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Three-Mile-High Supercomputer Poses Unique Challenges
Nerval's Lobster writes "Building and operating a supercomputer at more than three miles above sea level poses some unique problems, the designers of the recently installed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Correlator discovered. The ALMA computer serves as the brains behind the ALMA astronomical telescope, a partnership between Europe, North American, and South American agencies. It's the largest such project in existence. Based high in the Andes mountains in northern Chile, the telescope includes an array of 66 dish-shaped antennas in two groups. The telescope correlator's 134 million processors continually combine and compare faint celestial signals received by the antennas in the ALMA array, which are separated by up to 16 kilometers, enabling the antennas to work together as a single, enormous telescope, according to Space Daily. The extreme high altitude makes it nearly impossible to maintain on-site support staff for significant lengths of time, with ALMA reporting that human intervention will be kept to an absolute minimum. Data acquired via the array is archived at a lower-altitude support site. The altitude also limited the construction crew's ability to actually build the thing, requiring 20 weeks of human effort just to unpack and install it."
Simple answer: Have redundancy all over the place so it doesn't matter if a few modules fail. The repair crew can go in once a year and swap them.
No sig today...
Drove three of my friends over Tioga Pass in the Sierra Nevada's in the north of Yosemite...couple of them had never been out of Louisiana...between 8000 and the summit of the pass at ~10,000 ft meant me driving while everyone else suffered from altitude sickness...the only cure is to remove to a lower elevation. Having grown up in the sierras, i was used to the elevation...but if you're not acclimated, then you're going to walk 20 feet and have to sit down to rest for 10 minutes.
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
134 million processors, 140 kilowatts?!?
1 miliwat per processor?
When I read the title, I got all excited because I thought that someone was building an enormous supercomputer that was 15,000 feet tall. That would have been freakin' awesome.
As the subject says. They could have a short fiber optic connection to a more hospitable spot down the road.
It's okay. No one posts anything useful anyway. The more thought-provoking and interesting the science subject, the more idiots that go for a +5 funny mod. No more does anyone post anything intelligent to this site.
Face it, the slashdot of a decade ago is long gone.
The article mentions how hard-disks fail at this altitude because the heads can't glide over the platters on a layer of air because it's too thin. The thin air also is less effective for cooling. However, it didn't say if there's been any consideration of an increased incidence of high-energy particles from outer space causing random faults even in solid-state components.
Why downmod to -1? This is truthful and can be backed up just by looking at archived science stories compared to the ones of now. He didn't say anything offensive, and the last sentence is self-evident and redundant. Obviously something today will not be the same as a decade ago.
Just goes to show how bad the moderation system on this site is. People downmod because they disagree. Though, I suspect this mod was from one of the editors who have unlimited "mod points".
Mis-interpreted the article title and though that someone was building a supercomputer that is three miles tall. I bet that poses unique challenges too.
Who else, looking at the title, thought "Wow! Deep Thought! 42!"
it's so cute to see an anon pretend to be multiple people
Cloud computing!!!!!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
While altitude acclimation is required, there are a number of staffed high altitude research facilities at nearly this height. Mt Evans in Colorado (14,265 ft) has a paved road to over 14,000 ft and several scientific research facilities. Normal cars drive up from Denver. I cannot believe that another 2000 ft makes a huge difference to living there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Evans. Over 30,000 people live in La Rinconada, Peru at 16,728 ft altitude.
I hope you have some HP hardware.....iLo is your best friend. It was my best friend while living in Maine and having remote sites on top of multiple mountains.
Any discussion in TFA about why they aren't just sending that data over optical cables to wherever would make sense to house a data-center? e.g. ground-level?
Why does it need to be so near the array?
Speed of signal over fibre can't be the difference (i.e. what difference does 1 km or 40km make? not much).
Are you the same AC replying to intelligent posts below, telling them to stop posting intelligent posts? Are you trying to scare them away to force your prophesy to be true? Saying something sucks when you are the one trying, quite poorly, to make it suck doesn't make you right (or the succkage "self-evident"), it just makes you an ass.
The far side of the Moon. No clouds, no rain, and only a little bit of dust every so often.
They are combining signals from dishes separated by up to 16km so it is not a necessity that the supercomputer be right next to one of the dishes. Why not build the supercomputer at the base of the mountain instead of the top. They are already beaming raw data around so it will not make a difference.
Just virtualize the supercomputer in the clouds and put the virtual machine on the mountain!
See?
Defining Statistics and Social Research