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DOE Awards 265 Million Processor-Hours To Science Projects
Weather Storm writes "DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects at a governmental level. They recently awarded 265 million processor-hours to 55 scientific projects, the largest amount of supercomputing resource awards donated in the DOE's history and three times that of last year's award. The winners were chosen based on their potential breakthroughs in the areas of science and engineering research, and the suitability of the project for using supercomputers. This year's INCITE applications ranged from developing nanomaterials to advancing the nation's basic understanding of physics and chemistry, and from designing quieter cars to improving commercial aircraft design. The next round of the INCITE competition will be announced this summer. Expansion of the DOE Office of Science's computational capabilities should approximately quadruple the 2009 INCITE award allocations to close to a billion processor hours."
there are botnets out there that are offering the same thing on the black market
The earth is 6000 years old. A computer said it, it's science.
Does anyone know what processors the DoD is using? 265 Million Processor-Hours is a pointless metric on its own, there's a big difference between those hours on a 486 and an Itanium 2 or a modern Xeon. They should have used something like FLOPS to measure the processor power being awarded.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of...
oh, forget it already! I think this meme is tapped.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
What else are DOE machines used for other than research? Isn't this like saying "The Department of Transportation awards 100 million highway miles to travelers" or "NASA awards 100 shuttle flights to astronauts"?
MY computer told me it could enlarge my pen15, but I think that was more Science Fiction than Hard Science (that joke was soo bad, I HAVE to post AC)
Ron Paul is a damn nigger? That explains everything!
megahours? But how many laptop miles is that?
[...]to advancing the nation's basic understanding of physics and chemistry[...]
all you need for that task is a stone dropping from the second floor on some heads. that's the basics of physics and a hell of fun.
I don't get it, they are awarding CPU-hours... Lots of them of course but wouldn't the projects be way more happier with X brand new PS3's?
Because it's already a proven fact that PS3 is twice as useful as a research computer rather than a teenager playing equipment.
...now I can finally finish the calculations for my ultimate doomsday device.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Dear sir you are quite mistaken.
Ron Paul is the most vehemently anti-nigger candidate currently in play. He hates niggers with a beautiful passion. That man is the most dedicated nigger-hater in the country at his power level. Sure, Hillary Clinton may hate niggers more, but dollar for campaign dollar Ron Paul hates niggers more than anyone.
Vote ron Paul 2008
Maybe we should just use those supercomputers to select our next president. Way I figure it, even HAL 9000 would make a better President than pretty much everybody running. Hell, even the Combine Overwatch would do a pretty decent job, so long as you like roasted headcrab and antlion stew for three meals per day.
...advancing the nation's basic understanding of physics and chemistry,...
Ow Im afraid no amount of processor time will help.....its hopeless...
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Anything processed on their machines becomes something they have a stake in, and something they KNOW about, in INTIMATE detail. Nothing runs on my machines with my permission without me knowing something about it. I have a pretty good feeling that the federales are no different. If they're giving out access, you can guarantee that THEY are ALSO getting access to the data that is getting crunched. Wouldn't want any breakthroughs to go to the free market rather than to the strangulated market run by the government, would ya? I mean damn, some inventor might get it into his head to benefit from his own invention. How dare those damn inventors do that? Don't they know that ANY work they do is to benefit mankind, and not themselves?!
So the government found a solution. Donate some of those tax dollars that they take by force each year, in such a way that they will have a stake in any technological breakthroughs that they cannot confiscate and silence outright.
Hey, big surprise. At least they try to keep it reasonably legit. On the soviet side, they would've appropriated your invention ANYWAYS, and given you a wooden plaque and named an institute for you (if your invention was life changing for enough of the masses)... otherwise you'd get a free vacation to the nearest gulag.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Except for Blue Gene (and that's a big exception, since the 2^17-CPU Blue Gene at LLNL pumps out about a billion processor hours a year on its own, and has had another 80,000 CPUs added recently) these CPUs are either 2.4GHz Opterons or 3GHz Core2s; those were and are the sweet spots for building big HPCs.
The list of projects is at
http://www.science.doe.gov/ascr/incite/2008INCITEFactsheets.pdf
They seem mostly to be about fire, in power stations, in supernovae or in fission reactors.
Some nice examples: 27Mhours on lattice quantum chromodynamics, 21Mhours to simulating thermonuclear burning in type-1B supernovas, 18Mhours to figuring out how biofuels burn, 17.5Mhours to determine from first quantum principles how the nickel-56 nucleus holds together, 16Mhours to simulating thermonuclear burning in type-2 supernovas, 12Mhours to attempting to design a carbamate hydrolase enzyme de-novo, 10Mhours to simulating lead-telluride / silver-antinomy-telluride thermoelectric materials, 4.5Mhours to optimise the design of the next-generation linear collider, 5M hours to figuring out why enormous temperature gradients persist in liquid-sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactors and a further 14Mhours to liquid-sodium reactor design in general, 4M hours to figuring out exactly how multiple burners in large power-station combustion chambers light one another, 3.5Mhours to trying to understand why it's so hard to hydrolyse cellulose, 3.5Mhours to understanding how flame fronts move in the complicated gas mixtures obtained from coal gasification, half a million hours for oceanic circulation, three quarters of a million hours for flow of dense suspensions, ten million hours on catalyst design.
And, for some reason, a million hours on porting Plan-9 to the Blue Gene system. I presume this allows you to crash and reboot the entire 200kcpu system enough to identify ten bugs. Also eight million CPU-hours to developing better HPC libraries.
I would be interested to know the amount of idle time there is on these supercomputers; a friend of mine from mersenneforum.org got a week on several hundred Opterons in France over Christmas, which was enough to do most of the work required to factorise a few numbers of fairly unreasonable size - sadly, there's a second step in the factorisation which requires an SMP machine, and the biggest SMP machine I have is an Intel Q6600, so completing the factorisation is taking three weeks on a single desktop in my back bedroom.
Look, I don't know who the DOE are. I don't even know what country they're in. This is an international site -- is it too much to expect some basic information?
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
That's funny, there was an Asimov story 'Franchise' about just this. I think it's partly a joke, but it has a world in which statistical analysis is so perfect that a computer (Multivac naturally) chooses the perfect 'average' man and that man's one vote is the sample it uses to measure who must get elected. Funny.
So how many laptops per forthnight is that?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Define your acronyms the first time you use them. This summary got it half right. If the submitter fails to do this, please pick up the slack editors. If you don't know what to put, that should be a red flag not to post it.
This should be just about enough time to burn one DVD.
Have gnu, will travel.
The catch is that those 256 million processor hours are being given on a single 6502 processor.
... and then they built the supercollider.
265 million hours of computing time, how much do they really have?
Assuming they've donated this time to be used during one year, that means they've got around 30,000 processors idle.
Which makes me wonder how much computing power the NSA has. I had always assumed that it would be less than the number of people on the planet, but now I'm not so sure...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Mod me down all you want. This matters more to me than the topic, or your funny "Mod points."
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..