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Behind the Parting of IBM and Blue Waters
An anonymous reader writes "The News-Gazette has an article about the troubled Blue Waters supercomputer project, providing some new information about why IBM and the University of Illinois parted ways back in August. Quoting: 'More than three dozen changes, most suggested by IBM, would have delayed the Blue Waters project by a year ... The requested changes caused friction as early as December 2010, eight months before IBM pulled out, leaving the project to look for a new vendor for the supercomputer. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show Big Blue and the Big U asserting their rights in lengthy and increasingly testy, but always polite, language. In the documents, IBM suggested that if changes were not made, the project would become overly expensive.'"
Isn't that the truth? IBM is definitely the consultant to call if you want to learn how to do things as inefficiently and as expensively as possible.
One part of the article: "John Melchi, a senior associate director at NCSA, said last week that there is a variety of vendors available, which he compared to a choice of car dealers." Then another part: "Though she declined to answer technical questions, the FOIA documents mention clock speed as an issue."
OK, supercomputer vendorscar dealers, raise your hands: how many of you have 4+ GHz CPUs to sell? Standard, commercially available POWER7 cores run up to 4.25 GHz. That's the second highest clock speed CPU in the world, and by a considerable margin. (The highest in the world? this one, at 5.2 GHz.)
Could it be that academics demanded their idea of perfection and were unsatisfied with mere best available reality? That's never happened before.
IBM told you to take your $300 million project somewhere else? If that doesn't say VOLUMES about your project management/specification process, I don't know what does.
It may be that other vendors appear to be able to do the project for less money per TFLOP. If (example with made up numbers) an SC based on the POWER7 cores has 100,000 cores and they cost $1000 per core, but another Intel-based SC with 200,000 cores can do the same work and costs $400 per core with the same operating cost, then the latter machine is cheaper for the performance required - which is the figure of merit.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Illinois is broke as all hell. They're setting themselves up to be the next California. I moved out around a year ago before they raised state income tax. At that time they hadn't paid any of the in state colleges what they were owed for around 18 months.
U of I also came out with a genius plan to 'lock in' your rate for 4 years, so if there is a short fall, the next year is going to have a huge jump in tuition. It's getting to the point where in-state for U of I is as expensive as out of state if you were to go to Purdue, Michigan, UW Madison, etc. Out of state tuition is up near the cost of private schools.
The requested changes caused friction as early as December 2010, eight months before IBM pulled out
What about the sexual innuendo?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.