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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."
TFA does not name the O/S it runs, though a linked article from TFA says the Iranian's supercomputer runs Linux.
Inquiring minds want to know, I think.
Pun intended?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
What would Muslims need a supercomputer to simulate?
I would think it would be more for the oil industry.
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/news/press-releases/two-award-nominations-for-scottish-supercomputer
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,2090687,00.htm
http://www.hpcwire.com/industry/oilandgas/Worlds_10th_Fastest_Supercomputer_Helps_Find_Oil_and_Gas.html
Right up there with world's tallest building. Even for a geek this list holds very little interest.
I record my sleeptalking
they have to respond to Iran's nukular ambitions somehow, don't they?
since live testing is kinda out of question for the moment, they can just buy the simulation software as well.
come next year, it may be pretty cheap ;)
We should liberate Saudis too. Vote for McCain.
Like letting women drive and hold jobs, or letting men listen to music. The only purpose of a country is to treat its citizens right, and technological achievements do not mean zip if they are not applied for that purpose.
Maybe flight simulator
WTF? Did you actually think that was worth posting?
I appreciate the diversity of thought and opinion here at Slashdot, and I encourage people of all stripes to post here. But that post was just retarded.
The software was a big mess: A hospital management system (basically an accounting package) written in FORTRAN!.
It had evolved over decades. It was pretty much unsupportable, but we had the old developers in-house, so they were able to solve the weird bugs usually.
To our surprise, they did not want the regular compiled version with customer support. They just wanted the source code.
We told them that the source code was not for sale. It was also too embarrassing to release.
They then put an enormous amount of money on the table, and promised to keep it in house.
We said OK, and expected a lot of support calls at least for them to compile and install the system.
We never heard from them again. Ever.
Best sale ever.
Maybe IBM has entered into the same kind of deal. Would be great to get a follow up in a few years to see how this computer is being used.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
In some ways, it's encouraging. Until recently, 90% of the advanced degrees awarded in Saudi universities are in "religious studies". Most useful work is done by foreigners, and the country has a 25-30% youth unemployment rate. About four years ago, King Abdullah decided to throw money at the problem. KAUST is part of this. The university is still being built and has no students yet; opening is scheduled for September 2009. It's a graduate school only, and is intended to have about 275 faculty members. Faculty will not be tenured; they'll be contract employees.
Presumably somebody thought that having a big supercomputer would help with recruiting or image. There are no research programs underway yet to use it. The logical application for that would be seismic processing for oil exploration, a classic supercomputer application, but that's moving to GPUs.
That's putting it kindly.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
What, because he didn't jump the gun and demanded another war in the middle east? Go figure!
is it Sharia compliant?
to do alternate energy researches..? ;)
At least not be funny with some standards.</br>
<blink>this baby is gonna be powered by homosexual people and Saudi feminists running on giant hamster wheels. I'm not trying to be funny. I wouldn't be surprised one bit.</blink>
What I've heard from Saudis who have returned to Saudi Arabia after grad school abroad is that it is almost impossible to do much research because their family obligations are so time-consuming.
No wonder, soulless people without anything sacred...and I thought it was americans who came up with it...
At one of the conferences I attended here in Beirut, the chair of the department of pathology at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Riyadh (I think his name was Fouad Al Dayel) one of the top SA hospitals was asked about their hospital system and how much it costs. He answered without a blink, Cerner for $ 50 Mil.
I then noticed that these people would never accept to fund research for any software development in SA or other universities; if they pay a couple a mil per yr, they may have something at least for the smaller hospitals few yrs later.
Almost all Arab countries (especially the oil rich ones) are only consumers. They even refuse to invest in anything other than their luxury and BIGGER stuff...
Off this topic, what worries me is that with this oil price surge the money donated by the gov and by individuals for religious stuff- Zakat (religious i.e. including "fundamentalists = terrorism") will increase exponentially.
They still haven't figured out that the Ka'bha is really the biggest Connection Machine ever built.
They just need to pug it in and all the LEDs will light up!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Big Brother is Dutch. Just so you know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(TV_series)
I wank in the shower.
Note that this one rare country in the world where unemployement is not a problem : it just mean you don't work. In this country, citizens don't pay taxes but get a part of the petroleum money. They have, in fact, negative taxes. So, not working is possible and done by many people.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
But this is their typical reaction. They buy something expensive, that looks good. Then they let it rot.
A fool and his money ...
I am amazed to see this coming out from Saudi Arabia...
I am also amazed to see slashdot to put a terrorism tag with an academic endeavour...
On one side we put blame on saudis, about not having simple human rights. (like women can't drive cars etc).}
But are we any better than saudi govt. by labeling an educational activity as terrorism?
But they seem to have brains. Makes you jealous, don't they?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
When I think about Saudi Arabia though one of the first things that comes to mind is that it's very hot. Building a super computer in a hot country must be quite a challenge from a cooling point of view.
I was wondering was if anyone has considered building a supercomputer in an underground cavern. They are, after all, naturally pretty cool. You would still need cooling to keep it that way but you would be sheilded from the worst of the sun.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
What would Muslims need a supercomputer to simulate?
Lol! Shows what you know.
Those bomb simulations you linked to are not about making bombs - they are about being able to avoid live tests of current stocks. I.E. they don't really simulate explosions of different bomb desings, they simulate the effect of time passing on the stockpiles of bombs that the US already has.
Without the big computers they would need to explode a bomb or two every couple of years in order to verify that the remaining warheads are still functional and within specifications, which is not only nasty business in general, but would be a violation of international treaties. These supercomputers were actually a key part of the passage of those treaties back in 1992.
Besides, you don't need a supercomputer to design a bomb, the first few were done with pencil and paper after all.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I distinctly remember hearing, from what at the time seemed a credible source, about a national security related trade regulation which made the export of game consoles to certain nations illegal because the computing technology within could (in the legislators' irrational minds) be used in missile guidance systems.
Can I get a confirm or deny on this one?
If I wasn't just hearing fud, does this mean we're allowed to send PS3's there now?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Posting Anonymously for obvious reasons.
Actually this is quite a late realization. They have known that for a fact for the past few years but cared less to get into a competition. The computers are used for Oil reservoir simulation (predicting fluid flow and oil in place, production/injection rates over time), and their simulator is one of the best in the industry besides Schlumberger's "Eclipse", which it's based on scientifically, and is considered to be an industry standard.
They dont only stop there, also "Visualization Clusters" perform parallel graphics rendering (thats what I do actually) due to the enormous amounts of data needed to be displayed on multiple screens. I also know for a fact that there is not a single country in the middle east besides KSA that has such technology (Do not know about Iran, but thats not ME anyway, or is it?)
There are other applications running on SEVERAL clusters.
KAUST which is mentioned in the article is actually overlooked by the national oil company Saudi Aramco (which has all the clusters I am talking about)
P.S. I am not Saudi, but I do have the pleasure to be working with them on this technology, and I am telling you they have some of the best minds on the planet.
Spoiler alert!
The "House of Saud" are *NOT* real Muslims. Have you not been paying attention?
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.
So, IBM is building it, but Saudi Arabia is "building it" according to the article summary. Hey guys, I built a gray minivan. By build, I mean I went to the dealership and bought it.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
In the industry, you see similar ambitions usually followed by failure.
The truth is, you can't just buy a honking computer and declare "users will come". You start small, build up institutional technical knowledge and a user base who is increasingly educated about HPC. Scientists new to computing will have no friggin' clue how to use the resources, and most often won't use them efficiently or often.
Start with a resource big enough to provide an incentive for using your resource and come to that computing area - then start building it larger and larger if you have the money.
The worst thing in the world is idle cycles.
I can't believe that the jingoism in the above comments can possibly be representative of slashdot users.
Hopefully more sane people with mod points will come along, and counteract the right-wing team-mods.
They'll be following in a lot of footsteps. Landing the planes in flightsims was always the hardest part. But maybe next time, they won't have to pay for actual flight school lessons.
So the majority of /. mods today find bigoted statements just fine. Lovely.
That's obviously to run Vista
About four years ago, King Abdullah decided to throw money at the problem.
I don't think you will establish a scientific culture by "throwing money at the problem". The problem in Saudi Arabia and many other muslim countries is not lack of scientific institutions it is lack of a rational world view.
If Saudi Arabia wants to do science they have to address that problem. This means abandoning and actively combatting many islamic doctrines (Quran is the word of God, religious critique must be punished and so on).
When people grow up in a culture and with a religion which discourages critical thinking and encourages superstition and persecution of critics they won't become scientists.
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
Mainly because men have to leave work four times a day to drive their wives around on errands - women can't drive, there's almost no public transport, it's too miserable to walk, and a taxi would be scandalous.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Saudi Arabia to become supercomputing Mecca.
"When people grow up in a culture and with a religion which discourages critical thinking and encourages superstition and persecution of critics they won't become scientists."
They become Engineers. Seriously - I have never met a Saudi in a basic sciences degree program. They seem to gravitate toward Engineering, where all the answers are pre-solved for them and all they have to do is apply the geneal solutions to their problems.
In a way, it's just like their religious training back home. With Math.
And this was flagged as terrorism because of what .. geographic location? Its like me flagging every story that comes out of the south with racism.
Unrelated, and unfair tag for a wholy tech story.
Imran Ahmed, Linux Inthuziast
-----------
"I like to dissect women. Did you know I'm totally insane?"
It's called 'Saudi' for a reason: it belongs to the Saudi family.
Imagine America being owned by the Bush family!!! What would it be called? "Bushiland"? "USB" ("United States of Bush")?
How the hell do these people accept their country being named after a single person?
I don't find anything funny in this statement. Not sure if everyone has karma to burn or what, how come this comment got +4 Funny!
There are a substantial amount of Muslim's in the IT world who visit slashdot, myself included. And how the hell a country of 20 million Muslim represent 1.6 billion Muslims is beyond me!
There are 53 million muslim's in europe alone, a majority of them would be a more preferable example of Muslim's.
Few border line terrorist creating stereotypes and a few border line folks from the west creating stereotypes, screwing up things for the rest.
Honestly, I'm not a muslim (to paraphrase George Carlin, I used to be a christian until I reached the age of reason;), but I haven't found that much war-mongering in the Quran. Or at least in the translated copy of it that I still own. It seemed not much better or worse than the Bible, to be honest. I wish more people would actually read the damned thing before going on a mindless bashing spree based on rumours they heard from some idiot on TV... and which also hasn't actually read it.
Yes, it contains a few things which can be taken out of context and used as justification for blowing shit up. Same as our Bible does too. You can find inciting to slavery, war crimes, rape, murder, and almost anything else if you want to take certain verses from the Bible literally as God's commandment as to what you should do.
I mean, just as a random example, in Numbers, the Lord through Moses commands no less than complete genocide (including killing the women and children of the Midianites), with the exception being the virgin women... to be taken basically as slaves and distributed to the jewish men. I.e., way I understand it, nice way to add rape to slavery. You know, 'cause if you started the list with mass-murdering civillians, killing children and slavery, it would be a shame to not add rape to it too. They go well together, ya know?
That's the kind of punishment a loving and kind Lord wishes upon those of another religion, who end up spreading their religion to the Lord's flock. The "sin" of the Midianites was merely that some Jews married their women, and some of those Jews ended up converting to their wives' religion. And for causing that "corruption", every single man and non-virgin woman, even "among the little ones" had to be put to the sword. In fact, Moses is annoyed that the soldiers didn't kill the midian women and chidren in the first place. I mean, duh, it should have been obvious.
I could go on and give more examples, but let's just say: that's the kind of thing that's right there in the Bible. So if you want to split hairs and go "see, religion X incites to violence", you have equally good verses in the Bible. That's your kernel of truth.
But do christians or christianity as a whole actually act that way? No, I don't think I've seen any people who think we should, say, go mass-murder India because some Christians joined a new-age Guru and converted to some eastern tantric stuff. I mean, it'd the direct equivalent of what the people of Midian did in the Bible, no? We don't actually do what those verses say. Most people don't even think about them.
Same with the Quran, way I see it. Yes, it contains _some_ verses which can be considered an incitation to violence. And a few groups of nutters actually do. Most of the Muslims don't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well,
1. the inquisition worked quite a bit differently than most people seem to assume.
For a start it _only_ had jurisdiction over Christians, and only over faith matters. So if you had declared yourself a Jew or a Muslim, the Inquisition could kiss your ass.
The Inquisition only had a problem with (A) people who were gaming the system by declaring themselves Christians to gain the secular privileges those had in Spain, and then went and prayed to Allah or whatever, (B) clergy who did all sorts of crap from selling church favours to fucking boys, and (C) protestants. Ok, out of the three groups you noted, if you were a protestant, you were well and properly fucked.
So technically, no, not even the Spanish Inquisition applied those verses. They were bad people, no doubt, but even they weren't out to kill you for merely not being a Christian. To even fall under their jurisdiction at all, you had to have declared yourself a Christian in the first place.
2. You do notice that you had to qualify that as "Spanish", right? There was _one_ group which did excesses in the name of the bible. Hardly representative for christianity as a whole, eh? Im the same period, I don't think there were that many unbelievers persecuted by, say, the Swedish Inquisition. Did they even have one? They had people praying to the old Norse gods for _centuries_ after they had theoretically become a christian nation. Or I don't think I've heard of a Polish Inquisition.
Even then, it wouldn't have been quite fair to paint the whole Christianity with the same brush as the Spanish Inquisition.
3. And that goes doubly so for nowadays. We don't still burn heretics, you know?
Same with the Muslims, you know? Yes, there are a few sub-groups of one sect, which take that religion to ridiculous extremes. I don't think it's fair to paint the whole Islam with the same brush as Al Qaeda.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have to dispute the figure of 90%.
Having lived there for more than a decade, most Saudis I have worked with had secular degrees, mainly in engineering, computer and IT. Some in HR, ...etc. Most of them have Masters or Ph.D degrees from US universities, some from Europe. These were all on government grants. After 9/11, they shifted to Canada and Europe because the US would not be the welcoming place it used to be given the climate.
If you are talking of post-graduate degrees in religious studies, then it would be understandable if they are more than secular degrees. The reason is that this type of education cannot be gotten from the USA or Europe. Even not from other universities in the Muslim world, such as Egypt's Al-Azhar, or others in Morocco, ...etc. due to ideological differences. They belong to different schools of thought that make it not an option for the Saudi religious establishment to encourage such exchange.
So, yes, Ph.D and Masters in religious studies will be heavily biased towards in-country institutions, but it does not convey the whole picture.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I don't know, maybe they don't follow the mainstream geological theory ?
Maybe their weird geological model require more computing power to analyse ?
But stay reassured, they won't find anything. Everyone knows that the earth is 6500 years old and oil was put under the surface by the intelligent designer for us to use it ~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When you have enough spare funds, you can do anything.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Same as you or me; Jobs. For the most part, the middle east is no different than another country. In fact, I would say it is a LOT like USA. We have LOTS of radicals here. Moral Majority (though mostly gone); Focus on the Family; Timethy McVae; Alamo family down in Texas; The polygamists down in Texas; etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh, they had computers at the Manhattan project. They were just female and pretty.
citizens don't pay taxes but get a part of the petroleum money. They have, in fact, negative taxes.
No we don't. *Is Saudi*
True, there are no taxes. But citizens don't get anything of the oil revenues directly. Unless you count the public services and institutions funded by it.
Education is free, though. Better yet, college students get a modest pay out of it (About $300 a month).
Disagreeing about the content of a book doesn't make one a bigot. If I say the bible is a fairy tale of an evil deranged megalomaniac god, that's simply a literary review. If I say Christians are all evil deranged megalomaniacs, then that's bigoted.
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I suppose they could have special taxis for women, with a driver and two older women as chaperones. Of course, that wouldn't leave much room for passengers.
Seriously, though, my understanding is that Saudis are also expected to attend a great many family social events: not only weddings and funerals and so forth as in other countries but audiences and various other things.
Flamebait! Yeowch! Tell me where Mecca is, Einstein!
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
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.
The crusades, every one of them, were defensive wars to recover lands invaded by muslims. Stopping crusades is easy, stop invading christian lands.
Unfortunately, the Saudis pay for a lot of mosques and imams and they have an outsized influence due to their control of the haj. Most people don't understand that US Islam is tremendously penetrated by Saudi financing as is Islam in many other countries. Cut the purse strings loose and you'll likely lose the associations.
It's not irrational to conclude that he who pays the piper calls the tune and the Saudis have been paying for a lot of pipers.
You can compare between Saudi Arabia before 30 years and now to see if you are right or wrong! unless you are not aware of how it was.
The University is OPEN TO EVERYONE
Also Israel citizens?
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
How'd they get it then? I'll tell you how - by exploiting the proletariat! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."