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'Blue Waters' Supercomputer Lucky To Exist
Nerval's Lobster writes "One could argue that the University of Illinois' "Blue Waters" supercomputer, scheduled to officially open for business March 28, is lucky to be alive. The 11.6 petaflop supercomputer, commissioned by the University and the National Science Foundation (NSF), will rank in the upper echelon of the world's fastest machines—its compute power would place it third on the current list, just above Japan's K Computer. However, the system will not be submitted to the TOP500 list because of concerns with the way the list is calculated, officials said. University officials and the NSF are lucky to have a machine at all. That's due in part to IBM, which reportedly backed out of the contract when the company determined that it couldn't make a profit. The university then turned to Cray, which would have had to replace what was presumably a POWER or Xeon installation with the current mix of AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPU coprocessors. Allen Blatecky, director of NSF's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, told Fox that pulling the plug was a 'real possibility.' And Cray itself had to work to find the parts necessary for the supercomputer to begin at least trial operations in the fall of 2012."
Nearly 150++ times that I know of @ this point for all of March 2013 so far, & others here have told you to stop - take the hint, lunatic (leave slashdot)...
Sorry folks - but whoever the nutjob is that's attempting to impersonate me, & upset the rest of you as well, has SERIOUS mental issues, no questions asked! I must've gotten the better of him + seriously "gotten his goat" in doing so in a technical debate & his "geek angst" @ losing to me has him doing the:
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A.) $10,000 challenges, ala (where the imposter actually TRACKED + LISTED the # of times he's done this no less, & where I get the 150 or so times I noted above) -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585795&cid=43285307
&/or
B.) Reposting OLD + possibly altered models - (this I haven't checked on as to altering the veracity of the info. being changed) of posts of mine from the past here
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(Albeit massively repeatedly thru all threads on /. this March 2013 nearly in its entirety thusfar).
* Personally, I'm surprised the moderation staff here hasn't just "blocked out" his network range yet honestly!
(They know it's NOT the same as my own as well, especially after THIS post of mine, which they CAN see the IP range I am coming out of to compare with the ac spamming troll doing the above...).
APK
P.S.=> Again/Stressing it: NO guys - it is NOT me doing it, as I wouldn't waste that much time on such trivial b.s. like a kid might...
Plus, I only post where hosts file usage is on topic or appropriate for a solution & certainly NOT IN EVERY POST ON SLASHDOT (like the nutcase trying to "impersonate me" is doing for nearly all of March now, & 140++ times that I know of @ least)... apk
$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski
* POOR SHOWING TROLLS, & most especially IF that's the "best you've got" - apparently, it is... lol!
Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING !! We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.
Your HOSTS file claimed to have created a single DNS resolver. I offer absolute proof that I have created 4 simultaneous DNS servers within a single rotation of .org TLD. You worship "Bill Gates", equating you to a "singularity bastard". Why do you worship a queer -1 Troll? Are you content as a singularity troll?
Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.
If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.
I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.
Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.
Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.
I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.
If Natalie Portman is not measurable, hot grits are Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!
You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his banning he begins to send a variety of abusiv
This story assumes existing is better than not existing. Though I suppose the luck being discussed is bad luck.
You can only say it's "lucky to be alive" if you think it's alive. The standard theorem of AI is that when anything AI-ish gets developed, people say "Oh, that's not really Intelligence, that's just {Pattern Recognition / Expert System solving / Machine Vision / OCR/ etc.}" But if it is actually alive, then it's lucky somebody noticed so they know not to turn it off.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I got to have a personal tour of the building, and it is amazing! Imagine surrounding yourself in 36,000 CPUs worth of power... I bet you just had yourself a nerdgasm, right?
Also, the electrical distribution system on the floor below the servers, has so much electricity running through it, that you have to wear ear protection. It's rediculous.
Oh yeah, and I WAS giggling like a kid in a candy store during much of the time spent in the server area.
Greetings pedant!
You make many logical and valid points as any pedant worth their salt is apt to do, but unfortunately it all falls to pieces when I point out that "lucky to be alive" is actually what we like to call "a figure of speech".
But please don't feel bad, misunderstandings like these happen to pedants of all ages, we are human after all.
In all honesty, we here at Slashdot forgive you.
Seven comments and every one is about that damned hosts troll. jesus, prople, STOP FEEDING THAT GOD DAMNED TROLL! Am I the only one who's sick of him?
K5 died from trolls in the inside (Pete Jongular for one), considering that hosts troll doesn't have a "read the rest of this message", I'm starting to suspect that this is either an inside job, or slashdot has been hacked. WTF is going on, slashdot?
The project was a 'sweetheart' deal between 'lovers' at NCSA and NSF. Should never have been funded in the first place due to ethics violations and fraudulent activities by UI-CU, NSF, WH and DoE.
Speak for yourself. I think he's an asshole for typing out that pointless, obvious statement.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
So they end up with the track 1 system that Oak Ridge/ UT NICS originally submitted and they have had issue after issue with getting things done in the last couple years. They fire the only decent admins they seemed to ever have and they want to still be an XSEDE/Teragrid member and NSF $ receiver?
Cray can't even find ANY employees that want to work there. Let alone NCSA finding new folks. Unfortunately they did pick up a number of good research people over the past couple of years.
I say pull their funding and start somewhere else. West coast seems to lack any decent Track1/Track2 systems up in the NW/W. Let em sink. This has been a debacle for a while now.
because of concerns with the way the list is calculated
Read: because it won't look as nice as throwing the Rpeak of 11.6 Petaflops out there, and the ration of Rmax to Rpeak will look poor as well.
I know the Top500 is a BS, single dimensional metric. It is valid to call it out on that. However, to do so while also trumpeting '11.6 Petaflops' is disengenious since it is also a BS single dimensional metric that in many ways can be pulled completely out of ones ass, which is even worse than a measured value. HPC Challenge Benchmark has the noble goal of measuring the character of an HPC system in a more holistic manner, but no one pays as much attention to it. When occasionally a supercomputer installation does skip a Top500 submission, people tend not to think about that installation so much.
Of course, it's completely bizarre that placement in any such global list is a factor in purchasing and design at all. It really should be about the specific needs of the group funding it and how they are met, not some penis measuring contest.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
alive =/= intelligent
One could argue that the University of Illinois' "Blue Waters" supercomputer... is lucky to be alive.
What are they saying, exactly? Are the rest of us about to be extremely unlucky to be alive or something? :p
all this talk about AI.... why not Skynet?
With 1.3 petabytes of RAM it could definitely hold a massive neural net.
The linpack benchmark is like the top speed for a car: it represents the performance on a very specific setup.
I never met anyone who bought a car based on top speed.
It would be strange however if the car manufacturer would not give that number on the specifications.
My experience with my scientific codes is that the linpack number is a good indicator on a single processor. Once you have "slow communications" in a computing cluster or a cpu-gpu setup, that benchmark is no longer a rough predictor of the speed of my codes.