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.

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.

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.

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?

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.