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A Look Inside the NCSA
Peter Kern writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the great supercomputing facilities in the world and is home to 'Abe', one of the top 10 supercomputers on the current Top 500 list. TG Daily recently toured the facility and published a stunning report about their computing capabilities (more than 140 teraflops), power requirements (a sustained 1.7 megawatts), enormous 20-ft chillers in four cooling systems and other installations that keep the NCSA online."
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
But, does it run Linux.
In Soviet Russia NCSA Looks Inside of You.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Who knew Mosaic was so bloated? No wonder no one uses it anymore.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Just out of curiosity... does anyone know minimum requirements for getting on as a server tech in a place like that?
Really contemplating computing power like they describe is a pretty far out exercise for a small time programmer like me... What sort of people get employed at these places?
Regards.
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My prediction is that in 10 years the place will be functionally obsolete as a result of processing advancements elsewhere.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
My name is Jaap van Ballspoogen
and I have a problem!!1~112~!@four!`
Is there some way to perform a graceful shutdown before the water gets pumped and released? If the supercomputers are still on when the water is discharged from the pipes, wouldnt that damage the systems? If they dont want to use halon why not use a more computer-friendly compound like FM-200 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-200/)
Just reassure me that nobody has this hooked into our ICBM's. Knowing Bush has the button is scary enough.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
1.21 gigaflops and their webserver is an old guy with tourette syndrome yelling HTML code into a tin can on a string.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
But you failed to raise the question, will it run Vista?
As a prospective student of UIUC, who also has a good friend attending the school in a CS Ph.d. program, I get a bit giddy inside any time I see the university in the media. I've been to that building when my friend was giving me a mini tour of the facilities, although I didn't go see the supercomputers themselves.
you know the guy running this thing uses up most of its power to store his massive collection. Of course, as usual, the 900+TB of files is "hidden" from his boss within a series of obscure sub-folders.
You can run Vista, with most of the features turned off.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
FTFA:
We are currently experiencing server load issues. We are addressing this problem at this time and will enable the slideshow related to this article shortly.Oh, the irony of not having enough server horsepower to serve up a story expounding on supercomputing...
All that supercomputing power and they come up with "a one-building electricity bill of $3 per second - or about $1,500,000 per year". I'm sure they meant $3/minute with is much more in line with all the other figures they quote. Still, that puts their electricity rate in the 10-cents/kWh range - surprisingly high for a large industrial customer.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
From TFA: They also had two dedicated UPS boxes which stood six feet tall, three feet wide and 12 feet deep.
*Yawn*. Only impressive to the slashgeek with no real experience with heavy iron (I.E most of them.) When I was in the Navy and serving at a training center - we had also had two UPS's this size. For each trainer/lab. And we had four labs.
Just in the Weapons Training end of the building.
Cooling and power conditioning for the training facility was in a seperate 15k sq ft building. Getting to the building from the facility was cool though - you wnet down into the basement, then down a ladder to a tunnel that ran the length of the building. Off that tunnel was another tunnel that ran out under the back parking lot to the support building. We used to joke about building a sniper range in one of the tunnels - they were that long.
New computer simulations indicate that supercomputers are a major source of global warming.
A point of clarification, I worked there for almost 10 years and its NCSA NOT "the NCSA". We get touchy about that :)
The most surprising thing in the article was how inelegantly they've solved the problem with inevitable hardware failure. That is, limiting runs to only 6 hours. It seems like there just HAS to be a better way to handle the problem than this! Virtualization sounds a bit tricky, so why not just write the software to handle hardware errors in the first place? I.e. produce results, check to see if there was a hardware failure, if so, re-do.
Maybe they already do this, and the reporter didn't catch it. But it'd surprise me if they didn't have better solutions than just hoping nothing bad happens during a run.
AccountKiller
I have a copy of Mosaic 1.0 for Macintosh on a floppy disk. I'm getting read errors on it and thought they could renew it for me.
RTFA | Suppose the average technician earns $70K per year. That's $21 million for the NCSA's staff annually, just in salaries. |
when i interviewed with them a couple of years ago, the UofI 5 year vetrans were worth a whoopping 36k to 40k a year. but i guess they were worth every penny, cuz the grad students were doing low end technical stuff not even statical analysis. they almost cried when i told them i was doing data mining in the private sector. there is a huge disconnect from reality and the mistiguee of supper computing. i would bet a good beowolf cluser could cover the same ground as the "Abe" in most areas they are using it. but hey what do i know?
The BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Lab is still the fastest. Used to work there as a web designer. Scary.
Any of the folks in the loop know if they use Lustre for their storage backend?
Kind of raises hackles like somebody saying IllinoiS (vs. illinoi) or mississippi (vs. missippi). You know who is from there and who is not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I sometimes toy with the idea of going to the various used computer stores, buying a pallet of used computers and making my very own Beowulf cluster. I've seen pallets of fast P3 and low-end P4 boxes at interesting prices. Boeing Surplus have large numbers of essentially identical computers almost every time I go there. I remember once looking through a big bin for a particular size wrench and grumbling to the sales person "Surely there is something bolted to a 747 with these size bolts!" They laughed...
The alternative would be to do something with new motherboards and processors. Might even get a break on the electricity.
...laura
Here's the whole article on a printer-friendly page.
Just to be pedantic, such systems do exist. They're called "deluge sprinkler" systems. Like a pre-action system, the pipes are normally kept dry, until some external event triggers it. However, unlike a pre-action system, every sprinkler head is open, so once the water valve is opened, it immediately starts raining everywhere. Mainly used in places where any sign of fire warrants immediate drastic action, like a fuel depot.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
This article is nothing more than nerd porn. Please wash your hands before returning to work.
Thanks,
The Management
today is spelling optional day.
I'd be more interested in a look inside the NSA ... of course, the lights might not be on.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.