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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster
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."
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.
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!"
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.
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.