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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.'"
"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? ]=-