Slashdot Mirror
Iran Claims Two New Supercomputers
dcblogs writes "Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced development of two supercomputers Wednesday. Iranian government news media published a photo spread of one the systems it claims is capable of 89 teraflops, which is far short of the petascale systems in the US and China. There's no independent verification of Iran's claim. But after the Stuxnet attack, Iran may be trying for an IT comeback via supercomputing or just trying to show it is in control as regional unrest spreads. Iran says the new systems will make the global Top 500 supercomputing listing, but it hasn't submitted a Linpack benchmark to the list organizers."
first post.
I have to say I am surprised that they are using Stuper Micro crap to build their HPC.... what a joke!
Iran has a halfway decent computer industry, they even make computer games:
http://www.questofpersia.com/main/index.html
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Because the FIRST place you think of when you hear "supercomputer" is, of course, Iran.
A simple oversight I'm sure. But then we have a state controlled media vs a non state-controlled Linpack so...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ok so I can understand why they would want to have a supercomputer or 2. They must have a lot of computational work being done (building nuclear weapons is pretty technically demanding stuff, so I have heard). But of all the reasons to have a supercomputer the summary states.
But after the Stuxnet attack, Iran may be trying for an IT comeback via supercomputing
Comeback via supercomputing? What does that even mean?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
They haven't submitted a Linpack score yet because Stuxnet has the supercomputers busy spinning some centrifuges out of control.
duh.
Trolling is a art,
like, how fast can it run StuxNet?
I'm sure it's to process all the different permutations on how to bring about the 12th Imam.
Life is not for the lazy.
I feel like you could buy a top 500 qualifying supercomputer off the shelf from a company like Cray.
:-\
I looked it up, and this 89 Teraflop machine is less than buying 4 Cray E6 cabinets.
Watson on Jeopardy is supposedly 78 Teraflops, and it isn't even a system emphasizing processing power (it emphasizes the filtering algorithms).
Seems like much less of a feat from that perspective...
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Those are SuperMicro servers. I resell supermicro and as much as I love their low cost and good speed, the hardware failure rate is astronomical. They should fit in well with Iran's centrifuges. :-P
The Iranians have, somehow, discovered how to use the global trade in commodity parts to build a cluster computer(consisting of suspiciously under-filled racks, with a bunch of generic 1-3U-looking compute/storage nodes, much more empty space than I would have expected, and some pretty ragged ethernet interconnects, no visible brand IDs; but the black with reddish handles on the drive caddies looks a lot like de-branded HP...)
Other than perhaps minimally-puncturing the (always false) notion that Iran is a bunch of ignorant sand-dwellers just because it is a theocracy, I'm not seeing the big deal here. Depending on the CPU/RAM specs and how many racks there actually are(the photos are fairly cagey on the subject), it very much looks as though they've managed to put a few million dollars worth of datacenter together. News to anybody who thought that Iranians spent their time wallowing in backwardness and squalor; but pretty low-rent by cluster computer standards...
Photographic evidence here: http://ghettocomputers.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/funny_pictures_ghetto_computer.jpg
lmao
Title ought to be "Iran claims two new honeypots"
Their technicians ought to wear uniform white lab-coats with red targets on their backs..
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Just hack them to say things like "There is no Allah" or display cartoons of Mohammad. The Iranians will smash them to pieces.
Photoshopping two supercomputers into a room isn't impressive, I could do that when I was 12.
One of the photos shows a computer running Windows 7. And we know what runs on Windows 7...
Can we PLEASE stop putting Iran down with every other comment and harping on stuxnet? It's unoriginal and uninformative. Come up with something useful to say. you're better than this.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
It is a cluster of PCs. Really folks you can buy Infinityband off NewEgg and build your own HPC cluster. It is one of those scary but oh so cool facts that just about anybody can build some massive computing power with off the self parts and Linux. The formula is pretty easy.
Buy X Xeon or Opteron motherboards and CPUs.
Buy enough RAM to fill all the slots.
Build a SAN "Solaris with ZFS is a good choice"
Buy some infinityband cards and switches.
Buy some Gig-e switches for the SAN.
Buy some Tesla cards or even just nVidia video cards.
Rack them.
Install Linux on the cluster nodes.
You now have a super computer. Now the hard part is to write software that uses it but even that is well documented and just takes talented, educated people.
No it will not be at the top of the list and it will not be as good as what you can buy from Cray or IBM but it will be good enough for a lot of things.
But the good news is that it looks like it will be easy to hack. I am pretty sure that the monitor they showed was running Vista or maybe Windows 7.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Someone is trying to make it look a lot bigger than it actually is. They can condense 4 of those racks into 1 and still have plenty of room for some airflow spacing around the systems as well as network and KVM. More propoganda. Anyone also notice all the empty racks?
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
touting this as state propaganda, or a stuxnet comeback, remember the US did this with the tupolev aircraft around the middle of the cold war. Speculators consistently misjudged and underestimated it until it had overtaken many of americas long-range bombers in speed and range. To this day the tupolev still sees service in many european and baltic countries.
just because something first world comes from a country you've marginalized as third world, doesnt mean it isnt a neat idea or an interesting endeavor. Countries america has sought to demonize in the past such as russia, have consistently met or exceeded western social and technological standards with things like free mass public transit, lower mortality rates, and in the case of our soviet friends technological advances such as the first LED light, the first lunar robotic moon rover and manned space flight.
congratulations are in order, slashdot, for we are nerds and this is newsworthy of nerds. Iran has built a supercomputer, and naturally your first question should be "will it run linpac," not "are they building the evil muslim nukes." My questions to the scientists would be, how fast is it? what is it built from? will you use it to perhaps enhance your recent satellite projects and nuclear medical program, or is the supercomputer open to time slots like a university?
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think we need to launch Kiki Stockhammer at Iran. That'll show 'em who's boss.
Making the top500 list? 'Super' is a moving target. Shouldn't it be if you are within x% of #1 you have a super?
Sounds like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already done just that.
It looks as if the Super Computer is running Windows 7 from the screen shots.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Useful unless your 1000 centrifuges were recently damaged by a scada internet worm... Stuxnet - is the remaining nuclear material loaded on two iranian warships routed throught the suez canal and bound for france/italy?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
Maybe they believed the hype in the Apple ads and bought two Apple G5s! After all, according to Apple, the PowerPC is a SUPERCOMPUTER, as opposed to the snail-like intels.
by cleverly making the computing mechanism out of a combination of sturdy wooden frames, non conductive wires, and stone beads. Both systems, the SUCABA 1 and SUCABA 2 are reported to be scalable well beyond the initially reported 89 teraflops, however they would require additional space, well beyond the 77,600 square kilometers of the Kavir-e Namak desert they presently occupy.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
The Steve is not impressed.
Has anyone had a closer look at the last photo?
They all look angry or unhappy.
For extra credit:
Add thought bubbles.
Probably to be used as a "Weather Computer" hehe
Couple of the chairs in one of the lower photos still have plastic wrappings on them!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
TWO Iranian supercomputers and nobody's made a Photoshop joke yet?
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
Islam Inside?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Like they claimed launching four missiles in this faked photo back in 2008?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"They're SUPER, thanks for asking!
All things considered they couldn't be better
I must say
They're feeling super
No bugs inside them
Everything is super when you're -
don’t you think they look cute in this rack?"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And on the off chance anyone wants to read it in English:
http://www.mehrnews.com/en/newsdetail.aspx?NewsID=1260126
I saw the pics and they're running Windows 7
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
If you look closely at the pictures, there are two rows of racks, and one of them is empty. The rest of the pictures are of the same row of racks from four different angles trying to make the data center look larger. You can tell something is up by the "clever" photography.
e.g.
(only two rows in data center)
picture 1 : empty row of racks in foreground, 2 people standing in front of full row
picture 3 : picture taken from other end of room, full row now in foreground, empty row in background
(all pictures taken in front of the same row of racks)
picture 4 : guy walking in front of "full" row of racks
picture 6 : same guy standing at end of the SAME row
picture 8 : now he has a friend!!! two guys standing at end of SAME row
You can tell they are the same row because the first rack of nodes is missing a node at the bottom, and the loops of yellow ethernet in the first cabinet are identical.
Looks like they are using standard x86 hardware. I count 71 compute nodes in the pictures. Even if you max each one of those with CPUs and quadruple the number of nodes visible in the pictures (unlikely), you are still nowhere near 89 Teraflops.
P.S. many private research universities in the US have vastly more computational power.... hell many private citizens (myself included) have a respectable fraction of that compute power in their basements!
Speaking of benchmarks, is UnixBench useful for 'nix benchmarking?
Are there any others that are better?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
89 Teraflops = ~45 PS3s.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The supercomputer is probably a cluster composed of all of the domestic (and probably foreign) rooter machines.
The pictures of their computer system looks like a Beowulf Cluster of boxes, maybe 64 or 128 of them, depending on whether it's one or two rows of racks. So they're probably a fairly conventional blade-server design with a few blades per box.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As far as I know, don't we still have a trade embargo with Iran? If so, how are they using Supermicro servers and Windows 7? They are both U.S. companies.
The oil business have been users of supercomputers for a long time. A typical technique is to stick a bunch of audio sensors in the ground, blow up some explosives down in a well, and signal-process all the echoes to see what's going on geologically, in hopes that some of the structures look like the kind that have oil in them. There are lots of other petroleum applications that used to need supercomputers, such as scheduling problems, but I went to college back when "supercomputer" meant a Cray-1, which could do a blazing 136 MFLOPs, and you've probably got a cellphone that fast by now, so many of them can use more conventional hardware by now.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I see a lot of 3/4 empty computer racks. I see something devised to make something minor appear impressive. Why waste the space and submit to cable unnecessary lengthening which buys nothing but latency. And to that end I see 1x1Gb Cat5/6 cables on the backs of each of those racks into each node. Wow, we're talking super computer interface there. Anybody who has ever seen a real super computer can look at this and call it for the photo-op it is. There is nothing of substance here at all.
and photoshopped it to look like two.
The only problem with an Iranian supercomputer is it will blow itself up in your face if you don't believe it's results!
Now they'll be able to Photoshop their missile tests in record time!
Supercomputers run Stuxnet much faster than regular computers!
So, photos are conclusive proof, are they?
I don't suppose I should mention that I've got a half dozen latest-model IBM Bladecenters in my office. I haven't much use for them, but they're there - it means we're on the up-and-up, and have some serious computing power.
(Note: these BladeCenters are empty plastic shells, quite similar to 'demo units' sales guys parade around or you might find at a typical Iranian photo shoot.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That does not qualify it as a supercomputer. Hell, I could have an 89 TFLOP computer in my basement if we're talking pure power- a GeForce GTX 580 has 1.5TFLOPS alone, for around 4-500$, that's 50k for a computer with conservatively 1.4 times the power (motherboards and cabling to link 'em. Not counting the absurd power bills I'd rack up though). Call us, iran, when you break a petaflop.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.