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£52 Million Govt Funding for New UK Supercomputer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-flops-a-good-thing dept.

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."

26 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Born Yesterday? by ExE122 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Born Yesterday? by ronz0o · · Score: 2, Funny

      And 10 years from now, we all say "I remember when 100 teraflops was fast..."

    2. Re:Born Yesterday? by adz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits It would be more accurate to say that it is impossible to achieve the theoretical maximum speed, and very hard to come even close. Without doubt the machine will be used extensively and people will ensure they get as much performance as they can out of the system. Given how much it costs, they're hardly going to use it as a doortstop, are they?!

    3. Re:Born Yesterday? by plankrwf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nope, we will say: and we thougth that THAT was anywhere near good enough
      to actually make any chance of beeting a 12 year old in the game of Go

      Roel

    4. Re:Born Yesterday? by DrMrLordX · · Score: 2, Funny

      12-year-old Korean, you mean? I'm not joking. Your typical 12-year-old American doesn't even know how to play Go. 12-year-old Koreans are sometimes pros, and may have been since the age of 5.

      Then there's those Japanese kids possessed by ghosts of ancient, suicidal Go masters. Hoo boy.

    5. Re:Born Yesterday? by DrMrLordX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure they do. For what do you think the Extreme Edition(EE) chips were built? They're enthusiast parts meant to be overclocked. Same deal for AMD's FX line of CPUs.

    6. Re:Born Yesterday? by iain · · Score: 2, Informative

      In short, they're not. That's the BBC's attempt at explaining why the theoretical peak isn't practically achievable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraflop#FLOPS_as_a_m easure_of_performance

              Iain.

    7. Re:Born Yesterday? by GKThursday · · Score: 2, Insightful

      RTFA. 52 million POUNDS. That's around over $90 million.

    8. Re:Born Yesterday? by Black+Copter+Control · · Score: 3, Funny
      Try that new Windoze Vista on it...

      Microsoft wouldn't provide certification. Something about the graphics card not being up to spec....

      --
      OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
    9. Re:Born Yesterday? by Siffy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, that is how Moore's Law and military spending work.

  2. Thinking ahead. by RatOfTheLab · · Score: 5, Funny

    Preparation for the release of Vista, no doubt.

  3. 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer by Expert+Determination · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Of course it's 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer. It's a rack of 100,000 ordinary computers.

    Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?

    --
    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
    1. Re:100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer by san · · Score: 3, Informative

      Of course it's 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer. It's a rack of 100,000 ordinary computers.

      Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?

      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.

      In practice, most computational work in the end consists of running many jobs independently. There are rare occasions where a single super fast CPU might be better but it's even rarer for the performance gains to outweigh the incredible cost increases for buying specialized supercomputer hardware.

      Whether it's wise to spend so much money on a single enormous cluster is another issue. You could buy many many individual clusters for individual groups and have them operational in a matter of weeks, rather than having wait till 2008. Besides, the thing is going to be obsolete by 2010.

  4. I know who could by SB_SamuraiSam · · Score: 2, Funny

    However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits.

    Tony Montana could, if he had a montague.

  5. Tony Blair a BOINC freak? by Arkham79 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  6. Donations Needed by digitaldc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  7. Let's just get this out of the way, shall we? by Black+Copter+Control · · Score: 4, Funny

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of <kick> OW!

    --
    OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
  8. 640K Should Be Enough for Anybody! by fernandoh26 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!
  9. From my knowledge of UK government IT history . . by Don_dumb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
  10. Connection? by sane? · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I wonder if that and this story on replacing the Trident nuclear deterent have any connection?

    No nuclear testing means all proving of a new warhead design have to be done computationally. Now a new machine is being bought...

  11. That's great but . . . by 02bunced · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  12. Re:So is 100 teraflops a record or what? by bullitB · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not a world record (IBM's Blue Gene/L is pushing 280 TFLOPS), but it's still very fast. It will almost certainly be in the Top 10 by the time it comes online.

  13. Re:From my knowledge of UK government IT history . by MrTufty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  14. submitted a story a few days ago.. by Adult+film+producer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But of a bigger and badder supercomputer that will require it's own 170 MW generating station..

    Cray to build 24,000 quad-core Opteron Petacomp!!
    Friday March 31, @07:03AM Rejected

    check it out here.. .. now imagine a beowolf of those !!

  15. Re:From my knowledge of UK government IT history . by ralphclark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  16. Re:So is 100 teraflops a record or what? by mgabrys_sf · · Score: 2, Funny

    re:"what are the three best single uses to apply that much processing power against?"

    Hosting the world's prOn needs.

    Thank you and good nite.