Slashdot Mirror
£52 Million Govt Funding for New UK Supercomputer
Lancey writes "The BBC reports that the UK government has contributed £52 million towards the building of the High-End Computing Terascale Resource to replace two existing supercomputers currently in use by British scientists. The story claims a maximum speed of 100 teraflops, although it is unlikely that the machine will ever be pushed to this limit. Some of the government funding will also be used to train scientists and programmers to develop software capable of exploiting the machine's potential."
However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits
Give it a little while. Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Preparation for the release of Vista, no doubt.
Run Windows Vista on the new supercomputer. There has to be some CPU-cycle-sucking bug in there to bring down the mightiest of supercomputers. Assuming that a memory leak doesn't kill it first.
Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits.
Tony Montana could, if he had a montague.
...unlike private users of Microsoft's Vista who will have neither the cores or RAM to run the OS smoothly.
wait til you see the average credit this thing gets on SETI@Home - there'll be a TBlair@10DowningSt account at the top of the list before you know it.
https://comerford.net
This article should be renamed,
"£52 Million Govt Funding for New UK Supercomputer, Donations Needed to Help Find and Train People to Operate It"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Didn't see any reference to the builders of this machine in the article. Did I miss it, or is that just an unimportant detail? Or are the owners the builders as well? Just curious...
Anybody know who designed and built this thing?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of <kick> OW!
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
although it is unlikely that the machine will ever be pushed to this limit
Like I said class: If you can't fit your program in 640k of memory, you don't know how to program... "640k should be enough for anybody"
Chums up, let's do this!
What if all he had was a capulet?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This will be made by EDS, in a poorly thought out 'Public Private Partnership' and will cost three times as much, arrive in 2010 and be obsolete when it does.
If you think I am being too cynical, just look at their track record. The CSA computer system, the air traffic control system, etc
What amazes me is that they still get more work. Surely even New Labour have a limit to how far a bribe can take them.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Does this run linux?
You forgot the link on the rss feed.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Your joke is a handy jumping-off point to mention that in all likelihood this beast will NOT be able to run Vista, or any other version of Windows for that matter. The only systems that currently operate in the teraflop-ish range (aka the top 3 in the world and the #1 in Europe) contain IBM Power CPUs. Unless they specifically want to burn a bunch of cash investing in a new architecture, their best option is a nice big BlueGene.
"However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits, achievable only for short bursts of time that are too small for scientists to run their programs properly."
It's not going to be pushed to its top limits because it can't handle it for more than a few seconds, has nothing to do with its load.
Also, I am curious how some of the folks here on slashdot would answer the question: If 100 teraflops can be achieved and sustained, what are the three best single uses to apply that much processing power against?
Personaly, I have no idea. As for Vista, I believe that joke has already been made once or twice in the discussion.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Some of the government funding will also be used to train scientists and programmers to develop software capable of exploiting the machine's potential. They will run Java on a supercomputer..? Or will they teach how to exploit 100 Teraflops with memory leaks?
No nuclear testing means all proving of a new warhead design have to be done computationally. Now a new machine is being bought...
The answer is 42, they should have just used google
The government need it as it's the only computer powerful enough to run the National Identity Register database.
It would still take a good 10 seconds to start up OpenOffice.org
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One stands for danger; the other for opportunity
Add on the system for changing over farmers to the Single Payment Scheme... I was forced to work on that, and it sucked total balls. Fell over every 15 minutes tops, usually losing all the work you'd done to that point. EDS again. High quality development.
Pfft.. lets see them try to run web2.0 on that..
Is it a Blue Gene (just a stock picture so that the average reader will get the idea that this is something BIG), or is this actually Hector?
Picture is of a BlueGene
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Obligitory Star Trek -
A Holodeck? URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck/
They should just wait and string a load of PS3s together. That's what Saddam used to program his nukes back in the day. Plus they could render some Toy Story stuff in realtime on the side.
But of a bigger and badder supercomputer that will require it's own 170 MW generating station..
.. now imagine a beowolf of those !!
Cray to build 24,000 quad-core Opteron Petacomp!!
Friday March 31, @07:03AM Rejected
check it out here..
the govt. are highly motivated to make this work. This is, after all, the machine they need to process all of the data that their ID card scheme will generate (and run face recognition software on live video feeds from thousands of surveillance cams, and decrypt and analyze internet traffic and PSTN voice data, and run sophisticated prediction algorithms on the lot). With approx. 50 milion adults who can now *all* be monitored 24/7 in terms of where they go who they talk to and what they talk about, that's surely going to need an order of magnitude more computing capacity than they have at GCHQ Cheltenham now.
I'm pretty sure EDS will be gagging to get a slice of that.
"The computational limits of the existing facilities are now being reached," he said. Tell them to just format and re-install windows like the rest of us. I'd like to buy a new computer every time mine gets to the "limits of existing facilties" but that would get expensive
I think that it says something that the US tends to use its big
supercomputers for weapons and/or classifyed work while other nations (e.g. Japan & UK) use theirs for more public non-military work...
Finally those brits will be able to generate the funniest joke in the world.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
or better yet does the electrical system short out during any rain storm. Oh, snap!! hopefully they have a different engineering team then the typical UK automakers.
TFA states:
Cray Inc. of Seattle will supply the system, named Baker. It will run approximately 24,000 2.6 Ghz quad-core Opteron processors made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Do the math. Even at a freak'n KW per processor this would only need 24 MW.
Now RTFA and tell me what this means:
The laboratory will rely on the Tennessee Valley Authority for the power needed to run this behemoth. The power company is building a 170 megawatt substation to support this and other ORNL projects.
This will be made by EDS, in a poorly thought out 'Public Private Partnership' and will cost three times as much, arrive in 2010 and be obsolete when it does.
Fortunately the fact that it is public money doesn't mean the government run it. The UK research community have a proven track record on running big iron; it's really no different to US.gov giving money to LLNL to run Blue Gene/L.
I'll tell you right now, GCHQ Cheltenham ain't where the big computing power is.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Don't blame the politicians: I believe Mr, Blair still has to get his wife to type his emails. He wouldn't know a supercomputer from a Gameboy. Blame the Civil Service, who make damned sure that no scientists or engineers ever reach the top level and show up the incompetence of the Oxford Greats graduates you find there. Which is why people like Kelly were managed into the ground by their inferiors and sacrificed to protect the careers of (deleted)s like Hoon.
Pining for the fjords
I'm not sure that I can figure out exactly what else it could actually mean (besides trivial differences).
I'm very willing that I'm just ignorant of something here, but is there some kind of special way that devices have to be connected that make them more like a computer? If I connect two computers together, so that they accomplish one (computational) task, are they not one unit computing the answer... one computer? If not, how is it more ... unitary(?) for me to connect (basically by "wire") a bunch more logic gates to the main cluster within a processor? If I de-localize the RAM -- say, for example, setting some aside for exclusive use by the video card -- have I changed in kind what I'm working with?
I am a long-time computer nerd, but my training is in philosophy, not EE, so maybe I'm just missing something ...
The applications always mentioned in the articles are simulations (like weather and nuclear modeling) and the speed of these computers are measured in floating point operations per second. What about combinatorial problems and other problems that are discrete? Do these computers have applications for basically integer manipulations? and counting?
100 Teraflops ought to be enough for anybody.
Will 100 teraflops be enough to run Windows Vista ???
But does it run Barbielinux?
I remember 20-30 years back when basic computers filled entire buildings and costed millions of dollars.
These days, desktop computers are faster and more powerfull than those ancient behemoths.
I wonder if desktop PCs thirty years from now will make todays IBM's Blue Gene inferior.
With the rapid rate of development, I belive it may be possible.
Tommorrow's laptop or PS23 may one day be greater than yesterdays "Super-Computer"
You never know. :-)
Well right of course, that's just where the listening gear is. It doesn't really matter where the computing cores are, that's what fiberoptic cable is for.
Why is the UK government spending so much money on a supercomputer? Why don't they just buy 100 xBox 360's. Microsoft claims the overall system performence is 1 teraflop!
but will it run VISTA and whats the framerate for DOOM 3
Countries with a history of freedom and democracy, or countires with a history of repression of those principals.
How does a women show she is wearing a Burka while surfing, if she is allowed to surf at all?
An now,
live from the UK,
about that question you were looking for...
Okay heres a thought for the enterprising uni-students out here (I have a job and no free time so it's up to the graduates to solve this one). why not write a seti@home-esk bit of software that can be deployed on university desktops/servers (WIN/MAC/*nix) that can run whole/segments of custom written programmes.
Imagine the power of every uni-desktop all running together in parralle! Plus you get constant free upgrades. The solution would need it's own c++/java esk language for the tasks to be written in, some kind of local administration to allow uni admins to schedule processesing if it is incovenient to run during the day and some kind of security to stop people writing DDOS programes... anyway worth a thought.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Looks like they couldn't come up with a good with a really good acronym, so they settled on something that might build them an ultimate weapon...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
Remember?: "If 256-bit triple-DES or similar techniques are used then decryption could require supercomputer-levels of cracking."
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/04/13 48200&tid=123
Lancey: Some of the government funding will also be used to train scientists and programmers to develop software capable of exploiting the machine's potential.
san: Yes! and good riddens. Do you remember having to re-code for every single machine? Because they were such specialized machines, they tended to be extremely fickle: one wrong operation and performance would go down the drain.
If this architecture of theirs is at all novel, and if this is a one-time build of a machine with that architecture [i.e. not the first of many generations of backwards-compatible machines with that architecture], and if the developers and "scientists" don't know how to program for the architecture a priori, THEN THE MACHINE WILL BE OBSOLETE BEFORE THE SOFTWARE HAS BEEN WRITTEN!!!
It takes developers [especially compiler writers] two to three years [or more - witness the disaster that is Itanic] to learn a hardware architecture and begin writing clean, stable code for it.
Which is just about exactly the amount of time it takes for the hardware to become obsolete.
[Parenthetically: Can I call this Mosel-Saar-Ruwer's Law?]
By the way, I predict that this may very well be the fate of the new IBM cell processor & the PlayStation III - we're just now getting the compilers that can write to the architecture, and they want to release the thing sometime in this decade?!? Consider:
I knew as soon as we got the Octopiler news that there would be serious problems for Cell & the PS-III - if it's February/March, and we're just now getting new compilers for the architecture, then it'll be a couple of years before games are ported to it - if ever - and a launch of the product by Christmas [to be accompanied by third-party titles] strikes me as an utter fantasy.You know, /.-ers may hate Steve Ballmer, but he got one thing right: "Developers, Developers, Developers!!!" 'Cause the greatest hardware in the world isn't worth a damn if there aren't any developers writing for it.
You could have one of the best Duke Nukem sessions ever on that thing! /end satire
Come to think of it ... I have noticed that my philisophical considerations do increase my general difficulty in interacting with the world at large ... =)
Nonetheless, the above post makes the correct distinction. Were I to disregard considerations of personhood, I would be fine regarding two people intertwined with respect to their functions as a single thing with respect to it as "mechanism of task completion" though not with respect to it as "person".
Certainly we do do this when we refer, for example to "The FBI" or "The French Parliment" doing something. In such speech we do not mean to imply that they have become one person in the doing, but one mechanism with respect to the performance of some function.
But does it run Linux?
Actually, I would point out that the original article was from the BBC news ... a venue specifically designed to convey ideas in "ordinary speech". In "ordinary speech" this device was called "Britain's most powerful super computer." The complaint implied that the "ordinary speech" definition was a little too ordinary, and that he preferred a definition that "actually meant something" (calling for increased precision).
Actually, both the meaning in ordinary speech and the meaning in speech for technical people who work with computers more or less agree. It's the meaning in the speech of philosophers, would-be philosophers and marketing people that's the problem.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
First, before I transferred to get my degree in philosophy, I had 7 semesters of training with a double major in physics and math (with an strong elective emphasis on computer science). I've worked in tech fields for almost a decade -- primarily as a programmer. I surely qualify as "a technical person who works with computers."
But let it be that "philosophy" is generally absurd or whatever else. Still no one has said what "a computer" "actually" means. All that's happened is that
- that my defense of the common use was invalid because I was defending a meaning not in common use.
The last bit is especially odd -- that my defense of the common usage is being criticized for not being part of the common usage. Also strange is the grouping of philosophers (and would-be philosophers) with "marketing people" -- groups that are usually quite at odds.
This response is mostly just for the principle of the matter. I'll assume that since no one has responded sensically, no one with sense is interested in responding (which is a shame because it seems like there could be some worthwhile intercourse in a conversation about this topic, were there any actual thoughts to be shared).