Slashdot Mirror
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."
No-one ever got fired for buying IBM!
...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.
Seems a good bet it's a Blue Gene/P.7 91.wss
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
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.
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.
1 Petaflop?
Were any animal rights activists harmed in the design or manufacture of this computer?
"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!
The government can't save you.
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.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
A NSF machine? I wonder what a Not Safe for Work machine would have on it? PORN!
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 :(
www.purevolume.com/martyd
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.
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
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.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
"Dude, you're gettin' a Cray!"
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Aw c'mon, we all know it will only output 42.
The
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.
The DoE has $4 billion p.a. for such tasks; not counting money from military budgets.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I think you hit the nail on the head. Show me a $200M government contract award that WASN'T challenged by the folks who didn't get it...
E pluribus unum
Let's see how much each one gets each year:
DoD: 400 bil. US$ (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.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
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.
Yum. Yum.
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?
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.
The Farewell Tour II
Anyone else read the headline and thought that someone decided to give a $200Mil computer to IBM for free?
It's not even funny.
...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...
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.
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
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...
It's "petaflops" not petaflop. Please tag this article "flopsnotflop."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
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.
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? 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
Umm... yeah, that was a typo, and I would be really scared over what the NSA would do with that many FLOPS. :-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Hence the bold comma in my sarcastic remark.
www.purevolume.com/martyd
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.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
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.