Slashdot Mirror
Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions
An anonymous reader writes "Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system."
The article quotes on of the leads as saying that they have no legacy restrictions, so they are probably going to go with something very fast and very state of the art.
IOW, ForthOS.
We should liberate Saudis too. Vote for McCain.
Maybe flight simulator
Maybe they'll run some simulations to see how that pans out :)
Fnord.
is it Sharia compliant?
Step up one level. You'll find two princes who both have the same fastest cars in the world, the two fastest race horses in the world, the two largest private jet aircraft in the world, and the largest palaces in the world.
It's just the next competition.
Prince A: "My research lab has 1000 scientists!"
Prince B: "Oh Yea? Well I have 1000 scientists and I'm hiring 10 more next week."
Observer: "What are they working on?"
Prince A&B: "Mine's bigger!"
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
to do alternate energy researches..? ;)
Ibn Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Abdul Al-DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Ibn Tufnel: Exactly.
Abdul Al-DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Ibn Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Abdul Al-DiBergi: I don't know.
Ibn Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Abdul Al-DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Ibn Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Abdul Al-DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Ibn Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
A supercomputing center with no women? It's the same in the US!
Actually, it wasn't a game as such. See, one of the Saudi princes got taunted about his 3DMark scores once too often, by someone with an overclocked compressor-cooled 2x6 core Dual Xeon 7460 system with 3x nVidia GTX 280 SLI.
And as everyone(*) knows, your 3DMark score is not just the measure of your worth, but verily an accurate measure of penis size. In fact, they're in a feedback loop. It's true. If you fall out of the top 10, your Y chromosomes will spread their legs and go, "fuck, we were X all along". And the Penis Police will show up at your door with a rusty hedge scissors and revoke your right to pee standing. It's no laughing matter.
And, well, the royal family represents the whole country and people. The collective penis of the whole Saudi Arabia could be at stake, because someone didn't upgrade their machine to beat the best score. And the last thing you want as a ruling dynasty is to wake up one morning and find a mob of former men in front of the palace gates, wanting to beat you up with their handbags for what junior's lame machine did to them. You really don't want to go down in history as that kind of a ruling family.
So, anyway, it started kinda innocent enough. You know, _quad_ 6-core Xeons, liquid nitrogen cooling, stuff like that. But then they hired a consultant for the rest of the spec and it kinda snowballed from there ;)
(*) ... who wastes their time willy-waving about their system on those boards
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I thought you were talking about /.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There's only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the bloody Dutch.
which is totally what she said
Saudi Arabia to become supercomputing Mecca.
So, no women and all the real work is done by guys from India.
This differs from the average IT shop how?
I don't know what are them using the supercomputer for, but one thing can be taken for granted: the supercomputer will be programmed to stop three times per day to sent prayers to Mecca (maybe the whole thing will be built oriented to Mecca), and also in Ramadan results will be released only at night.