Slashdot Mirror
Einstein@Home Set To Break Petaflops Barrier
hazeii writes "Einstein@home, the distributed computing project searching for the gravitational waves predicted to exist by Albert Einstein, looks set to breach the 1 Petaflops barrier around midnight UTC tonight. Put into context, if it was in the Top500 Supercomputers list, it would be in at number 24. I'm sure there are plenty of Slashdot readers who can contribute enough CPU and GPU cycles to push them well over 1,000 teraflops — and maybe even discover a pulsar in the process."
From their forums: "At 14:45 we had 989.2 TFLOPS with an increase of 1.3 TFLOPS/h. In principle that's enough to reach 1001.1 TFLOPS at midnight (UTC) but very often, like yesterday, between 22:45 and 22:50 there occurs a drop of about 5 TFLOPS. So we will have very likely hit 1 PFLOPS in the early morning tomorrow. "
I don't think the poster is a native speaker and I fixed a bunch of other obvious typos... but missed that extra zero there.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Discovery is not usually a straight line.
I donate to SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, LHC@Home, and a bunch of projects at WorldCommunityGrid. BOINC and GridRepublic makes this easy. I believe Folding@Home is a seperate standalone project, so it's all or nothing. In addition, there are a LOT of protein folding projects. I'd really like to see them work together - or explain why they are different.
Someone who only knows physics might not be able to help medical research, so scientific resources aren't entirely fungible. But CPU cycles are. So contributing to one particular distributed computing project does carry an opportunistic cost of not supporting another.
Going off on a tangent here, while I echo your sentiment that people should be free to support whatever distributed computing project they want, I'm not sure people realize that SETI has basically already failed. They've covered their entire spectrum numerous times, and have been listening for decades without finding anything. The entire project operates off the assumption that interstellar communication of another intelligent life form would occur over radio waves.
Requisite XKCD:
http://xkcd.com/638/
If someone is contributing cycles to it, and not protein folding, then valuable medical research (that has been proven worthwhile) might be suffering literally out of ignorance. That is worth pointing out.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
A zero is nothing, therefore you missed nothing.
rewriting history since 2109
You have to run the Linpack benchmark and report that.
And I guess no distributed computing platform is ever going to score in top 500 according to that benchmark. The communication performance between nodes is very important to most parallel algorithms. Any decent benchmark would take that into account. A real super computer has much faster communication between the nodes, than what you can achieve across the Internet. Both throughput and latency matters. There are some specific problems which can be split into parts that can be computed independently by nodes without communication between them, but most super computers are used for tasks, that do not fall into that class.
At some point I heard the rule of thumb, that when you are building a super computer, you divide your funds in three equal parts. One of those was to be spent on the interconnect. I don't recall what the other two were supposed to be spend on.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
At some point I heard the rule of thumb, that when you are building a super computer, you divide your funds in three equal parts. One of those was to be spent on the interconnect. I don't recall what the other two were supposed to be spend on.
Hookers and blow.
Malaria is known to be in the US and has several medications to treat it. The CDC will tell you that Schistosoma does not even exist in the US, but I acquired it at the age of 10, and it wasn't until I purchased my own lab equipment around the age of 50 that I finally got an answer to all my bizarre health problems. Statistically I should be dead, several times over. Over 200,000 people die from it every year, and I am clearly one of the lucky ones.
There is currently only one drug (praziquantel) to "cure' (with 60% efficacy) Schistosoma, and it is quickly loosing its effectiveness. There is no other substitute. None. After visiting many pharmacies in my area, it took me three days for me to locate the drug in the USA and tell the Pharmacy where they could get it for me. . Yes Its that bad. Funny thing is I can buy it off the shelf for my dog, with a prescription, but I couldn't buy it anywhere for human consumption? Clearly we need more options and SNTS protein folding analysis will help with that goal.
If you have a few extra CPU cycles to spare, please sign up for one of these two worthy causes!
More info on Schistosomiasis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praziquantel
I'm not sure people realize that SETI has basically already failed. They've covered their entire spectrum numerous times
The entire spectrum? We've only looked at one frequency range on 20% of the sky:
SETI@home is basically a 21-cm survey. If we haven't guessed right about the alien broadcasters' choice of hailing frequency, the project is barking up the wrong tree in a forest of thousands of trees. Secondly, there has been little real-time followup of interesting signals. Lack of immediate, dedicated followup means that many scans are needed of each sky position in order to deal with the problem of interstellar scintillation if nothing else.
With its first, single-feed receiver, SETI@home logged at least three scans of more than 67 percent of the sky observable from Arecibo, amounting to about 20 percent of the entire celestial sphere. Of this area, a large portion was swept six or more times. Werthimer says that a reasonable goal, given issues such as interstellar scintillation, is nine sweeps of most points on Arecibo's visible sky.
Quoted from http://www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/seti/3304561.html?page=5&c=y
Also, when there is no work to be done, your computer can look at other things.
I donate my time to several medical studies that will likely find some results that will help all people. I also donate some time to climate research that has less of a chance of helping EVERYONE. I also donate some time to SETI which has a very, very small chance of changing the world.
It is called hedging your bets. I spend some CPU on things with low risk and low reward, and others on things with high risk and high reward.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.