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Aussie Scientists Build a Cluster To Map the Sky
Tri writes "Scientists at the Siding Spring Observatory have built a new system to map and record over 1 billion objects in the southern hemisphere sky. They collect 700 GB of data every night, which they then crunch down using some perl scripts and make available to other scientists through a web interface backed on Postgresql. 'Unsurprisingly, the Southern Sky Survey will result in a large volume of raw data — about 470 terabytes ... when complete. ... the bulk of the analysis of the SkyMapper data will be done on a brand new, next generation Sun supercomputer kitted out with 12,000 cores. Due to be fully online by December, the supercomputer will offer a tenfold increase in performance over the facility's current set up of two SGI machines, each with just under 3500 cores in total.'"
I wonder which CPU the supercomputer will be using. Could be Opterons, or SPARC. I could easily imagine 12000 out of a SPARC Niagra or SPARC VIIfx (8 cores per-die) and would use less wattage than the same number of cores in Opteron. Plus, if they're doing dual or quad-precision, the SPARCs will hold their own.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Google has already mapped the moon, mars, earth, working on the oceans, why not just leave the sky to them? they have a pretty good sucess rate
it's a skynet?
Beowulf Cluster
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
next generation Sun supercomputer kitted out with 12,000 cores ... will offer a tenfold increase in performance over the .. two SGI machines, each with just under 3500 cores in total
How is that 10x faster? I imagine because the new v. old cores are not equally comparable. In that case, why talk number of cores at all?
Sun servers running perl you say?
I'd say that has the price:performance ratio of a Rolls Royce. And that's not a good thing. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Good to see the coolest language around being put to a(nother) cool use.
With that much data we might finally have enough information to generate a singular point of reference in space and time so we can retrofit a poorly designed all stainless steel car and travel back in time 200 years and not find out selves drifting in the middle of nowhere since 200 years ago, relative to some unknown non-moving reference point, our planet, solar system, and galaxy is probably no where near where it was 200 years ago!
FLUX CAPACITOR FTW!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Imagine a open/globular cluster of those....
It's the Skynet? In all seriousness, it sounds awesome and it's good to know that they're using the right tools for the job (perl to organize, postgreSQL to manage large amounts of data).
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
ya, but can it run crysis?
They're moving from 1.6Ghz single core Itaniums to dual quad core Xeon blades. I suspect they're talking about cores to emphasize the density gain, and because people like huge numbers.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
"Old Man Rant"
Why do I cring every time I hear people use terms like Tenfold and order of magnatitude....
From what I gather the whole 10 Fold, 3 Fold, was more about the progressive thickness of cloth in relation to the number of folds back in the war when we made planes out of canvas.
1mm thick material when increase 3 fold is
1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 mm thick. Ten fold would then be 512 mm thick...
Why are we talking about folding stuff? Where are the protients... WHa? I DON'T WANT TO TAKE THE PILLS! WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE! LEAVE ME ALONE!
I'M NOT DOING ANY LAUNDRY! ;)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
tenfold
SGI stopped making supers many years ago.
The Altix line begs to differ. They're not using Onyxes.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
How do they store so much data into PostgreSQL? I thought it had a limit of 32TB per table, so are they using some sort of table partitioning scheme?
Sounds like a great step forward - and I want to be on record saying that I'm pulling for them.
However - I'm confused, per usual. As Oracle now owns Sun, what's to say that the camel won't stick his nose into the tent, seeing a database opportunity (read: marketing opportunity) and try to pressure, cajole, coerce, or otherwise influence them to drop a working PostgreSQL in favor of an all-Oracle (Sun) solution? I'm not saying that one is better than the other - I'm just concerned that a political motive on the supplier's part can have ripple effects to the tech guys making it happen.
I freely admit my confusion, so this may be a big non-issue. I just don't know.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Sounds like a job for BOINC.
"next generation Sun supercomputer kitted out with 12,000 cores." Can it run Crysis with full eye-candy?
"Sun supercomputer kitted out with 12,000 cores." " They collect 700 GB of data every night, which they then crunch down using some perl scripts "
Doesn't that mean it could be run from a home computer running c code instead?
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Can be bay like wolves and sing Men At Work's "Land Down Under"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNT7uZf7lew
But, change the song to Chips At Work's "Skies Up Over", hehehehehe....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Question - when can i cruise a model of the galaxy from my laptop? I wanna see some of the cosmos up close before i die. I think thats what everyone who's not a super geek wants to get out of this (and the geeks want it too I'm sure).
Maybe we should use expressions like "a 10dB increase in cores" or "a 3dB increase in memory"? How about the current chips features are -1.7dB those of the old chips?
Whatever...I'm going back to trying to get 120.827dBm into my flux capacitor.
Couple of items. First, the term is much older. Old enough that we're not certain when it starts, so a number of traditional industries are candidates for the origin once we wrote things down. Second, not canvas, but doped linen for fabric-covered aircraft of the Great War. (There were also plywood and metal covered aircraft at the time.) Sometimes cotton, then more recently dacron, and around the time I was getting out of it (80s), there was a sort-of thin fiberglass-like covering being introduced. Maybe called 'razorback'? I keep meaning to check to see how that one worked out for longevity, and for fuss during inevitable renewal.
"Canvas" _is_ a fairly broad term, but the stuff used for aircraft isn't the same sort of weight as what's used for canoes and paintings, and should not be included. The term to use is "fabric", when not being specific about which fabric.
It sounds like it almost has enough power to run Windows Vista with options turned on. Too bad you can only run three programs at a time though.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
From what I gather the whole 10 Fold, 3 Fold, was more about the progressive thickness of cloth in relation to the number of folds
That's an...interesting theory, but I can't find anything to support it. My M-W dictionary says the phrase goes back to the 12th century (so it has nothing to do with making planes of any type), and clearly states that "tenfold" means ten times, so your suggestion that it "really" means 2^10 is simply false. My own guess is that this ancient phrase has more to do with "in the fold" (where you find sheep, or perhaps wolves) than with cloth, but I can't prove that either.
you so totally missed the joke...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
2^10=1024. It's a pretty useful fact actually.
Back in 2004 I calculated contract interests for Columbia Pictures in PERL the data 2.4 Terabytes(took a day using 24 crappy pentium IVs). This doesn't surprise me check this out
look for duplicated words in a line /\b(\w+)\b\s+\b\1\b/gi' foo.txt
perl -0777 -ne 'print "$.: doubled $_\n" while
or to cheat in scrabble in Unix
input: tolkien
perl -lne'print if /t/ && /o/ && /l/ && /k/ && /i/ && /e/ && /n/ && length($_)==8' /usr/share/dict/words
output:
knotlike
townlike
Just try writing that in C,
Perl is actually quite fast if you use a bunch of one-liners -
Ah well, wasn't the first time, and certainly won't be the last. :)
The article describes Coonabarabran as being the "central-west NSW location". Now, Coonabarabran certainly isn't very far west in NSW. But, then I realised that they mean population-wise. There aren't too many people west of there!!!
Graham
...so are they going to use the 12000 cores spare CPU cycles for F@H or SETI....lol
it's ~10x faster on specfp_rate than the itanium2 altix.
specfp turns out to be a good representation of the codes we typically run...