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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster

Posted by Hemos on from the building-it-better-safer-and-faster dept.

starwindsurfer writes "US space agency Nasa is to get a massive supercomputing boost to help get its shuttle missions back in action after the 2003 shuttle disaster. Project Columbia, a collaboration with two technology giants, will mean Nasa's computing power will be ramped up by 10 times to do complex simulations."

10 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. I hope technology will help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But I wonder if moving from a spreadsheet to a supercomputer simulation will make it any more likely that engineers with concerns will whistleblow to non-responsive management. This is a government bureaucracy problem, not a technical problem.

    1. Re:I hope technology will help by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The two biggest failures at NASA, Challenger and Columbia, absolutely would not have been fixed with more computing power.

      In the case of Challenger, engineers whose opinions should have had the most weight were ignored when they expressed concerns about the seals on the solid fuel rocket boosters. The decision was made by bureaucrats who didn't have the technical savvy required to even form an opinion.

      In the case of Columbia, many engineers at NASA were concerned about possible damage to tiles and requested some (any!) possible surveillance to get a look at the possibly affected areas of the shuttle. They were overruled and there wasn't even any attempt to get a look though such a look might have been at least possible if inconclusive.

      Take some of the brightest minds on the planet, put idiots in charge and this is exactly what you get. This is a government bureaucracy problem, not a technical problem, and all the supercomputers in the world will not help!

    2. Re:I hope technology will help by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      you hit the head on the nail.. Along with the supercomputer they need to put in place a oversight committee of engineers that can take anonomous comments from other engineers and completely override and bypass Nasa administration.

      99% of the time major failures lies in the hands of management, or the failure of management. Yes going to space is hard and dangerous, but they KNEW that something went wrong on launch and management chose to ignore it.

      dont believe me? show me one corperation failure that was NOT the fault of managment.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  2. Re:Tax payer. by geomon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Also, why is the BBC the first news tidbit about NASA's new supercomputer?

    Science isn't sexy news in America.

    Not unless they declare they've created a satellite system that will track and kill bin Laden.

    --
    "Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
  3. Cluster != Supercomputer by ChaosMt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can understand the BBC making this mistake, but slashdot?! I'm sure this was also noted in the dupe.

    --
    Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
    1. Re:Cluster != Supercomputer by telemonster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It is a cluster of supercomputers :-)

      Seriously, the way the Altix is laid out... I believe it is a cluster of 512 processor supercomputers.

      This isn't uncommon. Look at ASCI BLUE, or some of the other large IBM SP2 based systems.

      --
      Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
  4. Re:Some CLusters by DAldredge · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does anyone know of a better site than /. to discuss tech related topics because, as the post I am responding to shows, /. users are getting dumber and dumber as time goes on.

  5. Re:Article not written by a technical person.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The time period that can be modelled in the simulator is now weeks or months, not just a few days.

    Presumably these longer simulations can be completed in times comparable to the existing shorter duration models.

  6. Re:Tax payer. by flabbergast · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because you can't buy an opteron system with NUMA link (3.2 GB/s between bricks) and you can't simply build a 500 TB data cluster by purchasing some CAT5, 100 250GB drives, 10 Gigabit ethernet cards and call it a day. SGI thrives because it can put together a clustered supercomputer and has the technology to build a 500TB data center. 20 Altix racks, 128 Altix bricks/rack (4 processors/brick X 128 = 512 proc) and has globally shared memory thanks to numalink. This means that even though each brick can run independently, you can also build a 512 proc system with a single Linux system image that has the combined memory of all the bricks (thanks SHUB and NUMAlink!). So, when you can build a 512 processor, global shared memory system out of Opterons, then you go ahead and sell it. This is a clustered supercomputer where each cluster is a supercomputer.

  7. There are limits by sakusha · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is a limit to what computer power can do for you. I'd rather see the money being spent on human resources: people who know what they're doing. There's an old saying in the business world, I wish I knew who first said it, "for any technological problem, the limiting factor is never technology, but rather, human resources." In other words, if your technology has problems, throwing more tech at it is unlikely to solve the problems. Only more human intelligence applied to the situation will improve things.
    Having the fastest supercomputer in the world won't help you one bit if nobody thinks to run a simulation of what happens when a chunk of foam blows a hole in a wing. I keep thinking about Frank Borman's statements to the Apollo 13 Commission, he said it wasn't a failure of technology, it was a failure of imagination, nobody ever imagined there could be a problem. Computers have no imagination. They give answers, but nobody's asking the right questions.