Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial

An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."

Comments

Because...

[mr_beanz]

No-one ever got fired for buying IBM!

Re:Because...

[obsolete1349]

I did . . . Now I have to eat soup at the kitchen down the street... and to keep warm, I have to stand by a trash fire.

Re:Because...

[kryten_nl]

... but at least you have an iPhone to post on Slashdot with.

Re:Because...

[wezeldog]

Me too. Now I live in van down by the river...

Is there a supercomputer powerful enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to stop Zonk from posting boring, pointless articles?

I'd prefer if HAL didn't open the pod bay doors, if Zonk were out there.

Blue Gene/P

[draxbear]

Seems a good bet it's a Blue Gene/P.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/217 91.wss

Re:Blue Gene/P

[Mathinker]

If it's going to be installed in 2011, it's probably anyone's guess.

Might also be a second-generation Roadrunner.

Got a good laugh about someone calling you on astroturfing, somehow I doubt Slashdot posts affect purchasing decisions on supercomputers all that much.

Re:Blue Gene/P

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Yeah, because word of mouth is what IBM needs. I mean, who's heard of THEM?

Re:Blue Gene/P

[TClevenger]

Yeah, brilliant move on IBM's part. Collect the money now, build a machine in 4 years for 1/10 as much as it would cost to deliver it, say, by Christmas.

Re:Blue Gene/P

[gothmogged]

It will not be BLueGene/P.

BlueGene/P will go online at Argonne this year. The NSF sustained petascale machine is targeted for 2011. We can safely assume that IBM won't get away with proposing to get $200 million to use today's technology for a machine 4 years in the future. Which means it is either BlueGene/Q or something from the IBM PERCS line.

The NSF solicitation can be found here http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2006/nsf06573/nsf06573.htm l

One controversy is that the NSF has already created supercomputer centers across the country which have enabled NSF funded scientists to do significant research. But this solicitation was not confined to them. It allows for significant NSF grant funding to be diverted to institutions not beholden to NSF, and not aligned with the interests of NSF funded scientists, such as the DOE funded labs. This engenders suspicion that the resources might be diverted from NSF's fundamental research towards the DOE's much narrower agenda.

The DOE bit

[StealthyRoid]

I don't know that having one of the machines at Oak Ridge is that big of a deal. One simple explanation is that the NSF is going to share time on the mainframe with the DoE, and in exchange, the DoE foots the energy bills and finds a place to put it. I'd rather have the agencies sharing multi-million dollar computers than buying them and not using them to capacity.

Re:The DOE bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this is a foolish question, but are there a lot of dead cycles on a high end supercomputer? My perception (as a non academic) was that those things tended to be running at or near computational capacity virtually full time and that it'd take weeks or months to get time on such a machine for an arbitary research project.

Re:The DOE bit

[vought]

Perhaps this is a foolish question, but are there a lot of dead cycles on a high end supercomputer?

Obviously you've never worked for a government contractor. A stage example:

1: CONTRACTOR, pacing in an untidy OFFICE filled with EQUIPMENT: "We need to order, configure and install this thing at 12/10s speed to meet deadline! Where the f*ck is the chimp from the CDW ads????"

  (CRICKETS sing ...six weeks pass)

2: CHIEF SCIENTIST, inside raised floor lab filled with immaculate, slab-sided computing machines: "Hey, can we use this thing to run some Mandelbrot sets?"

PHYSICAL PLANT GUY: "Not until we upgrade the chillers."
UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: "I'm not sure we can afford that!"

3: TOUSLED-HAIRED SCIENTIST, in grimy, pizza and book-strewn home: "If only I could get enough cycles to build my next great open source project...we could save the world from the impending unnamed crisis! Crap!"

SCIENTIST'S CAT:(forbiddingly) "Meow-rarwerews"

4: BUSH SCIENCE ADVISOR in a rather spare-looking OFFICE without a COMPUTER: "Let's shut this (supercomputer) thing down. We can shunt the money off to a lobbyist, and rake in 200% on the backend for our downstream contractors. What, Lockheed is on the phone? Hang on..." FADE OUT

5: VIEW OF EARTH FROM ORBIT. EARTH BLOWS UP. (Maybe use coal dust as per George Lucas)

6: FIN

Re:The DOE bit

[sumdumass]

If they don't share the resources, there will be a lot of dead cycles.

That is why the GP suggested it as being a good thing that they are sharing it. And your right, it does take a long time to get onto these computers. This is because they are letting people use the extra cycles in between their need for all of them.

Re:The DOE bit

[mako1138]

Most of the major research labs in the US are technically owned by the DOE, whether they're primarily weapons/classified research (Livermore, Los Alamos) or closely linked to academia (Berkeley, Fermilab).

The DOE and the NSF fund various projects (with some subject area overlap) but it's still up to individual scientists to write proposals asking for supercomputer time.

Re:The DOE bit

[Anonymous Coward]

> And your right, it does take a long time to get onto these computers.

That is my right, yes.

Re:The DOE bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Bwa ha ha! You are wasting your time tinkering with tech. You should be writing the screenplay for the (hip-hop and Osama-themed) remake of Strangelove (starring Vince Vaughn and an Affleck or two, natch -- with an expanded female role for J-Lo to play). :-)

Re:The DOE bit

[smittyoneeach]

Clearly you haven't been around the Beltway.
Your little script makes no mention of Service Oriented Architecture.
If you're not buzzword-compliant, how can you be meaningful?

Re:The DOE bit

[Gen.Anti]

An open-source-writing outcast genius as the only positive character--the humanity's lost chance. The humanity gets punished.

You are so kind it's cruel.

Now I'm going to cry a little.

;-)

Re:The DOE bit

[battery111]

The thing about DOE is that their primary business is nukes. They are in charge not only of all the nuclear power plants nation wide, but they also have a lot to do with our nuclear weapons. The oakridge facility is a main hub of this research, tracing back to the manhattan project. Therefore, a super computer makes sense, as nuclear physics is some pretty super-computery stuff.

Re:The DOE bit

[fractalVisionz]

Oak Ridge is not just DOE, it is a research center for many universities, including Georgia Tech and University of Tennessee to name a few. I for one have run computational genetics code on the supercomputer cluster at Oak Ridge as a Tech student, which was funded by a NSF grant. Therefore, NSF at Oak Ridge labs is nothing new or something to be surprised about.

Re:The DOE bit

[xcjohn]

This is a HUGE deal and, frankly, rather selfish of a DOE lab. There are a handful of non-DOE national labs out there that are struggling (I mean, very very close to closing doors) that needed this round of funding. Places like NCSA, PSC, SDSC. They're all shit outta luck now, cept for those NCSA jerks. Funny how NCSA suddenly got interested in very big iron when they've been keeping the mid-sized machines for the past decade..

Re:The DOE bit

[ToasterMonkey]

You mean 'inside' the Beltway, right?

Re:The DOE bit

[smittyoneeach]

Oh, if only the Beltway had contained the tumor!
No, the beaurocratic blight occupies a triangle stretching from Baltimore to Fredricksburg to Dulles.

The question is why not IBM?

[siyavash]

The question is why not IBM? Who else can beat it (BlueGene) at that price? Seems like a pretty good deal to me. Although, government procedures are never optimal. Free market works far better and far more efficient.

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[aichpvee]

Exactly! That's why we have the cheapest, highest quality health care system in the world!

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[sumdumass]

We haven't had a free market in the health care area for 50 years. It was probably the 60's or early 70's when government started controlling it so heavily that is wasn't free any more. You can look at the prices for hospital stay and procedures and see this too.

And if you really look at the cost, it still is cheaper then other places like Canada and england for some services. Look at the excess in taxes that they pay just to get the service they do. Now imagine the cost of that over a lifetime compared to the amount you would actually use. Unless you have something terribly wrong with you and don't die during the waiting period for specialized treatment, you would be spending a lot less in America over a life time. In all, their system is more or less government mandated insurance, you usually don't use more then you pay into insurance over the life time of the policy if you don't have something major happen.

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[AuMatar]

You're missing a few key points there.

1)Its cheaper than private insurance. No middle man taking a cut. And before you go into the government inefficiency bullshit, private corporations of a similar size are just as inefficient, if not more so.

2)You get better service, since that middle man taking a cut doesn't have a profit motive to deny you service.

3)Everyone actually gets treated, and has access to preventative care. This likely increases the savings from 1, as preventative care is far cheaper and lower risk than care late in a problem's life cycle. Think of it like a computer bug- the earlier you find it, the easier it is to fix.

4)Insurance is only as cheap as it is in the US because they force higher risk people to pay premiums they can't afford, or refuse them coverage at all. From a profit view this makes sense, but this means those who need care the most won't have coverage. It artificially deflates the true cost of insurance by biasing the covered towards fewer problems. This makes a straight out dollar to dollar comparison useless.

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[sumdumass]

OK, I'm not getting into a free health war. It isn't as cheep as you think. That's all. The vast majority of people could sack the equivalent of the extra taxes into an interest bearing savings account and give some money to their survivors after their death.

And no, It likely isn't cheaper then private insurance. You have taxes on your gasoline, tobacco products, food, income and most other items that pay for the health car. The US and Canada both spend about 7% of their GDP on health services for citizens and Canada funds about 70% of their health care the US only funds 50%. But Canada taxes their citizens about 10% of their GDP more then the US. Currently I believe it is at 37% of the GDP compares the the US's 27%.

Now the interesting part is that canada's GPD is $1,269,096,000,000.00 (USD) and there are roughly 32,982,900 people in Canada. So IF my math is right, and 10% of the GDP dived by the amount of people there, this works out to about $3848 per year in extra taxes per person which comes to around $320 a month per person.

Now, I understand that people who make more cover a lot more of the costs. But lets put this myth of everything being cheaper to rest. I picked Canada because I had the numbers close by for a project I am working on and I mentioned them in the post you replied to. Almost every could get health insurance in America for less then $320 a month per person covered. Especially if they went with the HSA and catastrophic insurance coverage. Mine is only $135/month for a smoker with a $1500 deductible that is sitting in a tax free savings account. I have a 5 million dollar payout so if I manage to stay under 5 million in medical expenses, I should be ok.

2)You get better service, since that middle man taking a cut doesn't have a profit motive to deny you service.

Almost every free health care system is full of stories and long waits and so on for procedures. It is commonly know that a lot of the wealthier people goto other countries to get around some of these rates. In england, there is a private system operating directly beside a public system for those who can afford it. In France, there are riots and property damage all the time because they don't like their health care system. In Australia, which is probable the most sane system, you can have private insurance and medical procedures on top of th public system and because the private stuff is limited in what it can do by the Government, it is more affordable.

)Everyone actually gets treated, and has access to preventative care. This likely increases the savings from 1, as preventative care is far cheaper and lower risk than care late in a problem's life cycle. Think of it like a computer bug- the earlier you find it, the easier it is to fix.

Change actually to eventually and I would agree. However, You should see above

Insurance is only as cheap as it is in the US because they force higher risk people to pay premiums they can't afford, or refuse them coverage at all. From a profit view this makes sense, but this means those who need care the most won't have coverage. It artificially deflates the true cost of insurance by biasing the covered towards fewer problems. This makes a straight out dollar to dollar comparison useless.

I agree that it is useless. In the first replay, I mentioned about the increased taxes levied on the citizens of canada. We could actually complicate it more by showing that about 50% of health care in the US is covered by the government where 70% in Canada is. When we add that to the mix, they are paying an extra $320 (USD) per month in Canada for 30% more coverage.

Here is an article from Wiki that has some of this information. Of course you need to take wikipedia with a gain of salt with it's history and all. I am for a public health system but the Idea of

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[operato]

you can't generalise taxation. taxation varies so much between countries and what the tax revenues are spent on varies a lot too.

the free health care system in the UK, NHS, is only so because of government policy (total neglect and failure to adapt) and that's why there are long waiting times, etc. however, when you say you can have private and public systems in place together, it doesn't always work. public health services take the brunt of the stuff that private health clearly will not touch because it is not profitable. thus making the system even more complicated than if it were just a public health system. anyways, it's the public health system that trains up all the doctors and nurses that work in the private sector anyways (especially in the uk).

if you go back to economics and externalities, health care is a merit good. people should consume more of it and without government intervention there would be under consumption of health care. public services are here to stay and people should invest their money into public health care as private health is just a waste of money for the whole economy.

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Yeah, I'm sure IBM pre-installs Vista on all new Super Computers.

Are you DENSE?

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[encoderer]

Wow... so much stupidity.. so little time....

1. First of all, the countries you're talking about -- Canada, UK, etc -- have a SINGLE PROVIDER system. That is, there is a single provider of healthcare coverage, in the form of Gov't run hospitals and clinics, and you go to them if you want free care. (Yes, in the UK there are private clinics and hospitals, but only for those that can pay cash)

Nobody has EVER suggested that the US be a SINGLE PROVIDER system. The idea has always been a SINGLE PAYER system. That means private enterprise still is responsible for delivering services. The difference is at the "insurance" level. Some plans call for the elimination of insurance companies, with Medicare expanding to cover everybody. Other plans call for the existing insurance companies to stay in place, the only diff. being that instead of your employer paying the premiums, the government will pay them.

BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SINGLE PROVIDER AND SINGLE PAYER.

2. The history of employer-funded heathcare in this country is not exactly an idea endowed from our founding fathers. It's only been postwar--since the 1950s-- that the tax code was changed to reward companies for paying premiums. This made a LOT more sense in the days of career employment than it does today.

3. The GOP--during their 7 years of hegemony--had a great idea: Since the freemarket is supposed to bear fruits of efficiency, why don't they take the amount they're currently paying for some people on medicare, and, instead, give 95% of that amount to a private insurer, giving the citizen that would usually have Medicare actual private insurance that's paid for by the gov't at a rate cheaper than Medicare would otherwise pay.

Their idea was that if their theory held, the private companies could deliver services cheaper than Medicare itself can, which would allow them to expand this program to EVERYONE. Furthermore, they thought that it would be so efficient that they could even cover things that Meicare can't, like dentures and such.

Do you know what happened? Months into the program, they couldn't find hardly any insurers willing to insure these people at a cost of 95% of Medicare costs for that same person. So the congress upped it. First to 100%, then to more than 100%. That is, they were paying private insurers more to take care of a person that was previously on Medicarae than it was costing Medicare itself to take care of that person. Again, they felt that SURELY the freemaket would delvier, if only they gave it chance.

It didn't.

The Medicare Advantage program FLOPPED.

At the end of the day, the "Free Market" just couldn't deliver services cheaper than Medicare itself could.

4. The amount people pay for healthcare cannot be simply compared to Canada or anywhere else because so much of the cost is paid by employers. How much more competitive would our corporations be without this burden? Practically none of their overseas competitors carry those costs. How do you quantify that? How much more wealth would there be in the pockets of Ameircan employees and investors if our corporations were relieved of this singulary burden? How much higher would your wages be?

5. At the end of the day, we're ALREADY PAYING FOR EVERYONE TO GET HEALTHCARE. Anybody, no matter how destitute, can walk into your county general hospital and get care, and the bill is footed by the state. So you're ALREADY PAYING. Except, instead of treating the infection when it starts, at a cost of, say, $200, you're treating it after it's spread to the whole arm and requires an amputation at the cost of $10,000. Etc.

And no matter how much you dislike that fact, THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION. Because if you just stopped treating people that didn't have coverage, disease would fester. A true sub-class would emerge with ghettos full of truly sick people. It would be the 19th century all over again.

So let's ACKNOWLEDGE that we're ALREADY PAYING FOR THIS and let's focus on preventive care and early treatment that w

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[sumdumass]

you can't generalise taxation. taxation varies so much between countries and what the tax revenues are spent on varies a lot too.

Yes, I believe I mentions this. I even said it wasn't an accurate because those making more pay more. But one of the pages I linked to which has/had the same information I have, drew the conclusion of how much was spent on health care. It specifically compare the US and Canada.

the free health care system in the UK, NHS, is only so because of government policy (total neglect and failure to adapt) and that's why there are long waiting times, etc. however, when you say you can have private and public systems in place together, it doesn't always work. public health services take the brunt of the stuff that private health clearly will not touch because it is not profitable. thus making the system even more complicated than if it were just a public health system. anyways, it's the public health system that trains up all the doctors and nurses that work in the private sector anyways (especially in the uk).

Government in general fails to adapt appropriately in many ways and far too often. This isn't the problem as I see it. The problem is more to the point that all of the main and often cited health care systems that are run by the governments. You can find excuses for the UK but what are the ones for AU, CA, and all the rest.

I am familiar with the problems of the mixed private and public systems. That is why I think Australia's system seems to be the most competent out there. It actually forbids the private system from certain procedures and treatments. They mainly focus on elective procedures and stuff like that. I'm sure there is more they can do that I am giving them credit for but you should get the idea.

if you go back to economics and externalities, health care is a merit good. people should consume more of it and without government intervention there would be under consumption of health care. public services are here to stay and people should invest their money into public health care as private health is just a waste of money for the whole economy.

What most people fail to realize, And I think I am just in including you into that category, IS that public health is nothing more then a Giant insurance policy with a heavily regulated medical system. Even when there is a private system in with it. The public part is just regulated by the fedral government on a much larger scale. People think that there isn't a price to pay for this service. If Canada taxes 10% more compared to thier GDP then the US to provide coverage for 70% of the medical expenses, Then the US is going to need a large amount more money when the population is 10 times that amount.

Switching to a public health care system in America isn't going to be those without coverage automatically having it and that's all. It is going to be a tax increase with 1-3000 of their income disappearing to fund it. Many people are going to be inconvenience's in their life styles and for the most part it is going to be because they think that spending their money in different ways then on medical insurance is the right thing to do. The only different now is that the government is going to be taking the premium before they get the money and in most cases, they will still be without something.

Personally, I think something like Rudy Giuliani's plan would work the best. It involves giving vouchers and even tax credits for private insurances that you purchase and keep. It places a small burden on the employer for part of this but that burden changes and you can Keep your coverage no matter what employer you have. It places some restrictions on the insurance company's ability to deny treatments and best of all, it get phased in over a period of time. The poor already have coverage. Children in almost every state already have coverage. I think this plan would work and amount to the same public health system. I watched an interview on PBS with him and it really made sense while having fixes for the majority of people's criticisms of socialized medicine.

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every could get health insurance in America for less then $320 a month per person covered

Well, except for anyone who's a female of childbearing age.

We could actually complicate it more by showing that about 50% of health care in the US is covered by the government where 70% in Canada is. When we add that to the mix, they are paying an extra $320 (USD) per month in Canada for 30% more coverage.

Where is the "more" coming from? All you've done is show that Canadian treatment costs $320/mo/citizen. How much of the average American's taxes goes towards Medicare/Medicaid and paying for all the people who clog the ER for hours on end who can't pay for any of it themselves?

The problem with the market is not so much "government intervention" as the insurance in the first place. Insurance companies hide the true cost of services from the consumer, quashing competition among doctors. Since pretty much all insurance companies (contrary to popular libertarian belief, medicare and medicaid are not alone in this) contractually compel doctors to charge more to uninsured patients than insured patients (after all, if health care wasn't so expensive, nobody would buy insurance) the market is even further distorted.

Of course, if we bought a few IBM mainframes we'd be able to calculate the best price/performance ratio for medical care and keep this thread on topic ;)

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[sumdumass]

Wow... so much stupidity.. so little time....

I know the feeling. I'm wondering why your adding to the problem though?

Nobody has EVER suggested that the US be a SINGLE PROVIDER system. The idea has always been a SINGLE PAYER system. That means private enterprise still is responsible for delivering services. The difference is at the "insurance" level. Some plans call for the elimination of insurance companies, with Medicare expanding to cover everybody. Other plans call for the existing insurance companies to stay in place, the only diff. being that instead of your employer paying the premiums, the government will pay them.

It doesn't matter, The effect is going to be the same regardless. The money will have to come from somewhere and it will be your pocket. Well, rather your paycheck because they like to get this stuff before you can miss it as often as possible. It really changes nothing I what I posted except maybe the degree to which it will effect you. But anyone wishing for this is foolish to think it won't cost them more money over their life time in increased taxes then they are likely to use from the system. They are even more foolish if they think they will have the same amount of disposable income to blow on things other then their insurance. It would be taken from them before they get it.

I don't see anyone cutting education, national security, the military or anything else in the near future to pay for a program like that. And if the cut anything, it would likely be the military budget and that would get those responsible turned out on their but the very next chance the voters get. They know this and this is why they will not defund the military like they did during Vietnam. The hippies and draft dodgers of the 60's have for the large part, grown up.

The history of employer-funded heathcare in this country is not exactly an idea endowed from our founding fathers. It's only been postwar--since the 1950s-- that the tax code was changed to reward companies for paying premiums. This made a LOT more sense in the days of career employment than it does today.

Any funded healthcare other then funded by yourself is not exactly an idea endowed from our founding fathers. I don't see why this would even come up?

More specifically, I was only showing that the free gift from the government will not and can not be free. It will carry a price in the form of taxes. I believe I said at the very beginning of that post, OK, I'm not getting into a free health war. It isn't as cheep as you think. That's all.

Yep, I think so. I guess I will reply to some of your other arguments as long as it is indirectly connected to my assertion of The vast majority of people could sack the equivalent of the extra taxes into an interest bearing savings account and give some money to their survivors after their death.

The GOP--during their 7 years of hegemony--had a great idea: Since the freemarket is supposed to bear fruits of efficiency, why don't they take the amount they're currently paying for some people on medicare, and, instead, give 95% of that amount to a private insurer, giving the citizen that would usually have Medicare actual private insurance that's paid for by the gov't at a rate cheaper than Medicare would otherwise pay.

That sounds like a good Idea. I'm not against doing something with the health care system. What I am against is the idea that somehow people won't notice a difference in their standards of living because they can still go out and buy all the cable channels, boats, motorcycles, second cars and recreations vehicles or whatever else that has a higher priority then medical insurance with the government magically picking up the tab and no cost to them.

However, I don't think taking what goes into medicade and using it to provide coverage for the remaining 50% of the people without governmen

Re:The question is why not IBM?

[mastermemorex]

One Hundred NVidia 8800 GTX Graphic Cards can achieve 3 petaflops for a insignificant cost.

petaflop?

[Anonymous Coward]

1 Petaflop?

Were any animal rights activists harmed in the design or manufacture of this computer?

Re:petaflop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope so.

I just get so mad at them when they try to tell me not to eat animals. If god didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them taste like meat? If he wanted us to eat only vegetables, Wouldn't he make them taste like meat too?

Re:petaflop?

[Grimbleton]

I sure hope so... (I'm a member of PETA, but not one of those looneys you hear about on the news)

Re:petaflop?

[Anonymous Coward]

god didn't make animals taste like meat, because god doesn't exist

on a side note, why did god make human babies taste like meat if they weren't meant to be eaten?

Re:petaflop?

[ImaLamer]

Frankly, I'm a vegetarian - not because I love animals - but because I hate vegetables.

Horrible Writing

[bendodge]

"According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week (a punctuation mark maybe?) the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed(s?) of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."

Come on editors!

Re:Horrible Writing

[martin_henry]

Excuse me, but to which punctuation mark are you referring?

Re:Horrible Writing

[cheater512]

That would be a comma.

Re:Horrible Writing

[bendodge]

A comma (or Zonk could have split the sentence).

This sounds like a simple one to me... who else?

[RobertM1968]

If the government was interested in a machine from a company who has consistently shown it knows how to build these things, then who else would they choose?

IBM has consistently dominated the fastest supercomputer list:

http://www.top500.org/

And as for it's location... why would the government want to keep putting all their eggs in the same basket? Also, it's not like you need a keyboard and mouse and operator directly attached to this machine... so housing it elsewhere in a facility that can house it makes sense.

Sounds more like a bunch of people grumbling that they arent going to have access to what they thought would be their newest toy. In addition, it indicates possible collaboration between the DOE and NSA which should only be a good thing.

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

A NSF machine? I wonder what a Not Safe for Work machine would have on it? PORN!

NSF?

[FeepingCreature]

Upon reading this article, I can't help thinking of the NSF. What do these guys need supercomputers for?
.. Maybe I should play less Deus Ex :(

Re:NSF?

[cheese-cube]

So they can synthesise their own cure to the Grey Death. Duh.

From the Article...

[martin_henry]

Several government supercomputing scientists said they were concerned that the decision might raise questions about impartiality and political influence. Unfortunately, under-the-table deals have persuaded the NSF to go with IBM, rather than me and my Beowolf Cluster of Illiterate Iguana linux systems...

What are the alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell.. anyone?

Re:What are the alternatives?

[Nullav]

"Dude, you're gettin' a Cray!"

at least it'll run linux

[martin-boundary]

Given that IBM's strategy is to try to run linux on all its hardware, there's a good chance that the supercomputer will be running a version of linux. Expect Ballmer to be sending several chairs by express courier to the NSF in short order.

Re:at least it'll run linux

[xcjohn]

No, and I don't know why everyone thinks this will be a BlueGene/P. NCSA bid PERCS on this. It's fairly safe to bet such a machine would run AIX (you certainly don't want to waste a petaflop on linux.

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[sumdumass]

Well, it makes sense that the DOE has access to it. They are after all running intensive computer models on all sorts of stuff from global warming to weather patterns and energy scenarios. They are working with the NSF on Carbon numbers and stuff.

This might be what saves the world. LOL

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[megaditto]

If DOE wants access to it, they should pay for that access. Given how little money pure science already receives from the government, handing over this computer to nuke research would be little short of treason.

Unnecessary

[fan of lem]

Aw c'mon, we all know it will only output 42.

So, what are the concerns?

[ShinmaWa]

This is a HORRIBLE article. Forget, for now, that it seems to be a disjointed series of sentences and let's focus on the "concern".

Word of the decision to award the contract to I.B.M. to build a production version of a computer that is now intended for [DARPA] has created widespread concern in the past week among some computer scientists involved in designing and building the nation's high-performance computers. [...] Placing it in Illinois, however, has led to expressions of concern in California and Pennsylvania, where computing laboratories also bid on the contract. Okay, that's nice. What is this widespread concern? Does it have to do with the bidding process? If so, why? Why does putting it at UIUC make a difference? Maybe the next paragraph will tell us:

The machine will become a magnet for the world's most advanced and challenging scientific research projects... [Exclamations that it's a special machine and an unfortunate comparison with Hubble] Guess not. Perhaps Horst Simon had something enlightening to say:

"The process needs to be above all suspicion. [...] It's in the interest of the national community that there is not even a cloud of suspicion, and there already is one." Anything on the nature of this "cloud of suspicion", New York Times?

It will also represent an extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers in the United States. For most of the last two decades, the fastest computers in the United States have been located at either the national laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., or Livermore, Calif. I thought not.

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[sumdumass]

The DOE does more then Nuke research. They are behind the official US responses to global warming or what ever the name of the month is.

The DOE is probably more science oriented the the NSF in some ways. When you put the NASA elements into consideration anyway. There are many faces to the Department of energy. Just like the military which wil get it's hands into everything, so does the DOE.

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[jschrod]

Uuh, DoE uses supercomputers mostly for other tasks. Almost all of them (and surely all of the top TOP500 list) are used for stockpile stewardship (i.e., nuclear weapons simulation).

The DoE has $4 billion p.a. for such tasks; not counting money from military budgets.

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[samkass]

I think you hit the nail on the head. Show me a $200M government contract award that WASN'T challenged by the folks who didn't get it...

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[megaditto]

Let's see how much each one gets each year:

DoD: 400 bil. US$ (not including the Iraq war costs, read another 90 bil.)
DoE: 25 bil.
NASA: 15 bil.
EPA: 8 bil.

NSF: 6 bil.

I say screw them, let them buy their own damn computer.

sour grapes are inevitable, probably

[Quadraginta]

As I recall, the number of NSF-funded supercomputer centers was drastically cut maybe 10 years ago or so, and something like only three emerged intact (NCSA, Pittsburg, and SDSC). I presume those are the "Illinois," "California" and "Pennsylvania" options mentioned in this otherwise utterly clueless piece of journalistic malpractice. Although maybe "California" refers to Livermore or LANL.

That NCSA might win the contract with a proposal that IBM build the machine is about as uncontroversial and "safe" a result as one could possible imagine, given the very long track record each institution has in this area. So I suspect the "widespread concern" is probably widespread concern for somebody's job or research grant. My impression is that the NSF has been steadily decreasing the amount of money it spends on supercomputer projects, because the community of people who think you can do something with a supercomputer that you really can't with a cluster is steadily shrinking. What that means is people in the business are being brutally squeezed as the research money dries up, and some are being squeezed right out of the field. Harsh, and it's not surprising if the harshest thing they say in response -- as life dreams go up in smoke -- is that they aren't sure the NSF was totally "fair" when they awarded the mongo grant to some other center...

The bit about an "extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers" -- a shift toward the scientific side and away from the military -- is so strange a thing for the New York Times to bitch about, with their knee-jerk loathing of all things military, that it's hard not to believe the reporter totally misunderstood Simon's statement (which is probably not much more than him saying Livermore has always had badass computers for designing nukes, and he thinks they still should, notwithstanding the fact that the nuke design business has been a bit slow lately).

Finally, the bit about another computer going to ORNL demonstrates more cluelessness on the part of the reporter. The fact that UT runs ORNL under contract to DOE doesn't prevent the PIs at ORNL from getting NSF grants -- and plenty folks there have them, I believe. I can't see any reason why folks at ORNL couldn't submit a successful proposal for a big computer to the NSF. They do a lot of unique materials research (since they have those great neutron and X-ray sources), and materials research is a good place to do massive simulations.

I wonder who, with what personal axe to grind, submitted this curiously vapid and pointless article to slashdot?

Re:sour grapes are inevitable, probably

[bockelboy]

Coming from a school which isn't on either coast, I think it's great that NSF money is being spread around a little bit.

While I'm not questioning the excellence of the existing facilities, there's certainly faculty outside of those who might be able to be more cost-effective with their money. A $2M grant falls into the "small fish" category in some places, while a $2M grant might be huge at smaller schools. Further, I personally believe the cost of getting a grant off the ground is less expensive in the Midwest. $60k is a great wage in the area where I live; taking into account the cost of living, it is equivalent to $100k on the coast. The NSF's money can simply be spread around farther.

I'm not faulting anyone here (the big places are top-notch, NSF projects usually do show good return on investment), but it'd be nice to see the money go to other places.

Re:sour grapes are inevitable, probably

[Quadraginta]

It isn't being spread out one little bit more. NCSA and ORNL have been rolling in Federal dough for the past forty years. Nothing is changing.

It's a bit weird for Livermore to be competing for NSF dollars. Usually their funding is DOE/DoD, since they've been a closed weapons shop for decades. Oak Ridge and Los Alamos made the transition to a lot more civilian research long ago, so they have plenty of NSF money. But I think it's a bit new for Livermore to be competing so strongly for it. Again, I think it's just because they're flopping around a little bit, looking for a new mission, now that nukes are kind of out of fashion even with the military. I think DoD is likely to be spending their blue-sky money more on robotics these days, e.g. UAVs, and that means NASA labs like Goddard or Ames, not Livermore or Sandia. Probably the Livermore chaps are only being kept alive by ballistic missile defense projects, with its big lasers and stuff, plus the odd fusion project and of course trying to maintain nuke readiness via computer simulation and no actual testing. Thin stuff. I can see why they'd want to tap into materials science, which I'm guessing is the point of this new machinery, if it's going to NCSA and ORNL. Few doubt that materials science is the kind of thing that (1) requires monster computers, and (2) will always be funded by NSF and at least attract the attention of DoD/DOE.

The NSF's money can simply be spread around farther.

Eh, there's a good reason for its restricted spread. Do not forget that a key component of research success, except in rare circumstances, is the quality of the support infrastructure. You need to know your grant applicant can easily get top-notch glassblowers, computer programmers, machinists, grad students, et cetera if he wins your grant. If he's at a top-notch research place, you can take that stuff as a given. Otherwise, you might worry about giving a pile of money to a PI who himself is maybe stellar, but who has to make do with second-class help.

Re:sour grapes are inevitable, probably

[bockelboy]

Good points!

NSF does do seed money (i.e., smaller grants to get infrastructure started). However, they need to find a way to do sustainable funding in a better manner. Nothing's worse to see a seed grant help a site get started, only to have it dry up 2 years later (or, forcing the poor PI to become a full-time grant writer).

I'm not saying we need to send $50 million to Nowhereville, Arkansas. However, it'd be nice to see a little more invested in infrastructure out there...

Re:sour grapes are inevitable, probably

[Quadraginta]

They're shits about that kind of stuff. I get the impression Congress wants to see them fund the 'eager young minds of tomorrow,' to quote the sardonic John Nash in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind movie. Trying to screw money out of NSF for equipment and infrastructure, and often even for post-docs, is like getting blood from a stone. They'd rather fund another half-dozen grad students any day.

Anyway, it's not my problem, since I've long since moved to private industry and I don't need to make pitches to them any more. For what it's worth, I tend to think the whole system is a little rocky, since it's gotten to the point where grantsmanship is the main figure of merit for a PI, and where big research schools utterly depend on the vast sums that come from the Feds to support research. It seems unhealthy and unproductive. I could wish that the system were more fluid, with more and varied sources of support for research, and less unholy focus on the total sums raised, or at least a greater variety of PI jobs available, so that folks who want to run giant labs with $10 million budgets can do so, and others who just want to putter away for 15 years on some odd little puzzle (that might, of course, have some gargantuan payoff in 50 years) can do that, too.

But don't ask me to get there from here, because I haven't a clue.

what kind of machine?

[ghort]

IBM has at least 3 different systems that this could be (x86-ish linux cluster, power* aix, bluegene), but the article doesn't say which.

Other competitors would have been Sun (linux or solaris), SGI (Altix), Cray, etc. Apparently the USGov won't consider Japanese machines so Hitachi/NEC are out.

PS Japan is building a 10x faster machine in the same timeframe.

PPS The top500 is heavily biased toward clustery machines; certain types of science codes do not run well on such systems. Not saying it's a wrong metric, just that the machines on the top500 are not good at every kind of problem.

Re:what kind of machine?

[GPSguy]

Rumor has it that this will be a Power7 machine. Whatever that is. Power6 has just been released to testing.

And yet

[WindBourne]

What you missed in your report is that medicaid overhead is less than 5% (IIRC, it is around 2%), while insurance is around 30-40%. So how is it that USA spends less on medical than canada? Because, those that can not afford insurance do not buy it. These ppl literally die from lack of medical attention. Regardless, in this next election cycle, I think that we will see socialized medicine hit America. Why? Because businesses are all calling for it. They are saying that medicine is more expensive in America than any other country that they operate in. And that is from the fortune 100 companies, not mah/pah shop. Oddly enough, the same businesses that hated HRC's ideas in the early 90's, are apparently the same ones that are calling for her ideas. Weird.

Re:And yet

[sumdumass]

You missed the entire point. And you got a few of your points wrong to boot.

My point wasn't that America spend less, Of course they spend more, we have more people. There is almost 10 times as many people then in canada. The entire damn point was that you could buy it yourself. The socialized medicine costs more then it would if you turned the 3 cable pay channels off and didn't drink $200 a month in alcohol or drugs. The money has to come from somewhere, IT will be you anyways.

Because, those that can not afford insurance do not buy it. These ppl literally die from lack of medical attention.

I call bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. It is illegal for a medical facility to refuse emergency and life save procedures for anyone based on their ability to pay. This is a federal law, they are obligated to do something. If a person is dieing because of lack of Medical attention, it would by any normal consideration be a life threatening emergency. Plain and simple.

And it isn't people who cannot afford insurance. There is a slim minority of people who aren't covered by a state or federal program and that cannot afford treatments themselves. The sad part is, if the problem turns dangerous to be life threatening, they will slip into a covered class really fast.

People can often afford insurance but chose on their own free will not to purchase it. My medical insurance costs less then my old cable package when I had cable. It is about priorities. And if you think you will still be able to get all the pay channels and have all the extra spending money once socialized medicine comes around, your stupid because they will have to pay for it and it will tax you.

Yes, And they are liking Mrs. Clinton's Ideas now because they aren't the same rejected ones of the 90's. They are the George Bush style plans that strongly favor the providers and drug companies. Of course they will be in favor of them when they make out like a bandit.

Personally, I don't care if socialized medicine comes around. I doubt it will be in the next election cycle or two. It will take longer then that to figure out how to pay for it without bankrupting everyone in America at the same time. We don't need another 1970's style Carter plan where 70% taxes and giving banks added leeway on real estate bankrupted the banks as well as most people living the tradition single working provider family. Even if we have a commitment to socialized medicine, it would be another 8-10 years before something could both be in place, funded and effective for everyone.

Re:And yet

[aichpvee]

My point wasn't that America spend less, Of course they spend more, we have more people.

We spend more per person, moron. A lot more.

Re:And yet

[Anonymous Coward]

You have truly lived up to your name.

Because, those that can not afford insurance do not buy it. These ppl literally die from lack of medical attention.

I call bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. It is illegal for a medical facility to refuse emergency and life save procedures for anyone based on their ability to pay. This is a federal law, they are obligated to do something. If a person is dieing because of lack of Medical attention, it would by any normal consideration be a life threatening emergency. Plain and simple.

This is just stupid. The simple fact is, that a lot of small non-"life threatening" conditions can and do add up until someday you find yourself dead. A lot of people have their lives shortened or otherwise curtailed by non life threatening conditions. You're saying there's no moral need to take care of people unless they are in imminent danger of dieing. This is just wrong. There have also been a number of news stories of people dieing after being turned away from medical facilities - but you may not have heard those reports if you only get your news from Fox.

And it isn't people who cannot afford insurance. There is a slim minority of people who aren't covered by a state or federal program and that cannot afford treatments themselves. The sad part is, if the problem turns dangerous to be life threatening, they will slip into a covered class really fast.

See above, dumass. (I can call you that, and it's not an ad-hominem attack because you chose the name; quite delicious, thank you)

People can often afford insurance but chose on their own free will not to purchase it. My medical insurance costs less then my old cable package when I had cable. It is about priorities. And if you think you will still be able to get all the pay channels and have all the extra spending money once socialized medicine comes around, your stupid because they will have to pay for it and it will tax you.

What the heck are you smoking. Where does this nonsense come from?

Personally, I don't care if socialized medicine comes around. I doubt it will be in the next election cycle or two. It will take longer then that to figure out how to pay for it without bankrupting everyone in America at the same time.

No, how about we just study the way other countries do it? That won't take more than a few years.

We don't need another 1970's style Carter plan where 70% taxes and giving banks added leeway on real estate bankrupted the banks as well as most people living the tradition single working provider family.

Why not set something up similar to what they have in other countries that are doing health care successfully? What is so fucked up about this country that if a country like Canada, or the UK, can do national healthcare, but the USA is incapable of it? Is this country that badly put together that it can't do something similar to how other countries are handling it? Are you saying Canada is a better country than the USA? Maybe you should move to Canada if you think this country is so messed up it can't create a workable system of healthcare for its population. We don't even have to come up with a new system, you could just pick a system from another country and copy it. It's not that hard and we're not so stupid a country that we couldn't do that.

Even if we have a commitment to socialized medicine, it would be another 8-10 years before something could both be in place, funded and effective for everyone.

There's a light bulb that's burned out in my office, but why bother changing it? Even if I do, it will take so many microseconds for the new bulb to light that it's hardly worth it. What The Fuck is wrong with you that you think this is a valid argument? Do you not understand that even if it did take 8-10 years, there will still be people around after that? Hopefully, most of this country's history will occur AFTER that period. Wouldn't it be nice if most of the people who are going to be here for it could be healthy, too?

The reality is that you're just a mean, cheap, bastard who doesn't care one whit about his fellow man. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Or maybe you just own stock in a health insurance company.

Re:And yet

[sumdumass]

This is just stupid. The simple fact is, that a lot of small non-"life threatening" conditions can and do add up until someday you find yourself dead. A lot of people have their lives shortened or otherwise curtailed by non life threatening conditions. You're saying there's no moral need to take care of people unless they are in imminent danger of dieing. This is just wrong. There have also been a number of news stories of people dieing after being turned away from medical facilities - but you may not have heard those reports if you only get your news from Fox.

No, I am saying there is no moral need to take care of someone who refuse to take care of their self when they had the opportunity to. And if they continue to put it off and then don't goto the hospital, they deserve what they are doing. And they are doing it, not me or you.

Now, as for the news stories about people being turned away to die because they cannot pay. This shouldn't be the case since 1985 and forward. In 1985 The federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 (EMTALA) was passed into law which is landmark legislation that mandates that all patients seeking emergency treatment receive an adequate medical screening examination and that they not be discriminated against because of inability to pay (1).

It is illegal for any medical facility that accept medicade/medicare in the US to refuse treatment for emergency treatment based on the ability to pay. I have seen these stories of someone dieing because they didn't have insurance all over the place. But I see them in several distinc places with no links or evidence to back them up. These stories are generally repeated by people who have something invested in getting the system changed. IF it actually happened, it would ne news all over the place, the doctor himself would be fined, the hospital would be fined, and both would lose the ability to collect federal funds again. It would destroy most hospitals and doctors. It would be a hige nation wide story because of all that it would entail, Not to mention the lawsuit the family would be launching and the phone number style settlements that would be paid.

It is basically a lie, I have seen it in some made for TV fictional movies and I have seen it taken out of context where the conscious guardian of a person had refused further treatment because it would ruin their credit. But I have never, ever heard of a legit case after 1985 where this has happened. Almost every hospital has a patients rights pamphlet or something on their website describing this.

See above, dumass. (I can call you that, and it's not an ad-hominem attack because you chose the name; quite delicious, thank you)

Actually, I think you would need the B in dumb for it to be name calling, it doesn't offend me. I do prefer to be called sumdumass though. But if you insist, I won't make an issue of it.

What the heck are you smoking. Where does this nonsense come from?

What? IT is a simple fact of circumstances. People that cannot afford insurance and are considered in poverty are covered by a government program. Well all but a small minority of people who are single and over 18 in most areas. Minimum wage is 5.25 or was until recently, but a living wage is more to the likes of $7-$10 and hour which is what we are seeing now. It still isn't enough to live on your own so you have a roommate of live with your parents, so your basically dropping your living expenses in half. You can/should be able to get a high deductible insurance policy for about $100-$200 a month (mine with a $1500 deductible is only $135 a month), the same costs as cable TV and Internet or basically the cost of a date or night on the town. I have the $1500 sitting in a tax free account and put it in there by depositing $20 a month and tossing half my tax return into it at the end of the year.

It is quite simple, If you cannot afford

Cinderella gets the slipper

[john82]

The summary is misleading. RTFA. The real issue here as academic prestige via the selection site. This has nothing to do with the selection of IBM. Mascarading under the cloak of "California" and "Pennsylvania", I'd guess we actually have a couple of ugly stepsisters in the form of the supercomputing facilities (and the universities themselves) at UC Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon. They seem to be shocked and somewhat put out that one of them was not selcted (instead of NCSA/UIUC). So the response now is to try and CREATE a "cloud of suspicion" by complaining that there might be a cloud of suspicion.

Harumph! What were they thinking? I mean, how suspicious that someone would put a new supercomputer at someplace called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Obviously there's something wrong with that selection!

Another point to consider, anytime a large contract (in this case a huge one in several respects) gets awarded, Miss Congeniality and Miss Second Runner-up are going to protest. Happens all the time. This go around however the academic community is trying to BS their way through the issue.

Re:Cinderella gets the slipper

[GPSguy]

Totally agree. The real bruha here was that NCSA got the award and CMU/UCSD/PSCC didn't. And worse, that they found out by web-scraping the NSB agenda rather than having the program manager call 'em and tell 'em.

Teragrid and petascale computing have always been closed games, with the price of admission being to either fund yourself (have your home institution) into a position to be recognized, or, when NSF suddenly realizes they're not looking to diversify the playing field but are always funding the same few suspects, and decrees that existing players won't get a new (small) award.

I'm less surprised that NCSA got the nod than I would have been if, say, San Diego State had won, or the University of Texas. Both are credible computing players, but neither was mentioned (and to be honest, I don't know if either was a proposed principal in a proposal, or if they simply played along).

Re:Cinderella gets the slipper

[xcjohn]

I honestly haven't heard of anyone crying foul over NCSA getting their cake. Yes, it really really sucks that PSC and SDSC didn't (we were quite shocked), but it's that ORNL got track2 that digs you to the bone. Do you honestly think ORNL thought they'd get it? I bet there were as shocked as any of us about that. Yes, I'm whining about greed, the DOE has the deepest pockets, there's no need to go after NSF money. My sincere congratulations to NCSA, any number of other sites could have bid PERCS, but they didn't. It also helps to have state money backing you (this seems to be a point of contention, but Meecham wants his moneys worth, fair enough).

Re:Cinderella gets the slipper

[Anonymous Coward]

It also helps to have state money backing you (this seems to be a point of contention, but Meecham wants his moneys worth, fair enough).

Actually, I think it's more a matter of Meecham & co. appearing to want their money's worth plus a whole lot more. The NSF petascale track 2 competitions have turned into a way for the NSF to get other people to pay for a lot of the NSF's computing budget. Both of the track 2 awards have now gone to sites that a) are not "tier 1" NSF centers, b) have vendor partners so desperate for revenue that they're willing to sell at (or possibly even below) cost, and c) have matching funds from other sources that equal or exceed what they get from NSF.

Honestly, the TACC/Sun proposal broke the entire NSF petascale track 2 process, because now the reviewers feel like they have to throw out any proposal that doesn't out-macho the TACC system in terms of peak FLOPs, regardless of whether that translates to measurable performance on real code.

Also, why the hell isn't the Ranger system at TACC up yet? Wasn't the NSF's requirement that "a signifcant fraction" of it be in production by the end of May?

Vegetable substitutes for meat

[tepples]

If [God] wanted us to eat only vegetables, Wouldn't he make them taste like meat too? Tofu. Tempeh. Veggie burgers. God gave man the ability to invent vegetable substitutes for meat.

Re:Vegetable substitutes for meat

[msdschris]

God gave man the ability to invent vegetable substitutes for meat.
If only they actually tasted like meat you might be on to something.

Re:Vegetable substitutes for meat

[tepples]

God gave man the ability to invent vegetable substitutes for meat. If only they actually tasted like meat you might be on to something. Nor does turkey taste much like beef.

Re:Vegetable substitutes for meat

[db32]

I cannot believe you are calling tofu a meat substitute of any form or fashion. I'm not sure if you have never had tofu or never had meat, but you have never had one of them.
"tempeh was referred as 'Javanese meat', and sometimes it was used as a way to bully javanese." Right from your link this line about how calling it Javanese meat was meant to insult javanese people. (If this is not what this sentence was intended to mean someone needs to be shot because the full sentence is rather broken)
I will give you that veggie burgers can taste like burgers, but only so long as we both are the understanding that ground beef is on the bottom of the totem pole of "good meat" just barely above hotdogs and other meat products made out of leftover parts of the animal. Oh, and that they are both frequently over cooked and have a tendency to taste like juicy charred material.

Go eat filet mignon, or sushi, or any number of high quality animal parts and then talk to me about "Meat Analogue" creation.

IBM and Linux

[SimonShine]

If IBM wants to run Linux on all its hardware, they should think about publishing free drivers to the community. Being forced to run their commercial copies of Red Hat is only "Running Linux" by a thin margin.

Re:IBM and Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"If IBM wants to run Linux on all its hardware, they should think about publishing free drivers to the community. Being forced to run their commercial copies of Red Hat is only "Running Linux" by a thin margin."

Look through the Linux kernel. There are lots of IBM drivers that are GPL, especially in drivers/s390. You should ask for specific drivers.

Riiiiight...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine.

Heaven forfend! The National SCIENCE Foundation having equipment at a NATIONAL FRIGGIN' LAB?! [gasp]!

Nothing to see here....

[rclandrum]

Just about every federal contract of any significance (translation: high dollar value) gets protested by the losers. Not news. Not a surprise. Not likely to have any effect of the outcome.

PETA = "People Eating Tastey Animals"

[peter303]

Yum. Yum.

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[dbitch]

Uh, I don't really think you want a collaboration between the DoE and the NSA. I think you might have meant NSF, right? What would the NSA do with all those ASCI flops?

Dell? Fuck that shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want a computer made by Dell? Dell intentionally alters the pinout of the connector on their ATX power supplies so that they can't be replaced with off-the-shelf ATX power supplies. Any vendor that would do that deserves to fucking go out of business.

Illinois, California, wherever

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care where the computer ends up as long as it's not a red state. Otherwise, we'll have spent millions to find out that, in fact, the earth's temperature has been constant for 6000 years (i.e., since the dawn of the universe).

Confusing headline

[kalirion]

Anyone else read the headline and thought that someone decided to give a $200Mil computer to IBM for free?

'PER PERSON' you dumb-fuck!

[FatSean]

What the fuck kind of 'geek' are you anyway? Fucking imbecile...

Why is this interesting

[ipjohnson]

It's not even funny.

Live Free Die Hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on! Haven't you seen the movie yet? Everyone knows that really important super secret mainframes containing databases full of financial data are stored at random locations (like DoE facilities). Don't worry guys, Bruce will save the day!

Not to mention...

[Cap'n.Brownbeard]

...that the summary includes the word "petaflop", which is completely wrong.

Should be "petaFLOPS" or similar. The "S" is important, otherwise the unit of measure is a mystery. Could be minutes, hours, days...

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[xcjohn]

You're missing the mark completely here. The problem is that the DOE doesn't allow their machines to be open to public researchers. You don't get time on a DOE machine unless you're doing atomic research, etc. The NSF is inherently seperated from the DOE because of this fact. That's why we have BG/L at livermore, it's for the nuke guys. The public sector isnt' getting as many big machines anymore, just the military. So all those astrophysicists and earth sciences people won't get access period. This isn't something to be played off as a bunch of people whining, this is a serious change in the way the NSF does business. More to the point, it approaches a travesty for the scientific computing community at large.

This is it...

[encoderer]

I'm not debating you. But you've distorted my words and my points. I'm going to fix that and move on. There is no way to communicate sensibly with people as stupid as you chose to be.

Very simply, you are fond of basing arguments off of broad assertions and use straw-men to support them. For example:

1. ALL OF YOUR ARGUMENTS revolve around this "not being free." You say time and again that "People who think it will be free if some entity pays for it" NOBODY THINKS THAT. NOBODY ON HERE HAS SAID ANYTHING OF THE SORT. PERIOD. This is a fact: you can go thru and read these posts. It's a FACT taht nobody is expecting healthcare to magically be free if only the Gov't would pick up the tab. My god, are you so stupid to actually believe your argument, or are you just so stupid you think that we'll buy in to your mischaracterization?

2. Instead of looking at easily available facts, you base your "learned" opinion, over and over again, on ANECDOTE. Your mom works in a "country" hospital and you're using that as some sort of basis for your opinion on national healthcare? Are you serious? Go crack a book, bro. It won't bite, I promise. I mean for chrissake, "my mommy works at the hospital?" My god man, are you 14?

3. You are COMPLETELY UNINFORMED about the Medicare Advantage program. Here's how it works right now: Medicare knows how much on average they're paying for a single beneficiary. Let's say it's $1000 a year, just for an example. Right now, Medicare is offering to pay a private insurer $1050 a year (105%) to insure a Medicare recipient. VERY FEW companies even agreed to accept Medicare patients and the ones that do have had to CUT SOME BENEFTS BELOW WHAT MEDICARE WAS OFFERING. That is, in very simple terms: It costs a private insurer (aka the freemarket) MORE to provide the same coverage as it does Medicare. This is a FACT, bro. This is verifiable. All of these numbers are PUBLISHED. Go look it up.

This is a perfect case: If the "Freemarket" was so much more efficient, they'd be able to provide Medicare-quality service CHEAPER than it costs Medicare to offer it. But they can't. They can't even MEET the costs of Medicare. It costs a private insurer MORE than it costs Medicare. So much for the "magic" of the marketplace....

4. Your little anecdote about your mom working in the hospital... You write that in retort to my point that the uninsured are STILL GOING TO THE HOSPITALS when they're ill. And we're ALREADY paying for that at the state level. It's ALREADY factored into our state taxes. We're ALREADY PAYING THE BILL to insure everybody. The only difference is that now we're paying 2, 3x as much for an emergency room visit than we would if we put these people on a gov't health plan and let them see a doctor in an office visit.

5. You CANNOT simply compare healthcare spending in America versus spending in Canada. It's not that simple. Even as a calculation of GDP. You failed to miss the most important part of what I wrote about this: American companies are uncompetive against foregin companies that don't have that same burden. How much more wealth would be in the pockets of American corporations, their investors, and their employees, if we allowed them to compete w/ Foreign companies on a level playing field?

In summary, your reply to my post is LAUGHABLE. Over and over you made it appear that you were addressing a point, but in reality took an entirely different tangent. You used anecdote and absurd assumptions like people think gov't healthcare would be "free."

You show a complete lack of understanding of the way healthcare and the freemarket currently work in this country. Your arguments are not well thought out and not well articulated.

If you're able to reply with FACTS and not more of this CHILDISH CONJECTURE, I may, perhaps be willing to have a discussion with you. But otherwise, this is it. My 2 posts on this subject speak for themselves and anybody reading this will clearly be able to see and verify the facts of what I've written. They stand on their own two feet very well. Yours, on the other hand, read more like a piece in The Onion...

Re:This is it...

[sumdumass]

Wow, Just wow. I cannot believe that you are so full of your self righteous bullshit that your ignoring outright mistakes in your ideology on this.

ALL OF YOUR ARGUMENTS revolve around this "not being free." You say time and again that "People who think it will be free if some entity pays for it" NOBODY THINKS THAT. NOBODY ON HERE HAS SAID ANYTHING OF THE SORT. PERIOD. This is a fact: you can go thru and read these posts. It's a FACT taht nobody is expecting healthcare to magically be free if only the Gov't would pick up the tab. My god, are you so stupid to actually believe your argument, or are you just so stupid you think that we'll buy in to your mischaracterization?

Yes, Not being free and not being cheap. And yes, people think that, this is exactly how the damn issue is being presented to the public. If you ask any non mentally retarded person like yourself, what changing to a public health care system means, they will say free medical as part of their answer.

And in case your wondering, My comments were made in response to Exactly! That's why we have the cheapest, highest quality health care system in the world! which was in response to Free market works far better and far more efficient. So I hate to disappoint you, but my position stands as completely relevant. The free systems aren't cheaper as the sarcasm in the post I responded to would imply.

Instead of looking at easily available facts, you base your "learned" opinion, over and over again, on ANECDOTE. Your mom works in a "country" hospital and you're using that as some sort of basis for your opinion on national healthcare? Are you serious? Go crack a book, bro. It won't bite, I promise. I mean for chrissake, "my mommy works at the hospital?" My god man, are you 14?

Yea, I base my opinion of direct first and second hand experience and your telling me to ignore all that to trust the writings of someone pushing an agenda. Get real dude, How stupid are you? Did you actually believe that they were trying to sneak money out of Nigeria too? (yea, In case your not smart enough to get the reference, I saying you are easily scammed.)

You are COMPLETELY UNINFORMED about the Medicare Advantage program. Here's how it works right now: Medicare knows how much on average they're paying for a single beneficiary. Let's say it's $1000 a year, just for an example. Right now, Medicare is offering to pay a private insurer $1050 a year (105%) to insure a Medicare recipient. VERY FEW companies even agreed to accept Medicare patients and the ones that do have had to CUT SOME BENEFTS BELOW WHAT MEDICARE WAS OFFERING. That is, in very simple terms: It costs a private insurer (aka the freemarket) MORE to provide the same coverage as it does Medicare. This is a FACT, bro. This is verifiable. All of these numbers are PUBLISHED. Go look it up.

And here is where your ignorance comes shining through. It isn't a free market. A free market wasn't doing anything. And more to the point, the most conservative estimates place the administration cost of Medicare at 5.2%. This means they will be loosing .02% right off the bat just for entertaining the idea. Workable estimates claim the cost of administration is around 6-8 percent which means they are losing almost 2% on every transaction.

Everyone they insure will be making claims and there is no room to wiggle around. If they were to get the same $1000 a year for people not making a claim, they would be profiting. But they aren't. I understand the concept your saying very well. I also understand that it is a loosing deal from the start. Now, If they got a premium when they covered person didn't need claims to be paid, and could ballance these premiums between who does and doesn't need claims, then they would be able to make money because that is the entire premise they work from right now. They tak

Re:This is it...

[encoderer]

Asking companies to pick up a loss? Do me a favor... Go research what the hell it is that you're talking about. Seriously. You apparently know nothing about Medicare Advantage, so go visit Google and educate yourself.

"Everyone they insure will be making claims and there is no room to wiggle around."

Seriously... WHAT are you talking about?

These people will be making no more or less claims than any other beneficiary that the company insures. These insurance companies are not getting paid by Medicare only when there is a claim. You miss the point ENTIRELY of this program. This is like school vouchers, only for health insurance.

Basically, at the beginning of the year, Medicare pays the insurance company $x.xx to insure that person for the year. It's like when my employer pays my premium to my insurance company to give me coverage for the month.

That person might not have any claims for the year. Or they might have a catastrophic claim. The same could be said about you or I. Even if the person has no claims, the private insurer keeps all the money Medicare gave them.

And the amount of money they're getting paid to take on each Medicare beneficiary is MORE than an average person in an average year costs Medicare. So, if the "free market" is more efficient than Government (which is your POV), and if the Private Insurer is getting paid to take any given Medicare beneficiary at a rate higher than that beneficiary is likely to cost Medicare for a given year, that insurance company should be able to make LOADS of profit, shouldn't they? I mean, if the Private company ran AT LEAST as efficient as Medicare itself, the fact that Medicare is paying 105% of the average costs should put 5% profits directly into the pocket of the private company. And believing, as you do, that Government insurance would inherently cost more/be less efficient than the free market, the Private company should be able to deliver services CHEAPER than Medicare can. So those efficiency gains should translate directly into more profit for the company.

Re-reading your posts, it seems to me that you misunderstood Medicare Advantage entirely. It seems to me that you assumed that Medicare was paying the private insurers per-claim, perhaps just to process the claims in Lieu of Medicare or something. That's not the case.

So really, it's not very impressive to be going toe-to-toe in a "debate" over something that you know very little about.

At the end of the day, Medicare Advantage flopped. It was really simple, actually. 10,000 Medicare beneficiaries subscribed to, say, Aetna. It cost Medicare, say $1,000,000 to insure 10,000 average people for a year. medicare paid Aetna $1,050,000 to insure them in lieu of Medicare. At the end of the year, Aetna was not able to insure these people as efficiently and cheaply as Medicare itself was able to do.

Yes, that's true: Medicare (aka the US Government) was MORE EFFICIENT than a Private Insurer (aka the Free Market).

This is a fact, bro, you don't have to take my word for it.

That little experiment is what proves your premise wrong:

"My point is only that it costs more and most people are better off placing the difference likely needed from increased taxes in order to implement the public medical coverage into a savings account."

The fact of the matter is that it WILL NOT COST MORE to an average citizen. It won't. This is for 3 reasons:

1. As demonstrated by Medicare Advantage, the Government is able to provide healthcare services more efficiently than the Private Sector
2. The government isn't making profits, investing in money-losing ventures (as all companies do at some point), and paying dividends to share holders.
3. We are ALREADY paying to provide medical services to the un- and under-insured at the state level because when people need medical help, they just SHOW UP at the hospital, and if they can't pay, the State pays for them.

All that would be required to provide Gov't healthcare w/o taking more

Re:This is it...

[sumdumass]

Asking companies to pick up a loss? Do me a favor... Go research what the hell it is that you're talking about. Seriously. You apparently know nothing about Medicare Advantage, so go visit Google and educate yourself.

Your right, all I know about it is what you are saying and what you said so far amounts to a stupid program. It would amount to asking them to take over a loss directly from the government.

Seriously... WHAT are you talking about?M

I'm talking about how insurance companies work and make money. I explained that so the competent among us could understand but I guess I will do it again for you. Insurance companies make their money by insuring more people then the amount that would need to make claims and then charge premiums along the same order. What you describes was pushing Medicare claims onto them which does not allow them to make money at all.

These people will be making no more or less claims than any other beneficiary that the company insures. These insurance companies are not getting paid by Medicare only when there is a claim. You miss the point ENTIRELY of this program. This is like school vouchers, only for health insurance.

Wrong, they would be making a 100% claims. Medicare pays for claims not premiums for service. An insurance company has over half of it's customers who would not be making a claim at the same time. This program as you presented it is only claims 100% of the time getting passed into the insurance companies.

Basically, at the beginning of the year, Medicare pays the insurance company $x.xx to insure that person for the year. It's like when my employer pays my premium to my insurance company to give me coverage for the month.

That person might not have any claims for the year. Or they might have a catastrophic claim. The same could be said about you or I. Even if the person has no claims, the private insurer keeps all the money Medicare gave them.

This is not what you described earlier. what you described was if X condition costs Y amount of dollar, we give them 5% more and ask them to suck up the 2% difference in administrations costs. What your talking about is more like taking a policy out. But it as little to do with the efficiency of the free market, the free and open market cannot set the premium costs or anything.

And the amount of money they're getting paid to take on each Medicare beneficiary is MORE than an average person in an average year costs Medicare. So, if the "free market" is more efficient than Government (which is your POV), and if the Private Insurer is getting paid to take any given Medicare beneficiary at a rate higher than that beneficiary is likely to cost Medicare for a given year, that insurance company should be able to make LOADS of profit, shouldn't they? I mean, if the Private company ran AT LEAST as efficient as Medicare itself, the fact that Medicare is paying 105% of the average costs should put 5% profits directly into the pocket of the private company. And believing, as you do, that Government insurance would inherently cost more/be less efficient than the free market, the Private company should be able to deliver services CHEAPER than Medicare can. So those efficiency gains should translate directly into more profit for the company.

I don't understand who you are calling a beneficiary? In medicaid/medicare it is anyone making a claim. In insurance, it is anyone with a policy for coverage. So i guess I would have to ask, is this program planning on paying out for everyone eligible for Medicare or just the people making the claims with known conditions? The difference in this means quite a bit. The way you have described the program until not is that 10 people have a condition and will make claims on Medicare. The government wants to pay the average cost of treatment plus the administrations costs minus about

Re:This is it...

[encoderer]

OK, I didn't read more than 3 or 4 sentences of what you wrote. Go educate yourself about what you're trying to talk about. Really. It would produce amazing results in terms of you not looking like such a dumbass. Googling for "medicare advantage" (in quotes) yields 861,000 results.

Re:This is it...

[sumdumass]

Why do I had to go educate myself about something your raving about?

I responded to what you said and based on how you said it. You cannot fault me if you still don't understand it yourself, or at least enough to accurately portray it to someone else. How can you eve make the conclusion of it proves government is better if you don't even know it well enough to explain it to someone else.

All this shows is that you are blindly following someone else and you cannot articulate it in the way they brainwashed you. This is typical of being duped into something. Maybe your should look deeper into it yourself?

New obligation for all /. supercomputer summaries.

[WK2]

It's "petaflops" not petaflop. Please tag this article "flopsnotflop."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[RobertM1968]

Umm... yeah, that was a typo, and I would be really scared over what the NSA would do with that many FLOPS. :-)

Re:This sounds like a simple one to me... who else

[RobertM1968]

Or hopefully this means that the DOE is (using this machine for) concentrating on things that are applicable to the private sector such as Global Warming, the environment, climate, etc, for which a collaboration with the NSF would make sense.

Duh...

[martin_henry]

Hence the bold comma in my sarcastic remark.

DoE and NSF

[DragonWriter]

Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine.

Really? Seems to me that the NSF and the DOE Office of Science tend to work together a lot, and sharing facilities, cross-detailing personnel, etc., are pretty common between those two organizations.