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Supercomputer Repossessed By State, May Be Sold In Pieces
1sockchuck writes "A supercomputer that was the third-fastest machine in the world in 2008 has been repossessed by the state of New Mexico and will likely be sold in pieces to three universities in the state. The state has been unable to find a buyer for the Encanto supercomputer, which was built and maintained with $20 million in state funding. The supercomputer had the enthusiastic backing of Gov. Bill Richardson, who saw the project as an economic development tool for New Mexico. But the commercial projects did not materialize, and Richardson's successor, Susana Martinez, says the supercomputer is a 'symbol of excess.'"
A Beowolf clusted of these! :)
Paul B.
2008 technology. Seems more like three universities are getting stuck with it than anything else. The parts will be 5 years old by the time everything is divided up and distributed. That's fine if you're redistributing old desktops to set up a lab for kids to type up term papers or something but supercomputers are supposed to be cutting edge. Maybe they can use it for a computer history class. "This is how we built supercomputers back in the day."
As a citizen of New Mexico, Susana Martinez is probably the dumbest and most shortsighted politician I've ever seen in office. She makes George W. Bush look like Albert W. Einstein.
I know that's off-topic, but Goddamn is that woman stupid. I just had to say something.
Think of how many Bitcoins this thing could make. Someone should tell New Mexico.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
and supercomputers often require recoding of the 'app' so that it runs better and uses the hardware better.
when I was at SGI (and cray was still part of them) I got some time on a cray machine to run some code that I was usually running on indys and octanes. I expected a HUGE increase in speed but I saw only about 2x. my app was not broken down to be cray-friendly and so I never got any real speed out of it.
unless you go to lengths to use the SC in 'its preferred way' its a wasted and expensive resource.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
My experience is it would be better to provision a cluster of EC2 boxes to run the task than build a purpose-built super computer (with some exception). One disadvantage of clustered machines is longer communication latency, so tasks that require lots of process to process communication will run slower. Many problems can be tweaked with search spaces sliced so that this latency is not a big deal.
A governor who thinks that spending $20m on this will bring more businesses to his state in the world of the internet just built his super-computer to nowhere.
There are not many problems these days that cannot be parallelized and split up to be run on a large number of off the shelf hardware. It is much easier to grow a Beowulf Cluster to add performance than redesigning to eke out every bit of capability of top-of-the-line hardware. Much easier also, to redesign your problem so that it can take advantage of parallelism. I agree that this was probably a boondoggle by a politician wanting to get some publicity for himself.
Yes. The government is the perfect candidate for extremely high risk, high reward investments. No other organization has enough capital to diversify that kind of risk away and reap the rewards.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Alright so this thing won't place on the Top 500 list but that's not the point. Its a real supercomputer and an ideal learning environment for distributed computing. No a room full of desktops and gigabit ethernet is not the same thing.
On the other hand that's pretty much how Google got started.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
My experience is it would be better to provision a cluster of EC2 boxes to run the task than build a purpose-built super computer (with some exception). One disadvantage of clustered machines is longer communication latency, so tasks that require lots of process to process communication will run slower. Many problems can be tweaked with search spaces sliced so that this latency is not a big deal.
There are huge classes of problems were you can't tweak things like this. Basically any simulation where things are large distances interact or where there is a lot of communication can't really be shoved into a cluster. For example, computation fluid dynamics (e.g. anything looking at air or water moving over surfaces), weather simulations, molecular dynamics, simulating gravity, etc. All of these types of problems will run like crap if you try to use EC2 instances for them.
Also, have you really priced out what computation and data storage on EC2 costs? There's a few studies that show that EC2 on-demand instance will cost you 2-3 times more than purchasing a comparable server even with power, cooling, and maintenance/administration factored in. See, this or this for example. EC2 is great if you want to explore certain problems and need to temporarily scale up or want the ability to scale up on demand but if you have a base level of work that you'll be doing all the time, it's much more efficient to buy your own hardware. That is doubly true if your problems need any significant amount of storage space.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Whether you're liberal or conservative, does anyone really believe that the government spending tax dollars on expensive speculative investments makes sense?
You mean like basic research on things that may not be realizable for a decade or two? What's your feeling on the internet which grew out of research on networking in the 70s and 80s. What about the funding for ultrafast networking that's happening now? What about things like the tevatron and LHC which resulted in things like MRIs being made feasible?
Personally, I'm all for it.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Where science and engineering is considered as excess,but litigation/lawsuit are considered as normal.
This is a very old machine. It was a piece of crap the day it was turned on and never got better. It isn't worth the electricity and cooling even when broken up. For the money it will take to dismantle, move, re-install, power, and cool individual racks you could get something smaller, less power hungry, brand new and in support for half the money.
The whole thing needs to get scrapped. What the state has actually done here is find a way to avoid paying to have it scrapped by "gifting" it to the universities who will discover the above facts after much time and money are already spent and end up having to pay to scrap it themselves.
It's actually clever (or sneaky/slimy) way to unload a lemon. "Hey here's a car I don't use anymore. Practically new. You tow it and do the 12k in repairs and it's all yours for *free*!"
It was a non-profit organization that was running this and they owed money to sgi for maintenance.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Probably, but it still doesn't make much sense.
C'mon, it's /. , what do you expect?
Nerds need to be exact, not necessarily to make sense... (otherwise they wouldn't be different enough from non-nerds to justify a distinctive term)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Yeah, they were maintaining a respectable lead in the space race, right up until their entire country came apart at the seams. I don't claim any inherent weakness in planned economies, in fact they have some very clear advantages (China's current economic revolution is evidence enough of that), just that in examples to date they tend to be operated by the few, for the benefit of the few, which tends to be an unstable situation. I'm actually quite hopeful that China will fair better - they seem to have learned from Russia's excesses and the demand of their own proletariat for Western luxuries, and seem to be moving in a direction that will eventually give their citizens rights and freedoms comparable to those enjoyed in the West.
As for ICs, everything I've heard indicates that critical developmental funding came through NASA, who needed lightweight computers that could survive the stresses of launch. That's not to say that they wouldn't have been developed anyway, but nobody else had a pressing need for their advantages so development may have been delayed by decades. Can you offer citations to the contrary? I would certainly be interested to hear them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think another problem is that there's probably not much reason for a business to be physically located close to a supercomputer. It would be just as easy to use it from out of the state, with the added benefit that your business can be located somewhere with a larger talent pool. Without that draw, there's not much reason for the state to sponsor such a project, since there's not likely to be a net positive gain for the taxpayers. For a country, it makes more sense to invest in a supercomputer, as there are higher barriers to people and data moving across international boundaries than across state borders. Of course, countries also generally have more use for supercomputers themselves.
Also, from looking at the stats, it's not a terribly efficient machine. It's currently at #185 on the Top500 list (not bad, for being fairly old), but it burns 861 kW. Only 286 of the Top500 systems list their power, and of those it comes in at #271 in terms of efficiency, or #241 in total power. So it's in the 63rd percentile speed-wise, but the 5th percentile in terms of efficiency. This is largely related to its age; the top 84 of 286 systems were all built in 2011 or 2012. I could imagine that having such a low efficiency makes it quite a bit harder to turn a profit. Especially when the most efficient machines on the list (including the fastest machine in the world) use 14-16 times less power for the same performance level.