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The UK's Fastest Supercomputer
bmsleight writes "The Guardian has a story on the HECToR, The largest supercomputer in the UK — around five times more powerful than its predecessor, HPCx, which is also at the University of Edinburgh. It measures up well internationally, sitting at 17 in the top500.org list of the most powerful computers in the world."
The UK GDP is 5th in the world (nominal) or 6th in the world (purchasing power parity). If our best supercomputer is coming in at 17th, we aren't spending enough on research.
Not to belittle this project, of course, building the worlds 17th fastest supercomputer is an achievement in anyone's book - but it is a sign of where the UK government is weak.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The people who truly understood how our Nuclear stockpile worked are all older and retiring. For years and years it's not been a field of study that was popular with Phd students. Now we're in the situation where the people who know what's going on are retiring and there are not enough new folks coming down the line that understand what's going on. Add to that the fact that you can no longer actually set one of these beasts off and they have been sitting idle for decades. What's the state of the current stockpile? The only way to predict how these decades old weapons will react is to simulate them with a supercomputer as best you can.
Yes, I remember people in the meeting kept calling it 'Son Of' but had to be corrected! Oh how we laughed at political correctness gone mad!
But is the machine room it lives in called Hector's House? Its instant nostalgia for any Brit kid in his or her late 30s/early 40s I reckon.
Except it's not doing research. It's eavesdropping on all electronic communication passing our borders. Welcome to 1984, say hi to Big Brother.
Money for nothing, pix for free
The CPUs are arranged in a Torus shape, according to here. I've seen a lot of these parallel computers with this shape. I can't think of how to make Google tell me this, so perhaps someone here could. What is it about the torus that makes it a good shape for this situation? Have other shapes been tried?
I have the feeling that an arrangement where the connectivity of vertices (CPUs) was distributed according to a power law (i.e. a few vertices with lots of edges, most with not many at all) would minimize the distance between any vertex. I don't think a torus gives you that. Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way though.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Ah, but you see I am looking *down* the road a little bit and now where we are currently at. Congratulations to your family on their current or future academic accomplishments, but you have to know that the statements that I made are based on factual conditions of funding from both the NIH and the NSF whose budgets have not even kept up with inflation.
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but as a college graduate in engineering from (early in) that time frame,
You might have picked the right field for short term gains.
with younger siblings (my youngest is 11 years my junior) interested in education/scientific fields:
Things may be fixed by the time your siblings are interested, but it will take at least a decade to fix the damage that has been done to science and science funding over the past several years. In the early 90s we spent much effort funding science and education and encouraging students to go into these fields, only to pull the rug out from underneath them when it came time to have them get started becoming independent scientsts. I've been fortunate in terms of funding and worked hard to maintain our position, but many junior (and senior) scientists are very worried about their funding.
one brother a pilot with a BS,
Then both you and he should know what a mess our current domestic airline industry is and unless he is a pilot for Delta, he is not doing nearly as well as he used to before the airlines had to deal with the increased costs of security, delays due to insufficient infrastructure, fuel costs that have tripled, etc...etc...etc...
one becoming a teacher,
God bless them for going into such a low paying career. I briefly attempted teaching junior high school before returning to graduate school when I realized that even as little as a graduate student makes, it was still more than what a teacher makes. If we truly placed a value on our teachers, we would not have the lack of commitment to the profession in terms of requirements for standards and low pay.
my sister studying to be a medical doctor
I am a principal in a medical clinic where we have about a dozen docs, our own MRI and CT scanners and about 100 total employees. On top of that, I teach medical students and am involved in the selection of medical students at my university. I think that I can say with some authority that medicine in this country has changed and not for the better. Even worse, we have not made any progress over the last few years on fixing any of the inherent problems with providing medical services in this country and in fact, have accelerated the damage being done by further limiting our options. Your sister is heading into a profession that is horribly broken in the US and is in need or a dramatic overhaul. Hopefully she can be a part of the solution...
Hey, in fact, we are in such desperate need of physicians if you know a neurologist or a cardiologist that wants to joint our practice, send them my way. If we hire them, I'll cut you a check on the spot for $10,000. I am serious. There are rural places in this country where physicians are simply, almost impossible to find.
and my youngest brother still in high school, but very into science
Cool. As one in science, I would very much like to encourage him. But we need to fix things to enable us to continue to stay a leader.
- I'd have to disagree. I could go on and on
Because we live in a (mostly) free country, that of course is your prerogative. But ask anyone in the trenches of science and education and they would have to be honest with you and say how things are. From this scientists/educators perspective, we need to change our approach.
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You need to look up "Sassenachs" in a dictionary. And then note carefully the geographical location of the city of Edinburgh.
You might, too, want to note that the University of Edinburgh has a very low percentage of Scots-born students and staff.
It wouldn't hurt you to also note that "Scotland" is a figment of your imagination. It's a collective delusion without any legal status or basis in current fact. While it was 400 years ago, today it's not a country, not a nation, not a state, -- merely a convenient way of defining a geographical area where certain local laws apply. It has very little autonomy - and far less than any German, Spanish or US state does.
Do you seriously think that Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth or Dundee have ANYTHING in common? Glasgow has far more in common with Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle than anywhere in "Scotland". The parliament is just a new way of scamming more local government funds without any true representation. In this, it replaces the Regional Councils and takes their scams up one notch higher.
Sorry, but despite being born in Edinburgh, I'm seriously tired of small-minded, chip-on-the-shoulder Scottish-Nazism.