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Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin
SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
So now we know why there is such a shortage of quad-core AMD Opterons otherwise.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
that it completes an infinite loop in only 5 seconds!
Perhaps it can run spell- and grammar-checks on Slashdot submissions!
A: The more flops, the more powerful it grows.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What, is it an android from Blade Runner? It's going to die in four years? Slashdot summaries are the Suxx0rs!
And the other half is deployed in Dallas?
Doesn't like cognitive dissonance? Have you ever _BEEN_ to Austin?!
(Score:0, Redundant)
Yeah, I suppose a cluster is redundant.
Gee, this computer is the BIGGEST flop generator of them all!
That's too bad.
NO! That's GOOD!
It is?
Yeah, lots and lots of flops per second - the more the better!
So the bigger the flops, the better?
Right!
Fewer flops is bad?
You got it!
And researchers want more money for more time with bigger flops?
Now you get it!
So they got $59 million for this humongous flop generator?
Yep!
Why don't they just burn the money if they want to generate a really big flop?
That wouldn't work - that wouldn't make any useful computing flops!
So this generates all these "useful computing flops"
Yes.
Was Vista one of their prototypes?
With that many cores, they will need to find new energy sources just to power it, and re-think water resource management as they redirect the river to cool the thing and to prevent it from causing global climate change itself!
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
No, it's hoped that within that time you'll learn how to correctly use the apostrophe.
The rest are going to SETI@home
Do you really want to have a $59M machine dependent upon Dell customer support?
Just grab a few and you'll be set for the next four years...
Seriously though, this money comes from an NSF grant earmarked specifically for this project. We get these kind of complaints from other departments and especially undergrad editorials in the student newspaper. Unfortunately, the budget from the football team won't be used to renovate the social work buildings.
chillax137