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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.
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..? ;)
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.