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Iran Builds Supercomputer From Banned AMD Parts
Stony Stevenson writes with the news that, despite a ban on US PC hardware, Iranian techs have built an enormously powerful supercomputer from 216 AMD processors. The Linux-cluster machine has a 'theoretical peak performance of 860 gig-flops'. "The disclosure, made in an undated posting on [the University of] Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country."
...he now has the justification for invading Iran.
Not only can they never be allowed to have nukes but it will be a cold day in hell before they are allowed to get the processing power to run Windows Vista!!!!!
Its not too hard to just buy a bunch of used PC and ship them there, is it?
Why are they even banned from using US PC parts?
Epic. Just epic.
Folks, no need to panic or call for invasion just yet. They still have twenty two more letters before they can get from AMD to WMD.
Too bad they won't know what to do with all that power...
Intel Inside, at least we don't support terrorisim....
JUST NO to the Military-Industrial-CONGRESSIONAL Complex.
Sincerely,
K. Trout
Im shocked that there may be resellers who are less than reputable!
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
The supercomputer's real name is W.O.P.R.
Is it just a coincidence that their supercomputer has 216 processors which is 6 * 6 * 6 ???
Somehow, those clever bastards managed to buy a bunch of highly esoteric computer parts that I can run down to a local computer shop and pick up for at most a couple hundred bucks a pop. What evil persons could have sold them all those processors?
The breathless panic in the American media about everything Iran does is getting a little old.
10 years ago, yes. But, seriously, it takes only about $30k to build a tera-scale system with commodity parts. And, if single precision is OK, $2400 will get you 900 "gig-flops" worth of PS3s. Last time I went through Bahrain, you could buy those in the airport for your kids, so they shouldn't be too hard for the Iranian government to buy.
Not sure what the story is here...
-Chris
When's the last time AMD motherboard and CPUs have been manufactured in the US? AFAIK, they're all fab'd in Taiwan or China. These parts may never have entered of left the United States at all.
Gotta wonder who "lost" their shipment of 216 AMD processors.
"I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence." - Gen. Ripper
This is just one more instance of US foreign policy failing in its purpose and then acting to hurt America.
Iran and Iranians can get their computers now and always have. You might as well have American companies making the money.
Same thing with Cuba.
Trade and diplomacy work much better than sanctions and war. You want Castro to fall? Flood Cuba with American tourists and artists.
I guess we'll expect to see Team Tehran moving up in the seti@home rankings.
Here we go again.
they support terrorism, at least put the CEO in guantanamo.
Of course AMD has no clue, there are a large number of ways the parts were smuggled in. How is this news?
Bearded Dragon
It's the country's biggest, but it's by no means huge. We probably have half a dozen within those specs on site. Not to mention it would be pretty easy for them to go to a non-embargoed country and bring some back, or work through a non-authorized resale agent.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Why do all that work to achieve a theoretical peak performance of 860 GFlops, when a IBM Cell processor has a theoretical peak around 1000 GFlops?
My point is that the theoretical maximum speed rating, all by itself, doesn't fully characterize the relevant performance of a given computer for the computations which it's intended to perform.
Or maybe the Iranians really should just make a trip to Best Buy...
I suggest that from now on, we just use "Obligatory .... Nevermind" and bypass any pretense of anything else.
....
See below for example
Subject: Obligatory
Comment: Nevermind
We'll eventually just shorten it to
Subject: Nevermind
Comment:
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Cue the hawks in 3...2...1...
but another to know what to do with it. Also, it wouldn't be that hard for them to build a distributed supercomputer using older systems on a LAN with MPI or PVM.
Yea but does it run Linu... Oh, so it does. Excellent.
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
To just buy a cluster of Playstation 3s, especially since they do have Gigabit ethernet and Linux toolflows.
Test your net with Netalyzr
216-cores is no longer anything more than a small cluster. if you wanted, you could do it with just 10 very mundane 2-socket, quad-core chips - less than a 2-foot stack of nodes! this one sounds like a 54-node 2x2 cluster, which would be about a rack and a half, and set you back about $100k (more depending on how fancy you get with interconnect, storage, etc.)
to put it another way: it's a long way from even the bottom of the top500 list.
Seriously, I'm getting tired of governments who are scaring their citizens about Iran's threat to this world. I'm glad they were able to achieve this despite all the embargoes against them.
This has to be bogus... who would say "gig-flops"? I thought that's what happens at a bad local band performance (the gig flops).
stuff |
...the implosion dynamics of the fission weapon they aren't building.
"The Iranian supercomputer falls far behind the world's fastest computers. In November, the BlueGene/L System, jointly developed by IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy was ranked No. 1 in the world with a benchmark performance of 478.2 teraflops. A teraflop equals a trillion calculations per second."
Indeed, the article mentions at the end that it falls far behind the rest of the world. In fact, to make the Top 500 this year you had to have a supercomputer worthy of 5.9 Teraflops.
This tells me that there are university professors and students who are passionate about hi-tech. That passion is a productive alternative to the other model we have of Iran as a bunch of wild eyed fundamentalists who want to bomb the world back to the 8th century. Perhaps this competing force of moderation in Iran will grow its influence through hi tech and universities.
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these !
Don't you get it. We have to be afraid of Iran. They are a threat. Ahmidnidaklsjadeasred, whatever, wants to end civilization as we know it!! With this SUPERCOMPUTER they could calculate the exact coordinates of New York and bomb it into oblivion!! (end sarcasm)
Seriously though, Iran is a scapegoat for US politicians. They can't handle, politically, the fact that their foreign policy initiatives fail consistently in the Middle East. They need a shadowy, vageuly evil figure to pit the fear of the electorate against the critical thinking of the electorate, which is the side that says invasions, coups, and exploitation aren't working. If it weren't for the Iran, the Iraq war would have zero political viability. Instead, Iran provides a "threat" so it becomes politically viable to call for indefinite troop deployment.
This is a most bizarre case of symbiotism. Ahmadinejade is pretty much an idiot (see no gays in Iran comment) who doesn't really have all that special of a record. Is he a threat to world civilization, probably not. He does, however, say enough dumb things that he gives political capital to his enemies in the west. His enemies in the west return the favor by imposing sanctions, threatening pre-emptive attacks, etc. It's a twisted quid pro quo kind of thing. He gets to appeal to Iranian nationalism against the threat of American attack, and the White House gets to appeal to Americans' fears of an evil terrorist state with nukes and a supercomputer.
Moral of the story is that fear, uncertainty, and doubt breeds political power. Any time someone tells you to be afraid, take it with a grain of salt.
I got a catholic block.
...AMD promptly voided the warranty on all parts shipped to Iran. Let's see them try to RMA something now! Burned!
How can we (United States) have export bans on components which are ALL made in China???
This is notable because it is the largest amount of computer power assembled that will never be used to collect porn.
... perhaps we should google-bomb it :-p
I'm not sure this all that big of a risk since computers have been around for a couple of decades now. It sounds like they just set up a Beowulf Cluster and didn't even use all the nodes possible.
"Beowulf Clusters are scalable performance clusters based on commodity hardware, on a private system network, with open source software (Linux) infrastructure. The designer can improve performance proportionally with added machines. The commodity hardware can be any of a number of mass-market, stand-alone compute nodes as simple as two networked computers each running Linux and sharing a file system or as complex as 1024 nodes with a high-speed, low-latency network." as quoted from http://www.beowulf.org/overview/index.html .
Does anyone who actually supports these embargo laws ever really think they'll stop said country from getting what they want anyway?
Embargos are a token gesture as most. Political foot-stomping.
No one is actually surprised that Iran can get all the banned US goods they want, are they?
The idea that you can somehow 'ban' a country from getting ahold of a commodity is ludicrious and stupid. The only way you could really do that would be to effectively seal and close their borders militarily and embargo them to the point that you controlled all of their travel and trade outside of their borders. Good luck with that.
Why Iran is not (apparently) allowed to have nuclear energy, or high powered computers? Have they ever detonated a computer guided nuclear weapon in someone else's country?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Mohammed.
What good is a Weapon of Mass Destruction without Ammunition of Mass Destruction? An ICBM without a warhead is just a rocket crashing. A water truck without anthrax is only useful for agriculture. It's the ammunition that counts as much as the weapon. So actually, WMD is a lot closer to AMD that you suggest.
Think global, act loco
"Trying to ban computer chips from reaching anyone who wants to buy them is like trying to ban corn, oil, gas, rice, or soybeans."
Those are easier to interdict because they are bulk products. A shipping container of computer parts is small and easy to send most anywhere.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Did you wander in from timecube?
Only Home Basic, and it'll be slow.
http://www.mhall119.com
Damn..that was brutal. But some idiots deserve to be smacked down hard.
big uncover job and the amd quad-core bug is part of a hidden back door that will be gone in the next rev and this is where the stop ship cpus are going.
Iran has vowed to annihilate Israel, which is an (undeclared) nuclear power. It would be impossible for Iran to have anything resembling a chance of doing so without effective nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them, and impossible to get a nuke working reliably without testing it. (Imagine if you're Ahmadine-Jihad and your nuke misfires, showering undetonated uranium over downtown Tel Aviv; not only has your glorious jihad failed before it ever began, but you are, to all intents and purposes, screwed.)
Were Iran to test a nuclear weapon in real life, they would get noticed pretty quickly (the seismic readings would see to that), and a preemptive strike would soon follow. (Once there is no doubt that the Iranians are working on nuclear weapons, there'd be little resistance to ensure that they don't succeed; it's not only the US, Europe and Israel who are worried, but their Sunni Islamic neighbours, regarded by them as apostates, are none too comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran. Add to that Ahmadine-Jihad's support of the concept of martyrdom (the Iranian government actually recruits suicide bombers for jihadist attacks against US/Jewish/Sunni interests), and you've got the sort of nuclear power that can't be trusted to do the sensible thing and sit on its nukes as a defensive weapon of last resort.
As such, supercomputing power of this sort would be vitally important in running nuclear simulations and perfecting a bomb.
The purpose of this machine is forecasting and meteorological research, which imho is a reasonable thing for the nation of Iran to do. Granted this just what they say the computer is for, but we only know about it because they announced that they built it. If it was a computer that designed nuclear weapons (or whatever), we can assume they wouldn't tell anyone about it.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
TFA doesn't say how much memory they have, but with Vista, 4 TB of physical memory will do you much more good than 860 "gig flops" of CPU cycles.
All their diabolical processing cycles! Useless!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
If it uses Ogg Vorbis, Bush and Jobs will meet in Washington, DC to discuss invasion strategies. Rumors of the iBomb are beginning to surface...
technical writing / development
You're on. Lemme get done talkin' to Dick here and sign a thing and dem Iranianites will have to liberate some sand into bread just to eat! Maybe even have to buy air! Wonder if I could invest in a company that does that......
-George Dubya
Most US nuclear weapons were designed using computers under 1 MIPS. Even the fusion bombs. About 40 years ago, I was visiting a UNIVAC 1105 installation (the biggest all-vacuum-tube computer ever built as a commercial product, designed when Gen. Leslie Groves was at UNIVAC), and they'd done some work on bomb design. It took about two days per run, and they'd run the program at the same time some other location was running it. Every three hours, the console typewriter would print out a checksum, and they'd phone the other location to see if it matched. If not, they had to back up to the last checkpoint tape and restart.
This huge machine was comparable in power to a PC/AT with an FPU chip; a good 1985 desktop.
The silly thing about export controls on computers is that the U.S. Government keeps increasing the control threshold for "supercomputers". The current threshold is 750 gigaflops, which is a few racks of servers. In 1995, it was 2 gigaflops, or about where a low-end PC is today. Back in 1987, there was a big flap when Iran tried to get hold of a VAX 8600, which is about 0.005 gigaflops. But bomb design isn't getting any more difficult.
Any modern laptop can do the calculations necessary for bomb design. Deal with it.
800 GFLOPS was "enormously powerful" like 15 years ago. Today that's like what? A PS3? donour
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
IS NIGH! THE END IS NIGH! :-|
They're gonna build the world's largest and deadliest computer virus with it and unleash it on everyone and we'll all be screwed.
(I think Intel provided them the AMD's as some sort of prank)
This just in from our reporters in the field. We're getting word that... good lord! The Iranians have used their new supercomputer to develop Duke Nukem Forever. God help us all.
that doesn't bother you?
whether pro-usa, or anti-usa, or pro-israel, or anti-israel, this should bother you, regardless
i'm sorry, but in this world, very little concepts frighten me more than a theocracy with nukes
and i'm not talking about the loose propagandistic label of "theocracy" one might apply to say, the usa, because the current president (who will soon be gone) is a conservative southern baptist. i'm talking about an actual, stated, as clearly implied in the constitution, theocracy. as in, our government serves god and those unelected grumpy old men over there interpret what he wants. the real deal, a real genuine clearly stated theocracy
any rational human being should feel threatened by a theocracy with nukes. regardless of any of your other concerns in the middle east, or any of your other politics in general
http://www.iranonline.com/iran/iran-info/Government/constitution.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Its ok they are both member of the "Axis of Evil", so I'm sure they have a "Strategic Alliance"
...an Iranian cluster of these!
part of their resistance to giving up their nuke program rests squarely on simply being insulted that they should listen to anyone but themselves about what to do
ok, fine, i respect that independence and fierce pride
however, i don't think i could be very proud of myself if my tech consisted of stuff i stole from my archnemesis. national pride i think must rest on something stronger than "ha ha! i stole your stuff!"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's simple, we can simply and easily neutralize their supercomputer by giving them 216 copies of Windows Vista to install on it, for free! That will sink them, for sure!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
one of a supercomputer's main uses is modelling complex systems. which historically has been such things as hurricanes, climate change, earthquakes, the weather...
and nuclear bombs
you want to point at an iranian supercomputer and say "see? they are not interested in just the bomb!" when acquiring a supercomputer is pretty much part of the bombmaking shopping list
are the iranians hellbent on making the bomb? are they not?
not the point
the point is: how can you be so colossally naive?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...by the USA!
Blar.
As long as it's not "Global Thermonuclear War".
Ever heard of North Korea?
trying to get nukes
those are both 2 obvious facts
forget all of the spin you have heard from every ideology and government entity in the entire world
doesn't just those two facts, all by their very selves, concern you, regardless of what anyone else's thinks for or against iran?
a theocracy
with nukes
what does that mean to you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...their first one they will have more nukes pointed their way than you could possibly imagine. I believe there are plenty of very smart people inside Iran who understand this clearly and they will not allow their whacko president to get that close to completing a nuclear weapon or to use it if he completes one, but they certainly will let him run his mouth off at the West all he wants, because that posturing and saber-rattling jazzes all their collective nads. The Russians will not let them get too close either, as they've got some kind of leash around his neck too, and when the time comes to pull that leash, they'll pull it hard. Ahmanjihad or whatever the fuck his name is, his days are numbered. He will not be able to outlast the next generation of young Iranians who are growing up in their restricted society, for they have tasted a bit of how the rest of the world lives, and they will not be satisfied until they can have more of the same freedom for themselves. This is Iran's establishment Islamic theocracy's biggest nightmare... the loss of the hearts and minds of their young people to Western ideas, and that nightmare for them is coming true at an accelerating pace. When a big wave comes at you, you must either learn to surf on top of it, or drown underneath it, and the old ways of their Islamic Republic won't even be able to swim, let alone surf.
Bomb design is trivial these days. Most of the information is easily available, and one modern computer has far more power then the systems used to design most current US weapons (most of which are 60's/70's tech). Iran doesn't need a three stage hydrogen bomb that can fit in a suit case, even low yield "fat man" style bombs would radically alter the balance of power in the region.
The hard bit is the massive infrastructure needed to get weapons grade fissionable's.
The ban on exporting computer hardware to certain countries is retarded when average consumer electronics have more power then the super computers of a few decades past.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Current-generation microprocessors do not classify as commodities. The designs are secret. There is not a large number of manufacturers only able to compete on price. This is in contrast to actual commodities such as corn, oil, gas, rice, soybeans or possibly RAM.
You might classify R3000-level microprocessors as commodities, but nothing you'd actually want to make a supercomputer out of is commodified yet.
Just because something is common and easily available doesn't make it a commodity.
think about it
over there, are a bunch of americans pissing in their pants
or
over there are a bunch of americans yawning and who don't care
hmm
either way, i'm still worried about a theocracy with nukes
do you get my point? your ppinion seems predicated as the opposite of what americans think, not really any more sense than that
are the american's ridiculous for getting their panties in a twist because ahmacrazyguy wants nukes?
maybe
but i think its even more ridiculous to say there's no problem in iran simply because the americans say there is something wrong in iran
i'm sure osama bin laden washes his hands after using the toilet. so do i. that's something he and i have in common. so should i stop washing my hands after using the toilet to remove that commonality? hey, i have a crazy idea: why don't i wash my hands after using the toilet, and i can still hate osama bin laden
imagine that
believe it or not, you can still hate the usa, even when you don't automatically state as your opinion the exact opposite of what americans say
in other words, it's actually possible for you to be worried about a nuclear armed tehocracy AND to hate the americans, at the same time. that worrying about a nuclear armed theocracy doesn't automatically make you an amaerican neocolonial imperialist warmongering neocon repulican. really
to you, it should be a more important principle to be worried about religious fundamentalists with nuclear weapons than to kneejerk against whatever americans say
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Indeed, quite convenient that you left the part out where the CIA of the USA took out the freely elected leader and installed a dictator that would comply with US interests.
Not particularly a minor point. I mean, how would you feel about China doing that to your country? I suspect you would be a bit miffed.
i made a preemptive strike (pun intended): in my original post, i said a neocon southern baptist in the white house is not the same as an actual, stated, constitutionally defined theocracy
let's put it this way: in 2009, there will be no more gw bush in power. also in 2009, there will still be a fundamentalist theocracy in the middle east mastering nuclear power
if you still want to make jokes, be my guest. seems pretty serious to me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where do you think they got all those AMD CPUs? Every time Microsoft releases their next version of resource hog, all the old systems get shipped overseas for recycling. You don't think some industrious folks in India won't pull the best of the lot out of the pile and set them aside for good cash customers?
Have gnu, will travel.
Al Gore may be an "idiot" too, but he actually did author and sponsor and promote key pieces of legislation that got the NSFnet funded. The Internet probably would've happened anyway in due time, without the contributions of Gore, but the work he did in Congress did get the whole thing rolling much more quickly and sooner than it would've without him. As a staunch conservative, I hate to give him that credit, but it is true.
Regardless of their reasons - I don't blame them for wanting to develop nuclear weapons. It seems that once you have one, the Whitehouse gives you respect. Look at NK, China, Pakistan, and the rest...
Until you have a nuke, you're just GWB's scapegoat for the world's woes. When we had the insurance of mutually assured destruction - it really didn't matter who had nukes, as long as you did.
Now with extreme religious sects running amok they give the nuke to some nutjob that knows he's going to be getting 40 virgins for detonating it in some far off land. Now we're all fucked.
Seriously, does anyone really think that any country in the world can be prevented from acquiring ~200 PCs?
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I hear the computer is busy right now calculating how many public lashings an 11-year-old girl should receive before she is hauled up into the sky by her neck and strangled to death for allowing a group of adult Iranian males to forcibly rape her.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
, recall that it comes with Ad-hoc Wireless capability, a thousands of them could easily be transformed into a very capable Linux cluster.
...Think of the children!
And you are shipping thousands (if not millions) to developing country.
Bush, do you see now why the developing country are placing order to buy millions of XO? Now it is very clear - a very cheap Linux supercomputer that could run by hand cranking!
God
I wonder how they are going to operate this computer without the religious police shutting it down immediately. You see - zero is an Indian invention and therefore "kuffar" and unislamic. So they can only use 1s.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these... ...used to help the terrorists win.
Doesn't the PS3 have 1.8 Teraflops? A single PS3 is more than twice as powerful as this "super" computer.
I am hardly an expert in middle eastern politics, but I somehow doubt most of the posters in this thread are either.
What makes Iranian religious radicalness worse than U.S. religious radicalism are the following.
1) Their church dictates their laws, so the church is the state.
2) The extreme forms of this religion are known to encourage things like holy war suicide bombing
3) Incidents like advocating the execution of cartoonists and teachers who name a teddy bear after a religious figure are hardly the mark of particularly rational thought processes.
I am not saying that Christian Extremists are any better, but at least the worst of those excesses were discarded after the Inquisition went out of style.
The primary problem as I understand it is that Iran is the sort of nation that wants a because they want to use it directly, as opposed to just using it as a deterrent to invasion. People who believe they are doing 'the good works of god' do not exactly have the best track record on these things.
END COMMUNICATION
Seems like the problem could just solve itself. No holy land to fight over anymore, people will take it away from themselves (except those with radiation suits-- imagine the irony in that, people visiting the holy radiation dump.)
Who will they scare us with after they lose the middle east? Will people get a little more sensible after such a disaster with a long lasting impact on the whole world? Sadly, it might save more lives in the long run. Bad situation either way.
Maybe Israel should nuke Iran, at least then they can no longer exploit the WW2 genocide. I can't believe it still works so well; I have to be careful what I say or the jewish brown shirts will attack me. The control they have of the Israel issues in the USA is so 1984.
Most people there don't want to die for nothing. The reality is most people die for nothing. It is sad when their life is cut short (by disease, accident/disaster, crime, or pointless war.)
Talk about being uninformed, why do these make it to the default page view?
I actually have a screenshot of that.
Perhaps if you'd taken the time to click to the story, then actually read the whole thing, you might have noticed a link to the original story tucked down at the bottom. In InformationWeek. A US publication.
You will now apologize for being so hasty in your judgment and rude in your choice of terminology.
This has grown into an incredible plethora of resulations under several Departments, chiefly DoState administering ITAR (International Arm traffic) and DoCommerce administering EAR (non-weapons, including "horses by sea").
I'm not at all surprised Iran got the computers. It is very hard to make a tight embargo without physical blockade. In this case, a French company could have ordered the CPUs, found that sales did not materialize and surplussed a bunch, perhaps to Russian merchants. The Iranians are not idiots: they know who will sell to them and who cannot. They won't waste their time shopping in the wrong stores.
Dude, the nuke genie was out of the bottle the day the US government used nukes on civilians.
Fast forward, and now terrorism and yes even nukes are considered acceptable IF they shorten the struggle ("saving lives") against their government, the USA, New World Order, Globalism, or the faux wizard behind the curtain. The precedent was set.
I'm sorry to inform you that the USA is not in a position to act as world police anymore.
I submit to you that the entire cost of the Iraq war is funded with Chinese and Saudi loans.
A war-rationing effort in the USA would hurt OUTSIDE INTERESTS MORE - after all, the USA produces few hard goods that can't be bought elsewhere.
Neo-cons know all this, and pushed for tax credits to promote outsourcing, and shuffle their loot to China and Saudi Arabia. In this light, it's OBVIOUS why many prominent Bush neo-cons hold 'dual citizenship'...
Back to your point -- there's currently no nuke efforts in Iran - our 'facts' are disputed by 20 US intelligence agencies.
That they might someday restart research is based on another assumptions, that ALL nations will have nukes someday. To have any other outcome, you would need a worldwide totalitarian government who would foster in a dark era, by purging the spread science.
You should be more concerned about building America up rather than tearing someone else down. I'm still amazed at how America is full of so many reactionaries at the bottom of their economy... all of whom are being used as tools to drag the country down from the inside.
PS - theocracy is a goal of many who favored Bush. Watch Huckabee take it further.
But does it play Doom?
More like, "But how many copies of Doom does it play at once?"
...nevermind
The silicon wafers should have an image of Muhammad on them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Since they're using AMD, this should be an easy target to visit with your basic heat seeking missile.
Unless, of course, the signature overwhelms the sensor.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
So the Iranians strung together 216 previous-gen 2GHz Opterons... Big freaking deal. This is not exactly rocket science; it's all off-the-shelf commodity stuff, both hardware and software. I know several university research groups that have more computing power than that, let alone supercomputer centers.
If they field a machine in the tens of teraflops, *then* there might be some cause for alarm...
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
My system at work is currently running on 650 blades (a mixture of AMD/Intel, all dual processor, dual and quadcore).
:)
216 Processors no longer qualifies as a supercomputer. This is 2007, not 1997
no taxation without representation!
NM
The idea that you can somehow 'ban' a country from getting ahold of a commodity is ludicrious and stupid. The only way you could really do that would be to effectively seal and close their borders militarily and embargo them to the point that you controlled all of their travel and trade outside of their borders. Good luck with that.
Especially if you can't put your embago in quickly enough to prevent them getting hold of weapons to defend themselves. Anyway most countries can't even seal their own borders.
go ahead and feel threatened by israel all you want, be my guest
but do it for valid reasons, not propaganda
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I built one of these (1/10 the size) on a small budget and with basically two man-months from parts some time ago. Buying the parts will not even be noticed, if you spread it over several vendors. The only harder obtain part you need is the server room and air-conditioning. Face it: By todays standards this a rather small "supercomputer" that you can build easily with standard parts you can get in computer shops or by mail order. Spread it over 100 people and nobody even notices a buying pattern.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
iran has spent the last 28 years chanting death to america and the west in the media and on the streets on a weekly basis
go ahead, be my guest and dislike neocons. fuck neocons
but because you dislike neocons, make sure you don't give a pass to a much, much worse hate group
perspective, scale, context
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IMHO, this is one of the most logical and intelligent comments I've seen on Slashdot in a while. The importance of our trade with other countries (especially China) is all but forgotten these days.
Pong is forbidden by Islamic law. You cannot make images of things, however ugly those images are.
To my understanding, the issue of forbidden images is complex and varied. Islamic law is not a unified monolithic concept -- it has evolved over centuries.
I'm no Islamic scholar. But plenty of information is available on the web. Here's one example:
"It is clear that the hadiths prohibit pictures of animals or people, especially in homes. There is no focus on pictures of Muhammad per se. All pictures of people and animals are forbidden." Link.
Since pong represents neither people nor animals, it should be okay.
-kgj
The Bush administration allowed the Iranian government access to the CPUs as part of several black ops that I have been privy to, thus insuring that when the time to attack grows near, the U.S. will have further proof that the Iranians have an advanced nuclear program. And why not? Bush is providing them with all the materials they need (computing and reactor components, etc).
take a deep breath
use these concepts: perspective, scale, context
right now you are swimming in a truckload of fud and propaganda
omg! huckabee! nukes in wwii! omg!
calm down. you're hyperventilating
let's start with your opinion that the usa is the asshole oft he planet. yeah. ok. whatever. the usa sucks. whatever you like man
guess what: the usa can smell like roses, the usa can be satan himself: as if ANY of that somehow makes it ok for a fucking theocracy to have nukes!
a REAL theocracy. as written in their fucking constitution. not the the fud of couldawoudlashoulda in your head
try to wrap your mind around sobering facts, put off the hysteria, and tell me with a straight face that a REAL theocracy with NUKES doesn't bother you
you may now continue your predetermined game of hate the usa
as if that should have anything to do with your opinion on iran
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...they were only AMD's. I was getting worried there for a second. One day they hope to upgrade to a single Penryn.
Fear the penguin.
and yet still, the idea of the nuclear bomb in the hands of grumpy old men who have the arrogance to say they rightfully interpret the will of god on this planet scares the hell out of me
as it should any rational human being
and this observation, in my mind, trumps everything else. it trumps all of the mideast politics, it trumps all of the israel/ palestine issue, it trumps all of the american warmongering, it trumps all of the "rah rah the americans are coming" nationalism by otherwise liberal students in iran
all of that pales in my mind to the fearsome thought of religious fundamentalists with their hands on a nuclear weapon
and i don't see how anyone in their right mind could not conceive of that as the most important thing going on here
they closed down the program? good
but any whisper otherwise, and i say the world needs to invade iran. all of the trauma and death from that is nothing compared to what religious fundamentalists with a nuclear bomb are capable of
here on slashdot, we are regularly reminded of the peril of religious fundamentalism: creationism, purposefully dumbing down of society, wrongminded social policies, the death of reason and science. and we are supposed to all of a sudden not worry when these people get nuclear weapons?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ha Ha, jokes on Ahmadinejad. The parallel performance increase of Uranium enrichment algorithms doesn't scale well past 30 processors! They overbought by at least 180 CPUs.
So sick of this misconception and ignorance, I really want to insult you somehow, but since that probably won't help much, I'll explain:
There are a few religious radicals in Iran in the lower to mid levels of the government, but they are significantly outnumbered by the other group.
Wanna know who this other group is? Please read on, till the end...
I start with someone you are familiar with; do you consider Dick Cheney a radical Christian or a ruthless businessman which uses religion or any other tool as a means to make profit? like when he talks about supporting the troops does he really care about the troops or he has an agenda of his own?
Well, Cheney is one of the members of the "Other Group", the businessmen, except he is American.
In Iran we have our own businessmen. Since the 'Islamic' revolution of 1979, these people have taken over the government in a country where 90%+ of the economy is owned and operated by the government.
A clear example, is the largest of these business entities: Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), most recent bogeyman on CNN/FOX. While the American media focuses on the 'military' part of IRGC's operation, they neglect to mention the much much bigger side of IRGC.
Revolutionary Guards is the single biggest business entity in Iran, they build all the dams, bridges, tunnels and roads, railroad, they operate civilian airports all across the country, they do the largest mining operations, they own many of the largest and most profit generating financial institutions in Iran and this list goes on forever.
Almost half of the members of the current parliament are former IRGC members, Ahmadinejad himself made his way to being Tehran's Mayor and later, Iran's president through IRGC.
Another example is Mesbah Yazi, a mid-level clergy, known as the mentor of Ahmadinejad, the biggest fucking piece of shit I know in Iran. Plays the same role to Ahmadi Nejad as Dick plays to Bush. But there's another side to this guy, he is also known as "Sultan of Sugar" in Iran. He controls import, distribution and sale of all Sugar in Iran. Believe me, in a country of 70 million population a monopoly on sugar is better than a monopoly on gold mines. He also says that the 'Zionist regime' of Israel is doomed, however nuking them means end of the sweet sugar business for him.
Former president Rafsanjani, former parliament speaker Nategh Noori and many others are businessmen too. They don't give a fuck about religion unless in public when preaching people.
In conclusion, I just want you to think, what benefit does nuking Israel which guarantees a much much harsher reaction from Israel bring to these ruling businessmen? See, that's why Iran, even with nukes is no threat at all to any other country?
All that matters to these people is survival of their business, they are not religious zealots, they don't believe in the second coming or afterlife or crap like what they preach to people. If a day comes where wiping their asses with pages of Quran helps them keep control of their business, then that's what they WILL HAPPILY DO.
Thanks for reading my rant.
on changing the subject and constructing your strawman
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
is not the same thing as despotism
what you just said is the same as saying a reptile is as bad as a black widow spider, because a cobra is a type of reptile. therefore, an iguana is as dangerous as a black widow spider, because it is also a reptile
does not compute
what you just said is secularism is as bad as theocracy, because a fascist state is secular. therefore, a democracy is as dangerous as a theocracy, because it is also secular
congratulations on not understanding your terminology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Really, I don't see what the big deal is. A 216 opteron machine is not very powerful compared to what is commonly available at many universities in the United States. To see the kind of processing power the US national labs have, and the ease of learning how to build/develop for them go to https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/linux_clusters/. This is the page of Lawrence Livermore National Lab's supercomputers. It has an overview of each machine, and technical information on building clusters. OpenMPI is open source, and gcc-4.3 includes OpenMP support. Perceus is an easy to implement cluster imaging system and Torque is a free scheduler. Building clusters nowadays is not any more expensive than the commodity hardware they are made from and a few techs to configure them. Most engineers have been taught at least a little programming, and leaning how to code in OpenMP+OpenMPI is not hard. The fact that they have built a modest supercomputer should not surprise anyone.
How exactly is their form of government supposed to be any more of a threat with nuclear weapons than any other form of governance which posseses nuclear weapons? Why is a constitutional theocracy more dangerous to the world than a 'democracy' ruled by theocrats?
Are the leaders of a theocracy any less motivated by desire for wealth and power? Are they more suicidal than a theocrat, or any other politician, ruling a democracy?
I haven't seen anything in your argument showing why a theocracy is more of a danger with nukes beyond using "theocracy" as a magic fearphrase like "think-of-the-children" etc.
if i told you hitler is better than churchill, because hitler has all the time in the world to gas jews, while churchill has to do good in the war or lose the election, what would you say to me?
now you know what i think of your thinking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...on poor Intel.
How can the export of chips to unsavory foreign powers be controlled? Apparently the US government thinks it can do it by simply wishing it were so.
It's a MICROCHIP. How in the hell are you going to prevent such a small item from making its way anywhere in the world? Somebody can just go to a "friendly" nation, buy a shitload of them, throw them in a suitcase and go back to Iran. How are you gonna stop that?
Maybe what we should be investigating are the MOTIVATIONS behind Iran's push for nuclear technology, instead of focusing on the CPUs which happen to crunch the numbers for them?
Iran didn't _start_ the nuclear arms race in the region. Arguably, Israel did, although their official position is still a "neither confirm nor deny" existence of nukes.
But Pakistan is their eastern neighbor, little further east is India.
Iran is just finally in a position to enter the race. And the fact that the evidence of your senses seems to indicate that having nukes makes you less likely to be invaded by the USA doesn't help to stop proliferation.
Look, the deal with the non-proliferation treaty was, "OK, we all agree that nukes are bad. So these guys who don't have them agree not to pursue them, and those of us that have them agree to start phasing them out".
Does anybody think there's a reasonable chance that the US, Britian, France, or Russia will give up their nukes in my lifetime? Given that the answer is 'no', then how can the US suggest that Iran having nukes is a problem? Is it any worse than, say, Nixon having access to nukes?
And really, how can the US take the position that Israel gets to keep their nukes but Iran can't have them?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
it'd be hard to bomb them into the stone age though :) Joking aside, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for the iranians to rent a bit of time on EC2 or one of it's ilk.
MP3 Search Engine
It is almost certain that China was the source of this. Only in the last few years has AMD moved these CPUs to China. Prior to that , they had to be done in western world because of ITAR. The interesting part of this, is that it does show that America should go into doing fast reactors, in particular IFRs. The reason is that this particular situation proves that if the tech is out of the countries control that it will spread (capitalism at its best), so we might as well create IFRs and burn the plutonium that we have. Perhaps we can use these to buy "waste" from other nations (or have them pay us to take it off their hands).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sounds like AMD found a way to get rid of a couple hundred of their bugged Barcelonas.
They are also using Excell. Their nukes will never work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I mean, seriously, the 8800 GT has a theoretical floating-point performance of 520 GFlops (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf8800_4.html). A single computer with dual 8800's could potentially out class Iran's "super computer". This is not totally crazy, either. The GPU Folding@Home client is two orders of magnitude more productive than the average Windows client. (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats)
It's the 'radical' part. If Jews put bombs on their chests and blew themselves up around civilians because they thought that was the proper way to get to heaven then they'd be as radical as these Muslims. This leads to the question of what those kinds of people who have no qualms about blowing themselves up would do if they did have a nuclear weapon.
Um, I'm no fan of the current theocracy in Iran, but let's not pretend that it was a paradise before the 79 revolution, but they had a secret police, SAVAK, torture of dissidents, unlimited power to arrest and detain any opposition to the Shah.
So, sure, things have gotten worse now, a theocracy is basically the worst case scenario for forms of government, but the point I'm trying to make is that the Shah was set up by the US, UK, and the CIA, and was responsible for some pretty awful stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
So let's recap: The US ran a covert operation and overthrew a democratically elected prime minister, to protect US interests (read: Oil companies). The guy the put in turns out to be fond of things like arbitrary arrest/detention and torture, so after the Iranian people threw him out on his ass, what the fuck do Americans expect Iranians to think of Americans?
And, were it any other country, most of us on slashdot would be saying that the Shah DESERVED to be overthrown. We may not like the successor, but let's not pretend that the Shah and his government didn't have it coming.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
We miss you.
-- Duxup
Getting embargoed hardware is easy ... try find Linux drivers.
Yeah, we should all be for censorship and ignorance instead!!! Yay, team!
We should never check out what they have to say to see if there actually is any scientific credibility to any of it. We should just be ostriches and bury our heads in the sand!
Because that's good science for you: only listening to one made-up story of something that happened eons ago... After all, it couldn't possibly have any flaws in it, even though nobody (except for, arguably, God) was there.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Look, the Iranians probably want a nuke for very sensible reasons:
1) the US is making noise about invading them or attacking them
2) Several of their neighbors have them
If I was Iran, I'd want the bomb too. Only a few of them, basically the minimum number required to be a credible deterrence against Israel or one of my other neighbors nuking me.
Iran doesn't want nukes so they can wipe Israel off the map (OK, maybe in their wilder dreams they'd like to do that), they want nukes for the deterrent effect so that nobody else will nuke _them_.
Israel's got the bomb, but I guess that's OK, as their military functions like an surrogate of the US military. Pakistan and India both have nukes.
Look, I have absolutely no love for the theocracy in Iran, a theocracy's basically the worst case scenario for forms of government. But they aren't stupid. They know very well that were they to use nukes on someone else, (like Israel) that they'd be nuked with a retaliatory strike, either by the Israelis or the US.
So let's not buy into the propaganda that Iran is a threat to anybody else, the US in particular. The US used to stare down the USSR, who did in fact have nukes, delivery systems, tanks, the whole nine yards and a larger population and land mass. Why is it that the USA, a country strong enough to stand up to the USSR, is frightened by a (comparatively) pissant country like Iran.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
The word they use for "regime" is actually the same /word/, and it has the exact same meaning in Farsi. Example of uses of the original word: "le régime de Vichy." Aren't we glad it's vanished from the pages of time? And last time I was in Auvergne, it did not seem to have been wiped off the map. /assumed/ the news was bollocks. Nowadays, most people are ignorant of it.
So there you go. Classic disinformation. The difference between today's corporate media and Soviet media, is that in Soviet Russia, people
Cheap, reliable, modify-able, AMD is the Toyota Helix, the Kalashnikov of processors.
AMDs, WMDs... What's the difference, really?
Nothing really, they're all "east, west, south, and north somewhat".
My other SIG is a Sauer.
You do know that for a simulation you do need to detonate a couple bombs to collect data first, right? You could get it from France, Russia or the USA, possibly from China, but I doubt they would give that to you.
Sarkozy is busy sucking Bush's cock, but he's not going to do anything, unless he wants to end up with a case of severed head like the roitelet he thinks he is.
Name a terrorist organization, that US funds and supplies in either Israel or Iraq. I'll wait... Thanks.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
i don't want war, you don't want war. the great moderate middle of all parts of the worlld does not want war
the problem is that the current ideological climate in the west and in the middle east seems to favor the extremists, who do want war. let us moderates regain the upper hand before the extremists achieve their wish
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bush has been trying really hard to get this war going, but at least he's getting *some* pushback this time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
because if you dislike one extremist, that automatically means you are another kind of extremist. god forbid i'm a moderate who hates BOTH extremists, of ALL ideologies. is that concept so fucking hard for you to understand?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Back in the day, yes computers aided the design of bombs to an extent, but the verification they actually worked came from testing. We'd take a bomb and go detonate it. Well there's a ban on that now, and all nations can monitor others for compliance via seismic readings. Nuclear bombs make a very distinctive wave, and you can't hide it.
However supercomputers have now progressed to the point that you can actually TEST a bomb all in software. They can actually simulate, supposedly at the atomic level, what happens. That's how the US tests their nuclear arms, that's one of the big points behind all those ASCI computers. ASCI Red was declared to be the first computer capable of doing this.
So that would be the worry, is that Iran would be able to design, and test, a number of bombs without anyone knowing. If they had to resort to detonation testing, the world would know the moment they did their first test.
I heard this one where the pilot gave "D Bom" to his mother, who was such a colosal bitch when on PMS that she just picked it up and chucked it at the Japs. Were Iran to test a nuclear weapon in real life, they would get noticed pretty quickly (the seismic readings would see to that), and a preemptive strike would soon follow. Yeah... Just like that invasion of North Korea couple of years ago after they did that nuke test.
I always knew that there was something wrong with that Kim Jong guy, but who would expect him to be an alien bug, ha?
What do you mean it was a movie with puppets? Yeah, right... Next thing you'll tell me there was no invasion of North Korea too. Yeah, right.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Getting good performance out of cluster machines requires some work, but that's what open source software and spare grad students are for. You can't use them for every kind of problem, but they're pretty flexible, and they're certainly good enough for most kinds of nuke design or fluid flow.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's so easy to just buy these parts in India, Pakistan Dubai and other places around there
that they could easily build such clusters.
Besides if they were smart, they just build the clusters here even and run everything here and just ship the results back on CD's. Even better yet, hack into 100's of idle web servers and use there CPU power.
I had a 100 CPU cluster in my garage doing GA and Video stuff, no one even thought twice about it.
I don't know why everyone thinks the US is the only place in the world with advanced technology.
I was in ShenZhen China and India recently, both have computer markets that put anything I have seen in Silicon Valley, New York or Los Angeles to shame.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Fast computers were another piece of export-banned product, though the definition of "super" had to be adjusted when the Playstation 2 embarassed them by being illegally fast, and it's been a sliding scale since then. Back in the early 1980s, a couple of DEC VAXes were illegally exported to the Soviet Union, leading to the Kremvax hoax on Usenet. I don't remember if Vax-class machines could be exported to the Commies at all, but you definitely had to do tons of paperwork for anything like that to demonstrate it wasn't going to be used by the military. I was really surprised by the publicity and panic the hoax got - it was transparent and obvious that it was just a cheerfully-written hoax, but it caught on like the "Bill Gates will send you $200" spam, with lots of people panicked about either Forgery!On!Usenet! or Commies! or both at once. (And of course the first Russian site that did connect to Usenet a few years later called itself Kremvax because that was simply the Right Thing to Do.)
Cryptography was another export-controlled technology - we couldn't even export it outside the US without scads of paperwork. So of course if you wanted to write open-source crypto applications, that was illegal, so you'd write most of the program and let people download their DES routines from an FTP site in Finland. Lots of good PR hacks by people like PGP and the EFF helped overturn that, such as exporting the source code for PGP in a printed book (which *was* legal) which got scanned in Europe, or filing export permit requests for T-Shirts with RSA in 4 lines of Perl (which got denied, but AFAIK they never gave Raph his T-shirts back.) It was pretty obvious during the 90s that unlike some other kinds of technology, the crypto export rules were primarily intended to keep Americans from having widespread wiretap-proof computer applications, and we're still paying for that today every time a laptop with an unencrypted disk gets stolen.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of telling us to go fuck ourselves. Just like their nuclear program. And I think they're perfectly justified in that message, given America's past history with them.
1. a crazed fundamentalist in the white house is restricted in his powers. in a theocracy, the crazed fundamentalist is the ultimate arbiter (except for god, of course... whom he speaks for). furthermore, after 4 or 8 years, the crazed fundamentalist is gone in a democracy. in a theocracy, they have power forever. this is significant. go read the constitution of the united states. go read the constitution of iran. i defy you to think that the threat of fundamentalists starting nuclear war in the usa is equivalent to that from iran. here, i'll help you with first sentence of the first amendment of the us constitution (compare to the iranian constitution i quoted above on the topic of religion): Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
...or does believing no nation should have nukes mean we support iran getting nukes, because the usa has them?!
2. i agree with you that no nation should have nukes. which means i am glad that you stand with me against iran getting nukes, right? while we also declare the usa should dismantle their stockpile, right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
all fundamentalist notions get all wrapped up in doomsday scenarios. a religious fundamentalist strapping on sticks of dynamite believes death is ok if he goes to heaven. now you are going to arm religious fundamentalist with a nuclear weapon, and trust them that this rationale will never appeal to them? cleansing the earth of wickedness and sin to make way for the arrival of the messiah, and to be reborn in heaven as a reward for your efforts. sounds crazy, right? well, religious fundamentalists firmly believe it, and act on it. and now a theocracy is contemplating getting nukes
in other words, you expect me, after seeing all of the loony tunes suicidal, fatalistic, and armeggeddeon thinking from religious fundamentalists, to suddenly believe that they will be full of common sense on the question of self-sacrifice if they were to use a nuke on the armies of satan?
so you want me to believe a crazy person is suddenly going to act sane
got it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
> an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of
> products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country."
Iraq responded, "That's becauase we just sent a guy to the US, who bought a bunch of 'em at the store, put it in a suitcase, and brought it back. We also have copies of Excel, with receipts, for that matter."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No real engineer would design a nuclear bomb that would actually work that goes into the hands of a stupid politician that might try to use it! However, they are handed very real looking toys.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
All the best super villains use Linux just ask this guy [youtube]
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
Prepare for spin, seeing as Bush most likely isn't smart enough to know what an AMD is - only that Iran possess's 216 AMDs, and oil. With Blair gone, its hard to judge what the Brits will do, though it would be fun if they reused their old FUD, informing the public about how fast Iran could launch their AMD's at london.
... to just travel outside the country, presumably on vacation, and buy what you need in a brick-and-mortar store in a non embargo country?
Move sig!
... is this called a Beotollah cluster?
I really wouldn't mind their nuclear energy program if it wasn't based on enriching uranium. There are plenty of other reactor designs that can't be used for nuclear weapons. I'd much rather they use one of those; then I'd have no problem with them having nuclear power.
Obviously, they are playing games with us. They want to have the capability to build a nuclear weapon, though they don't seem to be doing that right now. Also, lest I'm misinterpreted, I think that it would be an incredibly stupid idea to invade them over this. They're still years away from a bomb; we should use diplomatic and economic means to stop them.
Now, if you're wondering why I don't want them to have the bomb, it's because I think they'd use it. I don't want that to happen, no matter who is nuking whom.
to familiarize yourself with the customs, habits, and government of countries you're considering invading.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
While I do believe that nobody should jump to war and Israel ist not all white and Iran deserves to be recognized and all.
Iranian nukes is not good for anyone. Any new country gaining the ability isn't good news. And Iran is not even any country. Nobody wants them to have nukes. And apparantly (if you trust the lates US intel) they, too, decided that they don't want to. At least not yet.
Maybe a secret cabel from Israel told them that the bunkers for the Iranian government elite are not nuke proof.
Heh heh... AMD never authorized 216 chips to be shipped into Iran. And guess what? They didn't authorize some fly-by-night counterfeit product maker in China to make counterfeit chips, either. But guess what? I'm guessing both happened. And I'm guessing these counterfeit chips are what Iran got their hands on. They will most likely process the "one point twenty-one" jigaflops or whatever Iran claims it'll do, but unknown to them, it'll make mistakes on about 88% of them. So when Iran launches a nuke at what they think will be the United States, it'll actually fly all the way around the world and then fall right smack on that idiot tyrant Hitler-wanna-be Mahmoud A-mad-jihad's house.
Now almost have as much super computer power as one of Nvidia's Tesla D870 GPU desktop super computers. Go Iran!
from http://www.ihpcrc.com/Enews.htm
---
The Most Powerful Supercomputer of Iran Designed for Weather Forecasting
Linux is used as the operation system. The other software packages of the system for management and monitoring of system is provided by scientists of IHPCRC. Moreover, some meteorological applications such as MM5 and ARPS have been installed on the system.
There are lots of scientific and industrial applications that engage complicated calculations; obviously, they are not feasible without access to supercomputers. The samples of these applications can be found in Oil industry, Drug Discovery industry, Auto industry, Aerodynamics industry, Petrochemical and Polymer industry. Cluster Technology can fulfill all these applications.
---
Would you stupid fucking Americans please RTFA!?
All you can think of is "nuke, WMD, terrorist" -- your leader brainwashed you!
Shame on you. Shame on your leader. Shame on your whole backwards ideology.
Would you trust that your super-secret-plans-for-nuclear-destruction-of-xxx-country would be safe on a machine you didn't entirely control? I'm not saying that is what Iran is up to here, though a lot seem to think it is, but I know if I was doing something even remotely dodgy I would prefer complete control over the entire system.
Back On Topic: How are these parts "banned" when AMD merely failed to authorise them? Am I missing some small part of law or treaty here?
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
From wikipedia:
In April 1995 a total embargo on dealings with Iran by U.S. companies was imposed by U.S. president Clinton. Trade with the U.S., which had been growing following the end of the Iran-Iraq war ended abruptly.[19] The next year the American Congress passed the Iran-Libya Sanctions act which threatened even non-U.S. countries making large investments in energy.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
The sad fact is, there isn't much the US, or anybody else can do to stop Iran from getting nukes if they really want to.
Military strikes may or may not be effective on shutting down their nuclear program. Iran has located a lot of their facilities in underground bunkers in and around populated areas. Not an attractive place for air strikes, and it's unknown whether or not strikes would actually take out underground bunkers.
One thing we can say for sure though is that military strikes on Iran will lead them to closing the strait of Hormutz, kneecapping everybody's economy. Iran can do that without even breaking a sweat, and mobile launchers means that there will be little anybody can do about it. In fact, Iran doesn't even need to close the strait, just sink enough tankers that the insurance rates are so high that nobody will send their tankers through the strait.
The consequences of attacking Iran are very serious, and we should really think this through before considering attacks.
Besides, what's the worst case scenario, Iran gets the bomb. Big bloody deal. It's not like that automatically gives them ICBM capabilities. What are they gonna do, attack Israel? I'd like to see them try. That'd be a very short war (roughly the time it takes to fly from Israel to Tehran) and at the end, Iran will be flat and glowing in the dark.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
After Ahmadinejad had beaten Bush in Civilization IV GBE four times in a row (2003), he got in trouble. Althoug Bush had been batteling him on a Blue Gene/B powering his massive personal iMax 3D, Ahmadinejad always got the Nuclear Bomb first. The latter reported to be playing on a "Pentium Pro multi core system" with an undisclosed number of processors. Bush had a terribly fitful sleep since this.
After the NSA had found out, that the "Pentium Pro multi core system" was in reality a massive cluster of Iranian people's government-troyan infected home computers, the smart guys developed an ingenious plan: Export restrictions for anti-virus and anti-spyware software were lowered and the Iranian people should be helped to clean up their PCs. They started distribution just one month before THE World Series game between Bush and Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad being beaten down to just 10% of his former capacity failed miserably and was humiliated by Bush, who couldn't resist - against all even begging advisory - to place little virtual churches all over the virtually run over Iran.
In the end President Bush gained back his pride - but the world again lost a little bit of safety: Ahmadinejad was so pissed that he threw out the EIEIO Inspectors and ordered his own dedicated super cluster. And he has NOT decided yet wether to use it for bombs or taking back the secret virtual title...
Actually, that quote from Rumsfeld was a perfectly sensible statement. It's the kind of planning thinking that I've seen on the most successful projects. Rumsfeld was even helpful enough to explain each part, for those too slow to keep up with that nonobvious management insight. Of course, Americans, especially the media that treats us like children, choked on any sentence that repeats any noun twice in two different senses. Just like it could never understand Clinton when he said "it defends on what the definition of 'is' is".
Rumsfeld deserved to be mocked, but for other statements. Like "We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." When there were no WMD, and they knew that.
Rumsfeld was a monster, but mostly because of the unknown knowns.
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make install -not war
You can't bash Microsoft products on Slashdot and get away with it.
In fact what you've built for yourself is a karma pump. Normal people mod you +1 funny, because your comment IS funny but you don't get mod points for that, just visibility. Microsoft reps then mod you "Redundant" or "Offtopic" to try hide your slur on their product, which costs you karma and knocks your score down. Real people then feed you a few more non-karma "+1 Funny"s and boost you back into the range of the MS mods.
Rinse, repeat and say bye-bye to your rep.
It's great evidence that MS marketing is gaming the system though. Who else would have a motivation for stifling a joke?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
At 204+ GFLOPS each, 4 PS3s would match this supercomputer for only $2000. Plus shipping. From Japan, which buys a lot of oil.
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make install -not war
That damned 'Tiger Direct'...
But, on the positive side: just WAIT until Ahmadinejad tries to collect & process all those rebate forms. Suc-ker!
>>Would you trust that your super-secret-plans-for-nuclear-destruction-of-xxx-country would be safe on a machine you didn't entirely control?
What do you mean? TFA said it's running Linux, not Windows.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
They didn't say that supercomputers are required to build nukes. They said that if you're building supercomputers, then nukes are a good problem to work on with them. Not the only way to work on nuke problems, but a good way, and a good use of a supercomputer.
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make install -not war
Isn't that new AMD Spider platform supposed to be scalable up to a Teraflop? If so, I'm singlehandedly planning on outdoing the Iranians sometime next year. Hooray for me! Do I get a Congressional Medal or something? :)
Small countries like Cuba, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan etc. have voted in favour of OOXML in the failed ISO vote. Iran voted against, however. Maybe this is a revenge?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Supercomputers are measured in Teraflops nowadays.
Sure, it would be nice to run my ray-tracer on it, but 650 Gigaflops is just barely a supercomputer...
Lets face it- 860GF as a super computer? I don't think so. A quad quad core intel 7240 3GHz node is 192GF (4 ops per clock* 16 cores* 3GHz): your mileage may vary... Six of these systems would cost less than $100K and give 1.1TF. An infiniband interconnect would cost less than $10K. We are talking a half of a rack of commodity computers... Any staff from a foreign embassy could purchase 6 of these delivered to a PO box (or warehouse address) in the US and ship them through a diplomatic pouch to their homeland- poof 1.1TF "super computer" Any US vendor would have difficulty figuring out export control on a qty 6 procurement (not to mention that they could use 6 different vendors).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FiD7xsSw6s&eurl=http://www.macuha.com/2007/12/video/saddams-weapon-of-mass-destruction/
:P
Now that's fking hilariously damaging, I'm reminded of the comedic segment in V for Vendetta.
Whoever dug this gem up is getting black bagged for sure
Talk about apples and apples.
You're talking about 5% of the GNP, not the budget for the government, which would make it a larger share. Since the Israeli government takes roughly a third (e.g. 32% in 2002), the US contribution would then be at least 15% of the operating budget, not 5%.
Funny comment: my first reaction when I read "a bunch of wild eyed fundamentalists who want to bomb the world back to the 8th century" was to immediately re-read, cause I was wondering if you weren't writing about the Pentagon or the Bushies cabal of the wilfully psychotic.
... moderate me insightful, that I may prosper and live long. Er, anonymously, of course.
I'm just left wondering what the American equivalent of the "competing force of moderation" is supposed to be? Slashdot ? Wikipedia ? Competing forces of moderation, I hail thee
Did anybody really think that these export restrictions have any effect in these cases? All they mean is that certain American companies can't knowingly sell to certain countries; but how should that stop Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, ... from getting AMD chips, really? They aren't exactly huge, and anybody could in principle buy a suitcase full of them in Europe or America, fly to somewhere that is not banned and where they don't control your luggage all that well, at least not for computer parts, and then on to Iran. In fact, you wouldn't take too big a risk if you flew from London, in my experience - not that I have been to Iran, but they don't really check people's luggage other than to ensure that you don't carry weapons or bombs. It is the job of the customs officers at the other end to make sure you don't smuggle illegal things in. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranians would be quite lenient if you tried to bring a load of 'illegal' computer parts into the country.
This is a bit like the ridiculous declarations you have to click on when you download 'restricted' SW from American companies; if you are a terorist or live in one of the banned countries, why would you restrain yourself from lying? Most people in the west wouldn't think twice about it anyway.
Of course they are helping them keep the oil fields up. Do you think you want to go and build these things when you take over the place. Its so much easier when you use their money to build it. Beside, you don't even need to change the contractor, when its time. You just can integrate this in to the existing contract.
Does it run linux?
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." - Mark Twain
They're not suspending their nuclear program. They got a deal on Ebay on those used "Mobile Biological Weapons Trucks" from Iraq that they're turning into "Mobile Nuclear Weapons Trucks". Heck, they'll probably disguise them as "Hasan's Desert Lawn & Tree Service", "Samad's Roto-Router" and maybe even "Mister Softee bin Laden" trucks to fool us. They're just too sneaky ...
This report is brought to you by... doo da doo doo doot... Intel and the new duo snitch processor. Leap ahead by any means available.
I have met some Iranians that have told me about how life actually is in Iran. Very unlike the weird image we have of Iran in the west. Here is a number of bullets:
;)
1) Unlike what people think, including me, Iran is not a desert / barren land like Iraq. It is a very green and mountainous country, especially in the north. They even get snow sometime, so they have skiing resorts in the mountains.
2) The capital, Tehran, is quite amazing. 14'000'000 people and it is quite modern. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran
3) Ordinary people in the country does not: 1) Like religion that much. 2) Does not care for wearing masks and other religious symbols (but this is mandated by law), 3) Love the president, they actually hate him and all of the religious leader. However, they *DO NOT* want another war, like the one in the 70s / 80s, which is why most people just try to ignore their stupid leaders.
4) Iranian people have the same shit as we do in west, they have TVs, they have Personal Computers at home, they have internet access and cable or satellite TV. They have McDonalds, PS3 and coca cola.
5) Using the internet, this is what really got me to understand iranians as people just like us, they download tv-series such as "Heroes" using the same bit torrent protocol as geeks in west. Read that again: Iranian kids and young adults watch the *same* tv-shows as you do!
6) Generally, the banned merchandise this article talks about is quite common in Iran. They have nvidia graphic cards, they have modern fast computers, etc. According to the Iranians I met everything just flows freely into the country through Russia and China. The problem is with exports of, for example, oil.
7) The universities seem quite good and they are serious about science and engineering. As a matter of fact they even have some quite nice industry of their own and a strong economy despite the embargo.
For example, the Iranian GDP, it is quite strong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gdp_nominal_and_ppp_2005_world_map_single_colour.png
If you look at Iranian GDP (PPP) it is the strongest in the middle east, even stronger than Saudi Arabia. It is actually also stronger than many european countries.
Generally it seems Iranians have it pretty good. It is an amazing country with lots of natural resources, strong economy, good education and a very good geographical location wrt trade. They hope their religious nut leaders die and disappear, but do they wan't USA to attack Iran and "liberate" them (AKA create lots of suffering in the every day lives of people)? Not as far as I understand from the people I have spoken to. The ideal resolution to this problem is just let it take its time. Stability is always the key.. Sooner or later enough key-people will have died for the government to weaken enough to make their democratic system more democratic. (as it is now, presidential candidates must be approved by the priests, etc).
So I just wish USA would stay cool and passive about this. It seems nothing good could ever come out of attacking Iran. Also I think that the trade embargoes, which limits for example the oil flow from Iran, is just hurting the Iranian economy, and by extension the Iranian people. The embargo also damange the economy of the rest of the world as well. Everyone loose. IMOHO trade embargos does never work like in theory. A weaker population will for example, be more supportive of a bad government. Just let the Iranian people buy and sell whatever they want and sooner or later they will get rich and brave enough to challenge the leaders.
Also, Iran does actually have some military strength, unlike Iraq. Compared to Iraq, Iran is probably 10 times as strong, or more. So a attack on Iran could very well result in a long war with plenty of causalities on all sides, destroyed economy in Iran, destroyed c
If you're an Islamist fundamentalist (as Ahmadinejad is), the "no winners" argument might not apply. Losing a few million of your citizens to Israeli nukes whilst striking a lethal blow against the despised Zionist Crusader state could be a very efficient way of buying martyrdom in bulk.
They could've gotten much more performance, if they had gotten their hands on PS3s.
According to the statistics collected by Folding@Home (http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats), one PS3 CPU generates 25.391 GFLOPS, while one AMD processor generates 3.891 GFLOPS.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
On one hand I'm going: "Good grief!", but on the other hand I'm like: "Fair enough, if you really don't get it yourself than I guess that is a valid question to ask."
I agree with you that it is really questionable if any form of government is in absolute terms responsible enough to entrusted with nuclear weapons.
Theocracies deny inherent value of human and other forms of life. Nor will a theocracy value truth or equality as a basis for a system of law. By now it seem almost inconsequential that freedom of speech and transparency of government are antithetical to theocracy.
A theocracy will value what its dogma says is important. If that dogma is relatively benign, like Jainism, you might get lucky, while Satanism would seem particularly sinister choice. If the dogma just silly and contradictory, like with the big Abrahamic religion, you're still pretty much out of luck. Governing is a difficult job in the first place and no bonus is awarded for extra difficulty.
Is a theocracy more likely to use a nuclear weapon than any other form of government?
Yes. Before using nuclear weapons offensively (including clandestine use) the top echelon of power will do cost-benefit analysis based on information provided by a bureaucracy. This is true of many forms of government. In a theocracy this cost-benefit analysis is more likely to show a positive ratio than in a democracy, socialist or totalitarian governments. It may well make sense to gamble if the present statue quo is an affront to gods or the possible end result is paradise. To make the matters worse, anyone making these decisions will be deeply indoctrinated in the dogma and as a group will highly likely demonstrate the ill-effects of groupthinking.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
all fundamentalist notions get all wrapped up in doomsday scenarios. a religious fundamentalist strapping on sticks of dynamite believes death is ok if he goes to heaven. now you are going to arm religious fundamentalist with a nuclear weapon, and trust them that this rationale will never appeal to them? cleansing the earth of wickedness and sin to make way for the arrival of the messiah, and to be reborn in heaven as a reward for your efforts. sounds crazy, right? well, religious fundamentalists firmly believe it, and act on it. and now a theocracy is contemplating getting nukes
in other words, you expect me, after seeing all of the loony tunes suicidal, fatalistic, and armeggeddeon thinking from religious fundamentalists, to suddenly believe that they will be full of common sense on the question of self-sacrifice if they were to use a nuke on the armies of satan, even if it kills them? oh no, they killed satan's armies, now they get rewarded with heaven
in iran they are looking for the mahdi i believe. a christian parallel of the mahdi would be the second coming of christ. doomsday scenarios are all the rage in ALL fundamentalist gorups, and a theocracy elevates fundamentalists to absolute power. suicide in the name of the religion isn't a problem when you get heaven for your efforts at killing satan. how does M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction, the principle of nukes in the cold war) work when one side is ready to die and go to heaven for the cause? that doesn't bother you? even if 99% of iranians would mind, a theocracy concentrates all the religious nutjobs in positions of absolute power
here, read about the mahdi
now you tell me again that giving people who believe in doomsday scenario bullshit like this, getting nuclear fucking weapons, doesn't bother you, and isn't worse than say, a democratic republic with checks and balances (where even if the southern baptist in the white house says nuke them all, someone can intervene), or cold atheist technocrats in beijing, or autocratic nationalists in moscow
the assholes in beijing or moscow still want china and russia to continue existing. a fundamentalist nutjob thinks he will go to heaven if he dies fighting satan
ever hear of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
you honestly aren't worried about religious fundamentalist wackjobs with nukes?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
how does opposing ALL extremists make one an extremist? i'm an extreme moderate? isn't that like dry water or bright darkness? an impossible paradox?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Iranium
Just like uranium, except it's jihad friendly.
Take Irans nuclear program and merge it with their AMD Super Computer and you now have a WMD...crap!
I doubt these machines actually have US-built parts in them, as the title seems to imply.
AMD says they ban exports to Iran anyway.. but....
AMDs most advanced fab is in Dresden, Germany. Most motherboards are built in Taiwan, I think mainland China for the Chaintechs and the like, and Germany for aome other models. Cases and power supplys are made in the states, but they're made all over, there's undoubtedly local vendors for that stuff.
The interesting historical precedent I think is Digital. They did not ship VAXes to the soviet union, that's prohibited. But, apparently, they did ship quite a few Russian,language manuals to Japan. (And reportedly one DEC with "to russia with love" written on the inside of the case.) The most twisted result I read of from this was a VAX with a vacuum tube based hard drive controller... the stock controller died, DEC spares were absolutely unavailable, so a vacuum tube based equivalent was locally built and installed.