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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 someone ought to tell them that Doom 3 runs pretty well just on moderately-new hardware...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
10240x more dupes?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Well, I guess they're not using it to serve that webpage.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
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http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/ 1427228&tid=163&tid=139&tid=103
Do the editors work for the USPTO as well?
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Too late. See the post above you.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"are we gonna get another barrage of (insert slashdot cliche') posts" again?
Damnit!
About $7.2 Million.
Talk about a software tax!
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
This should help 'em convert feet to meters ... ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!
Hahaha, my comment is a dupe!
The system will have 500 terabytes of storage, the equivalent of 800,000 CDs.
In related news, the RIAA has filed a writ of discovery for illegal downloads of 'Major Tom' at NASA.
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.
I'm rather mad at this idea, the system costs more than an opteron system, costs more to run (heat/power) and is slower. But it at least runs linux.
Also, why is the BBC the first news tidbit about NASA's new supercomputer?
...a Beowulf cluster of slashdot dupes.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
So Hrathgar carries Hrunting into a bar. The bartender asks him "Why the long face", and Hrathgar cuts his head off with Hrunting singing, "A hrunting we will go, a hrunting we will go!"
*Rimshot
.. or a very good writer.
"They can also be modelled over a time period of weeks or months instead of over just a few days."
Ohh sweet, so then what used to take days now takes months?
And at one point in the article, it says "20 nodes" and then at another part it says "512 nodes." So like, what is it?
You know what, I don't even care.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
to number 4 next time because of this sucker. it has 2 times the nodes as the earth simulator!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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
Aren't you tired of hearing how supercomputers "may help solve" all the problems in the world. If anything the impact of that supercomputer on shuttle will be nil. Developing massively parallel software takes years, by then this supercomputer will be obsolete.
Another rant - why use Itanium processors? In order to get good performance from EPIC architechture you need specially optimized compilers, which won't be available for many years (by then this supercomputer will be obsolete). For now ibm's power architechture is a much better bang for the buck.
They could make it 11 times faster merely by continuing to use whatever it is they already have in addition to the new cluster.
"But this one goes to eleven!"
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Can anyone point out any significant advantage of the Itanium that justifies the fact that it costs ridiculously more than its competition (i.e. AMD Opteron)? The only reason I can think of to explain why NASA would go with an Itanium cluster over something else would be Intel giving them a great price break on them. In which case I'd like to assert that Intel is just doing it for the free promotion a la Apple (remember the G5 cluster Virginia Tech bought?).
.02 FRN's says it's Feinswine.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2004/ju ly/supercomputing_ctr.html
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Apple didn't give VT any computers, they paid for them because they were the cheapest solution.
Do they need a supercomputing cluster to figure out where foam is going to fall off next? Or perhaps to compute down to the millimeter exactly how much crap they'll be in if something goes wrong again...
Yes it takes weeks or months instead of days, but it does it an order of magnitude more expensively! This same technology has been employed for years at the DMV, and look at the results you get there. This is the Government we're talking about...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Isn't the computer running the space shuttle built around one of those physical disk memory systems?
So this super computer will be used in part to emulate the computer running on the space shuttle - probably one of the oldest designs still in regular use.
So little memory the launch, orbit, and descent programs cannot be loaded simultaneously.
...I litterally started to salivate at the prospect of a cluster of this magnitude.
BlackNova Traders
SGI said the reason they went with the Itantium2 versus AMD Opteron is that the Altix was being developed before the Opteron went to market.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
if they'd gone with G5 Xserves they could have had 23,888 Dual 2GHz systems with 17.916 Petabytes of storage (assuming they just went stock on the high-end systems).
Okay and one question about the article. Was he saying 1000 Gb of RAM per system or 1000GB per system?
Cynical, and blatant promotion of the company you work for :)
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.
Cynical yes, blatant promotion of my company no. What does a supercomputer have to do with a SIP User Agent?
I used to work for NASA, thats why this makes me angry to see. I could care less if they buy a big supercomputer, but to label it as helping the return to flight is just bs. This really is nothing more than a fat subsidy for Ames and California.
Frank W. Miller
The David Bowie song to which you are refering to as "Major Tom" is actually called "Space Oddity" from his 1969 album "Space Oddity" originally released as "Man of Words/Man of Music".
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Wonder why its "10240"?
You'd think they'd have gone 8192 or 16384, or 10000 or something.
10 chips in a module, 1024 of them perhaps?
Curious.
Anyway, certainly a LOT of IMAGINING will get fulfilled if you work at nasa!
they have a really good diagnostic setup. Just occured to me, if one cpu or ram card goes bad they're going to have to take down one of those 512 processor nodes to replace it. It would really suck if there wasn't something letting you know exactly which one and where it is located.
For one, your low UserID just means that you had nothing better to do then sign up for an account on a news portal around its birth. Dont try and use it as some indicator of IQ or superiority.
Nextly, I simply voiced some opinion, and left it broad on purpose for the sake of discussion. Yes, I KNOW that even Windows itself takes control of the hardware, so my DOS cluster idea wouldnt work for that OS specifically. There ARE OS's that simply use DOS... Run as a compliment to DOS.
The Clustered Virtual Machine OS is a great idea. Rather then being vague and completely pointless in your retort, why dont you voice why **I** personally am stupid for suggesting such.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
where is SUN Microsystems?
:)
well someone had to ask
Don't Tread on OpenSource
What's the price tag on such a system ?
Or, what's the price for just one 512 processor box ?
...ina few years time, CT and Co. are going to need that much computing power to keep track of all the dupes...
It makes you believe this supercomputer is made out of commodity components.
That's blatantly false.
The SGI systems are highly proprietary equipments that provide very large bandwidth between the nodes, extremely low latency and tight integration. They're not regular Beowulf clusters. They really are single systems with hundreds or thousands of CPUs, all of them running the same single instance of the OS (as opposed to typical clusters which run one OS instance per node).
Because of the tight integration, the software does not have to obey the same constraints as when running on commodity clusters. Especially the requirement for total parallelization does not stand anymore.
Therefore, problems which cannot be translated into 100% parallel algorithms, and therefore do not run efficiently on commodity clusters, are easily tackled on SGI supercomputers.
That's why they can charge a high price on their systems - because they can solve problems that are not accessible to "normal" computers.
That being said, the system at NASA is indeed a cluster, but it's a "small" cluster (a handful of nodes), each node being a supercomputer with hundreds of CPUs. It's a hybrid that provides the best of both worlds.
In related news, NASA's new computer to be used as Half-Life 2 beta test-bed.
I think you may be wrong when you consider floating point performance, which I suspect is the key driver here. From what I have seen googling around a little, Itanium 2 is better than Opteron on floating point computations.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
Because a simple google search would have turned up MOSIX, OPENMOSIX, LinuxSSI amoung other SSI clustering environments.
You didn't even try.
Just think how fast that scrollbar will fly across when they install Fedora Core 2! It'll probably take 2 seconds!
-c
Do it for da shorties
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.
... Except for the fact that these projects are meant to run underneath/alongside LINUX. My suggestion is to be able to load ANY OS on a Virtual Machine micro-OS, such as Windows or BeOS. The best I could hope for with your suggested projects is to load Virtual Machine software on the Virtual Linux image... which, would add a layer I dont want.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Then buy VMWare's enterprise products but you will find it run on those 486's you where talking about.
This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!
Hahaha, my comment is a dupe!
I MOD because I care.
---
From the department of ironic punishment.
You can't handle the truth.
They better pay their $7,157,760 ($699/CPU) in SCO tax or McBride is going to be stomping around saying "NASA is screwing us!"
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Imagine a Beowulf cluster off... oh, wait...
The issue has become space to put the machines. As it is, the pre-existing supercomputers are being moved to other rooms and there is barely enough space to accomodate the 10k as it is. Many supercomputing facilities have a similar problem. There are not many rooms that have the environmental controls needed to run such massive systems.
As for the comment on making it 11x faster - the other systems serve a different purpose (customer base and funding source)... and they were moved to another location to make room for Columbia.
On a cool note, it looks like they are filming the building of this system so we can see one of those time-lapse videos.
NASA is not the sole user of the system. Anyone within the U.S. can use it. We support many university projects that require the use of supercomputers. This purchase is a benefit to the entire country, not just NASA.
It is most unfortunate that people are not aware of all that NASA does for them. A majority of all research projects are in collaboration with industry vendors, universities, non-profit organizations, scientific corporations, and so on. There are few that are specific only to NASA. The range of customer database is wonderful and there is such variety in the areas of research (not just aeronautics and space technology, but biology, earth science, nanotechnology, optics, and so on). We all help each other to advance our knowledge, and computers like this make it a lot faster.
The Columbia disaster was not due to a lack of computing power, but rather to a culture of denial. The failure of mid-level and senior management to listen to their people prevented any action being taken until it was too late. In a way, this mirrors the broader American culture of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, typified by a complete refusal of individuals - particularly but not exclusively individuals in powerful positions - to take responsibility for their own actions, inactions or failures of any kind.
Windows datacenter version?
C|N>K
NASA does not care about money. It's US taxpayers' money
Thanks for the troll post.. you're a wonderful example of how uninformed citizens can be. FYI: The government defines NASA's budget each year, so there is a very high concern for money. It takes months upon months of civil servants fighting for funding out of that money pool. There are a lot of research programs, and not nearly enough money to fund them. Particularly, in the case of Columbia, there were massive layoffs to fund this. I'd like to see you make your statement to all those who now do not have jobs because of the lack of money (many were needed operational engineers, not just research staff). It's sad when people lose their jobs over something like this, but it did allow something good to happen. It's unfortunate that arrogant fools are blind to such politics.
Does anyone know what kind of software is available for testing and modeling real life systems?
It's one thing to bring together a large number of CPUs and connect them with a well known network scheme, and it's another thing to write a bunch of software to take advantage of a supercomputer.
Although NASA may already have a lot of supercomputers and a lot of software, a new systems with so much more power is meant to run new software.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").