the lameness filter)
If you wish to calculate the cost of electricity you need to know the duration for which you are measuring. A kW/h is the measurement used by your elctric utility to determine how much they are going to charge you for the service they are providing. It is calculated by taking the power load, in this case 25.2kW and multiplying that by the hours that load is on the power grid (with 1 kW/h being the measure of a 1kW load being on the grid for one hour.)
24 of these a day, and [28-31] of days per month will provide you with the power load that this assembly will use. A standard 100 watt lightbulb will use 2.4 kW per day, and 74kW per 30 day month.
People with ID's under 6773437 shouldn't be allowed to post anonymously.
You never know...
Compare that to the US, where students need to excell at sports, or wage-slave themselves between lectures to keep going.
Stafford Loan Maximums (independent student):
1st year: $6625
2nd year: $7500
3rd year: $10500
4th year: $10500
5th year: $10500
For dependent students the amount is almost halved but any student can become indepent when they are 23 years old or demonstrate that they truely are no longer supported by their parents/guardians (don't know too much about this though). This is only Stafford loans too, there are plenty of other sources for loans.
Now if you had said loan-slaves maybe I'd be slightly more inclined to agree...
The key is to strike a balance between social help and helping oneself.
... umm... these minorities were probably in a WORSE situation where they came from, and you guessed it, they left... they came here.. where people are willing to pay them to sit around and do nothing.
As far as who can and can't leave,
A much more fruitful application of social welfare would be something that has recently started to gain momentum -- workfare.. in other words, you still have to work for a living, but you get a little assistance in bringing you above the 'poverty line'.
The sentiment of the current welfare system is nice, however it was implemented by a bunch of people who would rather look nice for the camera than think about the implications of their actions. The current plan is rife with abuse, and i think that is common knowledge. It encourages people to be lazy, sit on their ass (if you work, you get less / no assistance?), it also encourages having more kids (more kids = more money), however it doesn't require that you spend this money on raising your kids, or planning for your future, etc. All in all, sounds like a poorly implemented system.
Libertarians are a little out-there with their everyone-for-themselves (almost republican?) attitude, however the liberals are just as bad with their bleeding hart b.s. that you should be guilted into paying for other's lack of motivation.
Also, i'd like for you to explain why leaving is a better alternative to voicing your opinion regarding the use of your tax dollars.
I work @ UK and the students used were on a pure voluntary basis
projects @ http://spectechnologies.net
What a shame. Freeloaders. They would never be able to achieve such performance if not for the fruits of labour of SCO .. eeeh.. lawers?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Er...you can do that with parts from ebay or craigslist without too much trouble.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Oh, I agree your situation isn't abnormal. What I find abnormal is paying 400% over the odds (plus interest) and considering it a good deal.
I'm not talking about a socialist society, where everything is covered by "the state", but rather of any system (regardless of form or politics) where you pay for what you get, and you get what you pay for.
Hey, people are going to want a profit margin. Without profit, not many people have motive. Most shops are happy with a 50% mark-up. Specialist dealers (eg: technology) often work on a 100% mark-up, because they've less volume.
But why are you paying a 300% mark-up for a high-volume, relatively low-cost enterprise? That's the bit I don't get. And if you have more people who are educated, the cost of that enterprise per person goes down. (It costs about the same for a salaried lecturer to teach one person, a hundred or a thousand. As lectures aren't interactive, the quality isn't affected that much, either.)
In other words, three times the kids in University, with only a 100% mark-up, would give the Universities about the same profit, cost them about the same to do, resulting in a massive jump in skilled workers, resulting in greater revenue generation, producing more taxes, resulting in a wealthier nation.
Menial laborers - the apple-pickers of the world - generate next to nothing for themselves or their country, and produce nothing for their company that a machine couldn't do better, quicker and cheaper.
Abslutely nobody needs to exist in this class. There is nobody so uneducatable and so incapable that they can never perform any operation requiring some degree of skill, intelligence or other human quality. Even many of the "untreatably mentally ill" who are in permanent care are, in fact, perfectly treatable and perfectly capable. They cost us money in the long-term, because we don't invest for the long-term.
Socialism tends to do badly, because people don't tend to plan long-term. Capitalism does just as badly for the same reason. The bottom line is that the system is really irrelevent. It's what you do with it that counts.
I believe that stupidity and ignorance are the two greatest drains on the pockets of everyone, whether on the level of an individual or as part of an organization, or even as part of a country. You can't do much about stupidity, but you sure as hell can eliminate a lot of ignorance.
To tie this in with the supercomputer effort, I believe that this kind of research is extremely valuable - if it is designed to educate the maximum number of people practical. When research is done to give one or two senior staff members an extra citation (citations are often used to determine the market value of academics), then it has profited but a single person.
Constructing a whole new design of networking topology could be used to educate a whole new generation of engineers. Remember, even Seymour Cray was "just" an engineer, at one point. In many ways, he still was, when he died. The difference was, he knew enough to be really, really good, and he knew how to apply that to become really, really good.
Network topologies are a major area of research, and are worth VERY big bucks. The blackout in the Northeast was a product of a very bad design of network topology. The Internet's backbone is also cruder than it has to be. The PhD grad student, whose thesis was mapping the topology of networks, became so dangerous to the Government that his work is likely to be classified.
Good designers are extremely rare, because very few people understand what it takes to make a good design. The students who assembled this supercomputer had the opportunity to
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The site said that one year of power for the cluster would cost about as much as all the hardware cost. So I guess if you include power, it certainly doesn't beat the $100/GFLOPS barrier.
Sig: I stole this sig.
It's interesting to note that the this cluster of 128, 2 GHz processors is only about 9 times faster than a single 1 GHz Itanium 2 processor at performing the PvRay benchmark.
This is why only the rich can learn in the US.
I agree the rich have it easier, but that is true anywhere in the world. I don't think money is the reason a poor person will likely get less education than a rich person though. If you haven't noticed, scholarships, grants, and loans make it possible for anyone to go to school if they *want* too. The problem is that the drive and discipline to go to school must be instilled by the parents and the family.
To say that rich people are holding down the poor and keeping them from going to school is not true at all. In fact it is quite the opposite. Who do you think gives money to all these school funds for financially challenged people to go to school? I bet it is not poor people.
The problem with society as a whole today is not this division between rich, poor, or "working families." The problem is that more and more people feel they are owed something. That they are entitled to rewards without having to work for it. This idea clearly permeates itself thoughout U.S. culture. Consumer debt at all time highs, people graduating high school without knowing how to read/write, and not forcing people who come to this country to learn english are all symptons of the same problem. People wanting something for nothing.
I'm sure whole volumes could be written on what is causing this, for a lack of a better term, laziness. I'm also sure many people have their own ideas on how to fix it, but the cause and the fix would take us even farther off topic.
You have to include a people time, building overhead etc. A reserach grant may be billing $500 - $1000 a day for this. If this takes 50 man days to set up, then the cost is is another $50,000.
that shelving they used looks almost identical to the kinda stuff i have in my bedroom, unfortunatly my shelves are not filled with a supercomputer (yet)
I'm glad you're proud of the fact that there are hundreds of thousands (conservative estimate) cheating the system and being allowed to be leeches when they could be working. Actually, since you're so glad about supporting deadbeats, I'll be more than happy to let you pay my taxes. I'll make a deal with you.. Just give me your checking account number and I'll let you pay for my groceries too.
I'm not just being an asshole either, I've honestly had to work with people collecting government funds, and I'll tell you.. For every hard luck case, single mother gets laid off and is really looking for a job, there are at least 3 deadbeats and 2 crackheads who have found ways of cheating the system to collect good money. The way our system is now, why NOT cheat it? I'm not totally against government support, I don't want to see that single mother get kicked out of her apartment, but I'm certainly not proud of the deadbeats in this country. Welfare and foodstamps aren't preventing muggers and beggers one bit, and I'd wager that most 'muggers' (>50%) are already on government support.
The minority you speak of is huge. They're sucking billions out of our economy, and the able bodied free loaders should be stopped. The working man and woman, no matter what they're doing as long as it's legal, should be proud of themselves. Just think of the programs which could be funded by spending the welfare/foodstamps/etc money on them instead of giving it away to people who do nothing to deserve it. Think of the extra tax money that would even be generated by the thousands of people that could be employed instead of freeloading.
That's such a stupid comment.. It's like saying after I build and maintain a successful business I shouldn't be allowed in the building because people want to smoke inside and I don't want them to.
1) I can protect myself if allowed. I don't want to have to use one, but I'd use a gun, baseball bat, kitchen knife, or pencil if I had to.
2) Uhm.. I already have to pay full price to go to the doctor, what's going to change? I'll still just walk into one and pay the price.
3) Okay you got me, if I fall into a well I'll just hope some good person walks by to save me.. It's a risk I'm willing to take
Don't buy into the garbage of if you want protection you have to have welfare for deadbeats, it just doesn't make sense. I'm tempted to ask if you even have a job and what it is..
So 10 teraflops isnt enough?
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They even have a tool on their site to help you wire it up! You can buy the hardware at any computer shop. Of course buying several hundred PC's at once and multiple switches takes a pretty heft credit limit! --Oh and you need to figure out how to power several hundred dual Athalon toaster ovens from your meger 200 amp service! But no one's stopping you. I think I'd be cool to do this to an office of PCs. After all an extra $50 per PC for a hobby project might get by the PHB.
we worship thee!
Slavery-ha, If I was available [unfortunately I'm in michigan] I'd be there for free too! Besides college students have fewer rights than slaves--every one knows that...
What I find abnormal is paying 400% over the odds (plus interest) and considering it a good deal.
Did they offer math at your school?? I only paid once *shrugs*
I'm not talking about a socialist society, where everything is covered by "the state", but rather of any system (regardless of form or politics) where you pay for what you get, and you get what you pay for.
Odd, I paid for an education, I got an education (not that it always shows). Yes, some of my taxes go to fund state schools, but come on - some of my taxes also go to support crack whores.
Your post kind of travels around a bunch of topics so I'm really not sure what point your trying to make.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
The students are actually PAYING to be their University's slaves. I guess that makes it legal, if somewhat masochistic.
Side note: I wonder if my postgrad supervisor would make good dominatrix...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
What're the extra 4 for? They don't mention it. Hot spares? Command + control? Scheduling?
(S+C) x (B+F)/T = V
The best supercomputer in history, his brain. Or at least I would hope thats what he used.
I guess you have to pick a more interesting article on the same topic or know someone. :(
Now, there's the subtlety that they're doing SIMD stuff using the 3D-Now vector processing, which may run a bit hotter than regular random behaviour, but I don't know if it really does.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They did comment that the machine is located in the basement and doesn't have any windows, so it's dependent on the building's cooling system. Otherwise they could have taken care of much of the heat load by simply blowing the hot air outside, at least if they can tolerate Kentucky summer heat/humidity ambient conditions, which is a lot more efficient than actual airconditioning.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72589&cid=6558 445
Sorry for the sloppy reporting; posted in a followup the citation.
By the time you are 23, you ought have already graduated.
That independance thing is BS too. You have to have been emancipated before you were 18, or your parents must be dead. Simply showing that your parents don't pay for your food and shelter do not suffice.
When you are a dependant student (under 23, 1 parent is alive, this is the definition as given in the FAFSA, it makes no difference of your parents income), your loans are halved. If you make 7,000 dollars at a part time job, they expect 5,000 of that to go to your schooling, and the other 2,000 to go for food/shelter? Give me a break.
I'm not bitching that this is a shitty system, but your simple view of student loans is utter bullshit. And its ignorant to try to spout that bullshit off like you know what you are talking about.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
Thats a myth. First stereotype/myth is that only minorities are poor, when you have the trailorparks filled with millions of poor white americans in them who live off welfare.
Second myth is that people on welfare dont work, they do work, but when you work at MCDonalds you dont make enough money to raise children.
Abortion is legal but usually poor people dont have abortions because they need all the help they can get from their kids, often kids help them pay for their house.
No, I simply stated a fact: if you don't like paying taxes in order to take care of the troublesome/sick minority you can always leave - the minority can't. You won't starve, they will.
You have a point, Minorities arent usually allowed in the neighborhoods with low taxes, like the trailorparks, or the all white small towns, if minorities did flood these places then the same people who complain about social programs now will complain that too many minorities are moving into their communities.
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The key is to strike a balance between social help and helping oneself.
... umm... these minorities were probably in a WORSE situation where they came from, and you guessed it, they left... they came here.. where people are willing to pay them to sit around and do nothing.
Welfare is not free money, you cannot get it without being poor, and without working 40 hours, if you work at McDonalds yes you can get it, and why do people believe only minorities are on welfare when mostly white people are on it?
As far as who can and can't leave,
What about minorities who have been here for generations, or minorities like native americans who were here first? You are assuming all minorities are textbook illegal immigrants from mexico, when you have plenty of minorities who have been here for generations who are poor due to segregation and all the racism that went on for the last few hundred years.
The only minority group which is successful is the Asians, and it just so happens that the Asians are the only minority group who werent completely taken over by Europeans and robbed of everything they own. So its more complicated than you make it sound.
A much more fruitful application of social welfare would be something that has recently started to gain momentum -- workfare.. in other words, you still have to work for a living, but you get a little assistance in bringing you above the 'poverty line'.
And thats what welfare has been for the last 10 years since Clinton(Not Bush) signed welfare reform.
"The sentiment of the current welfare system is nice, however it was implemented by a bunch of people who would rather look nice for the camera than think about the implications of their actions. The current plan is rife with abuse, and i think that is common knowledge. It encourages people to be lazy, sit on their ass (if you work, you get less / no assistance?), it also encourages having more kids (more kids = more money), however it doesn't require that you spend this money on raising your kids, or planning for your future, etc. All in all, sounds like a poorly implemented system."
Dude will you do your research and read the law Bush just passed. You must work 40 hours a week now to stay on welfare not 20.
Libertarians are a little out-there with their everyone-for-themselves (almost republican?) attitude, however the liberals are just as bad with their bleeding hart b.s. that you should be guilted into paying for other's lack of motivation.
The truth is, socialists and libertarians are the extremes, most people are a mix of both. We know neither of these plans work in the real world.
Also, name some people who live off welfare without working, I do know of a few people who do this, but its literally a few, like maybe 5-10% of all the people on welfare. Should we get rid of welfare just because a small percentage abuses it? Perhaps we should get rid of money in politics because it encourages politicians to be lazy and accept free stuff.
While we are at it lets get rid of their retirement and put it in the stock market, so we can laugh at them when they lose their life savings and retirement money in an Enron type situation. ha ha HA! Thats funny.
"Also, i'd like for you to explain why leaving is a better alternative to voicing your opinion regarding the use of your tax dollars."
What he is saying is while you can move into your tax free small town where rent is cheap and taxes are low, minorities if they were to flood your small town, your townfolk would get their shotguns and kick them out or they'd leave the town, its called white flight.
What the other guy is also saying is, its better to provide social programs than to build prisons. I agree wit him I'd rather pay higher taxes than have a high crime rate and build more prisons. I think while some poor people are lazy, most arent, in fact most work harder than you do, they just arent as educated.
Try working two jobs, I bet you have never done it.
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Good responses -- you have corrected me with regards to the welfare system. If things are the way you say, then i have no qualms with it. We obviously agree on how it should be done, the only difference was that i wasn't aware that it had been changed to operate in such a manner.
Asians aren't the only minority to do well.. How about indians (from india)?
I have a good understanding of why it is that certain minorities fare better than others (chiefly a cyclical problem passed down by the generations).
one thing you are incorrect about, is racism. Racism affected nearly EVERY new nationality of people that entered the country -- be it italians (damn plumbers), irish (heavy drinkers -- do you remember when they were specifically not given jobs for years?), arabs (towel heads), asians (more derogitory terms than i care to list), etc etc. Immigrants in general are often told to go back to their country of origin, without regard to the fact that all of us, including the 'native' americans are immigrants.
I dont deny that many immigrants work harder than I do..but, that is the advantage of having an education, and a specialized skill.
OH, and gues what? i'm an immigrant too... from an eastern european country ruled by the USSR til around 10years ago no less.
i'm not sure what your deal is personally attacking me with comments such as 'try working two jobs, i bet you have never done it.'... Have you? or are you too busy posting essays to slashdot. Oh, and i'm on my way to my 9 to 5.. while my mom is on her vacation back to hungary for the 1st time in 13 years -- and she's done the two job thing quite often. BUT, she did it so that i could get an education and not have to.
So maybe i should work THREE jobs just to make you happy? To prove that i am "hard working" enough to speak about this issue?.. sounds pretty stupid to me.
In closing, i'd appreciate if you re-read my post, then before replying with your knee-jerk reactions, try to comprehend what i've said.. Much of it is in-line with what you are attempting to get at, thus rendering most of your response redundant, and only leaving a few decent points and a few personal attacks.
one thing you are incorrect about, is racism. Racism affected nearly EVERY new nationality of people that entered the country --
YES BUT NOT EQUALLY be it italians (damn plumbers), irish (heavy drinkers -- do you remember when they were specifically not given jobs for years?),Yeah and some minorities are still not given jobs or equal salary in 2003 arabs (towel heads), asians (more derogitory terms than i care to list), etc etc. Immigrants in general are often told to go back to their country of origin, without regard to the fact that all of us, including the 'native' americans are immigrants.
Yes but some worse than others. Italians had the chance to someday become part of society, they suffered while they were immigrants, just like all the other white minorities you mentioned, the difference is, these minorities are all white, they had all their rights, they were not treated like "colored people" and segregated.
The reasons Asians are successful is because on average they are more educated than whites to such an extent that no one can overlook hiring them. Alot of asians are this successful because in their home country they picked the smartest kid in their whole family and told them "Go to America, get your education!" They were specifically taught from the beginning that they would not be treated fairly over here unless they were more educated than the average white male competitor.
When I talk about racism, I'm also talking about oppression, the only group of people besides colored minorities who have suffered the kind of oppression I speak of are the jews. Alot of jews were forced to change their name and pretend to be white in order to end that oppression. Now theres no way to know who is a jew, but alot of people on the college campuses are.
The reason italians moved past oppression is because they had other people to oppress, the mexican, the black, the chinese, the native american, in the end italians are still considered white. Italians do not have a very successful history in the USA, with the mafia and all of these setbacks, if there were not minorities here below their level, the prisons would be filled with italians right now instead of mexicans and blacks. Why isnt it filled with Italians even though italians run most of the organized crime orgs that the mexican or black perosn sells drugs for? Well thats because race does still matter, just look at the jails for proof.
I dont deny that many immigrants work harder than I do..but, that is the advantage of having an education, and a specialized skill.
What you ignore is the fact that a white male does not have to be as educated or as skilled as a minority to make the same amount of money. You ignore the fact that when the whites were facing racism, they could change their name, change their culture, and blend into society and become just a white person. Suddenly it all would end.
i'm not sure what your deal is personally attacking me with comments such as 'try working two jobs, i bet you have never done it.'... Have you? or are you too busy posting essays to slashdot. Oh, and i'm on my way to my 9 to 5.. while my mom is on her vacation back to hungary for the 1st time in 13 years -- and she's done the two job thing quite often. BUT, she did it so that i could get an education and not have to.
My point is, poor people work harder but always get called lazy while rich people work the least hard and dont get called lazy. If your mother worked hard, and your mother isnt lazy, and my mom worked hard and my mother isnt lazy, where do you get the idea that the poor are lazy?
Most people on welfare work hard, most of them have kids, yes some of them have kids on purpose to get money, but this is a small percentage. Alot of rich people do enron type things but should we move to socialism over it?
Also I'm not personally attacking you, the point I am making is, poor people and minorities get blamed for everything, while rich wh
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...in the W. T. Young library on the U of Ky campus here in Lexington. Anyone in the area who wants to grill him should try it the old-fashioned way.