Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

TeraGrid Gets an Upgrade

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the we-need-more-flops dept.

The Fun Guy writes to tell us The NSF has awarded $48 million to the University of Chicago to operate and expand TeraGrid over the next five years. TeraGrid is 'a national-scale system of interconnected computers that scientists and engineers are using to solve some of their most challenging problems. TeraGrid is the world's largest open computer, storage and networking system. Only the U.S. Department of Energy's weapons laboratories have larger systems, which are dedicated to classified research.' Currently, the TeraGrid's power is just over 60 teraflops.

5 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. How does this... by Odin_Tiger · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...stack against the likes of distributed.net and other similar projects for processing power?

    --
    Unpleasantries.
  2. Every time I run a 500 proc batch job ... by Salis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    it makes me smile.

    It's just so ... cool.

    (And the only people who I say that to are my research group members and ... the people of Slashdot!)

    The TeraGrid is well managed too.. very few problems for such a huge system.

    --
    Favorite /. tagline: "On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN." And it was good.
    1. Re:Every time I run a 500 proc batch job ... by YetAnotherLogin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you're a member of an academic institution, you can just submit a proposal to the NSF to apply for time on the TeraGrid. I've heard at conferences that it's quite easy to get time, provided you give them a good account of the time complexity of the algorithm you want to run on their machines. And of course, that you attempt to answer a science question :-)

  3. I really hope ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ... that some of that money is going to go towards securing the system. :-\

  4. Re:But a systematic framework? by 777v777 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have a non-parallelizable algorithm for you. Apply a non-associative operation to elements of an array like this:

    result = (a[0] * (a[1] * (a[2] * (a[3] *(....)))))

    Note that I use * to represent some binary operator that satisfies non-associativity. I think that this algorithm may be provably non-parallelizable, since the innermost * operation must be performed before any other * operations. Thus no two * operations can be done at the same time, and thus none of the * operations can be parallelized. Furthermore if these are the only operations being performed in the entire algorithm, then no operations in the algorithm can be parallelized. Thus the algorithm is non-parallelizable by any reasonable definition. I do assume for this proof that you cannot parallelize the * operator.

    On a side note, I could also prove that NP hard problems are still NP hard on even a large number of processors.