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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.
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
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.
There is, if you like windows.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
is it Sharia compliant?
to do alternate energy researches..? ;)
No wonder, soulless people without anything sacred...and I thought it was americans who came up with it...
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 ...
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.
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.
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 the majority of /. mods today find bigoted statements just fine. Lovely.
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.
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.
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.