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Indiana University Dedicates Biggest College-Owned Supercomputer
Indiana University has replaced their supercomputer, Big Red, with a new system predictably named Big Red II. At the dedication HPC scientist Paul Messina said: "It's important that this is a university-owned resource. ... Here you have the opportunity to have your own faculty, staff and students get access with very little difficulty to this wonderful resource." From the article: "Big Red II is a Cray-built machine, which uses both GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes to deliver a petaflop -- or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second -- of max performance. Each of the 344 CPU nodes uses two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors, while the 676 GPU nodes use one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20."
Computers used to be a lot bigger.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Or it could be something completely innocent like cutting of tape and speeches and shit. You know the kind of stuff you do when you show your stakeholders what their money went to. Stop your idiotic religious babbling.
... whatever
Cray is still kicking around??
You want PERF you must go INTEL !!
Intel RUELZ !!
until some wannabe comedian makes a "Does it run Linux?" post. Despite the fact that it's one of the earliest /. memes and has been used over a million times, it will get moderated "+5 Funny" because originality and creativity are lost on this crowd.
It's great to see a university have a monster like this for research use. And old universities you would think are well suited for these kinds of monsters. Their computer centers were built at a time when the computers really were filled with monster machines that your iPad would run circles around today performance-wise. They were replaced in the 1990s by servers that would fit into a closet. But they still have all this space that can be filled with racks upon racks of supercomputer nodes. However, I suspect that IU may have built a new building for these new and improved monsters. But anyway, these new monsters are nice to contemplate but they're not a pretty to look at. Computers in the old days were designed to be both functional and attractive to members of the unwashed masses who could gaze at them through the glass windows and drool, and be hypnotized at the blinking lights and the spinning tape drive reels spinning. And the glass windows were there to allow the institution to show the machine off as a kind of status symbol. There was no picture in the article of this new beast but I will bet $0.02 that it's pretty dull looking.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Can you imagine how many Bitcoins this thing could mine per hour?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
they're still unable to figure out why the big ten sucks at bowl games.
I realize that you don't "believe", but SkyNet will be real one day and we never know which super computer will be the first node in humanity's Beowulf Cluster of Death.
Maybe, just maybe, if we're nice to them and show them some respect they'll let us service their modules until we die of natural causes.
The bitcoin pools are mostly PCs with GPU rigs, and they often number into the tens of thousands, so basically this supercomputer is puny compared to even the GPU bitcoin pools.
I dunno, Indiana does have those awful "In God We Trust" license plates.
They'll just use it to mine Bitcoins I'm sure.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Now they have Big Red Two and Big Red too. Twice the fun!
At least we (Purdue University) name our supercomputers something interesting.
some big ten schools are not sports colleges.
No at some you have real classes to take and pass.
It's already found 2 verified bitcoins and paid for the first month's electric bill.
That's just an alternative to the Free Market sky fairy used elsewhere in the US.
Come up with something better than "Big Red III" for the next machine.
While it has been in vogue for years for universities to have this capability in-house, I have to question the wisdom of this kind of investment in a few areas. First, recently there was an article on Slashdot posted about the Federal Government retiring Roadrunner because in less than 5 years because it was too much of a power hog. I haven't seen anything in the press releases about Big Red that would indicate that IU has solved the power obsolescence issue; in five years, we'll probably see Big Red II retired because it wasn't power efficient given newer technology. IMO in five years, IU will be looking to fund Big Red III so I hope they get their value out of this investment, total operating costs (TOC) because it has to be very, very expensive to keep the lights on for this thing. Second, with Utility Computing models available in the Cloud with AWS, Google Apps etc. for large scale experiments, more and more companies are choosing the utility model to run their research rather than buying it. I don't need to cite them all here but there's stories day in and day out of companies and universities leveraging utility based, cloud models for HPC. You have one resource here at IU when you could lease multiple Cloud based resources with hundreds of thousands of nodes simultaneously, not just rely on one large machine in your data center. I can imagine there are quite a few experiments that IU can do with it, but when I read their press, it's available to IU students and Faculty, does that mean they won't let other academic institutions use it? If that's true it's a very expensive resource that only one institution can use and I doubt that they can keep it busy 24x7x365 for its useful life with experiments. Maybe I'm wrong but I just can't see this kind of large scale investment being feasible over the coming years because it will just be too inexpensive and disposable to run it in a Cloud based model.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"RTFS... in what world are 676 Kepler K20s called puny?"
In a world where 100k GPU's can't compete with the Avalon rigs, so why do you think 20k can?
The IU machine at 1 PFLOP would rank around 24th in the world and 11th in the U.S. (http://www.top500.org/list/2012/11/).
What is the advantage having two different GPUs in one node? Any idea?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Just offer money (pay even in Bitcoins is fine), and in return you run a node on your computer.
Open source the node design, with Bitcoin it drove the design of FGPA and now ASICs to run the nodes. Someone is sure to design tiny fast cores capable of just running your nodes. GPU nodes are too general purpose to be the most efficient solution, and once you make the cores simpler they become cheaper and use less power and scale far better.
As long as you can keep the compute jobs running (so there's income there), the computing power will scale to use it.
There is a huge benefit to having a computer that you physically control. For instance, you can install whatever software you want, including experimental operating systems that might crash. Sure, you could VM all the machines, etc., but if your *thing* is developing high performance computing, then running on the real metal is important.
The other aspect is that the money comes out of a different bucket. If you have the big box already installed and sitting there, your little $10k grant can essentially get the computer time for free (assuming the Uni sets it up that way), as opposed to buying by the CPU-Second from a cloud provider. CapEx vs OpEx as it were.
Finally, the administrative overhead in getting an account and access to an on-campus resource is typically trivial in comparison to negotiating a procurement contract with a cloud provider, particularly if your money is coming from grant funds, since the granting agency usually sticks their fingers into the negotiations as well. (Is the provider compliant with the "Drug Free Workplace Act", for instance)
If that "personal touch" weren't important, then we'd all be still using timesharing terminals on a mainframe.
So do they have Bobby Knight in a closet kicking chairs to power this thing?
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
My mind read 'clown owned supercomputer'. Where was my subconscious going with that?
...if this got as much attention in the local press as throwing a ball into a basket does.
It's only the biggest supercomputer only allowed to be used by one university. Even their own FAQ explains their weasel words: there's at least several (much) larger university supercomputers out there (Blue Waters, Kraken, Stampede). Just because no one else will work with them doesn't make them the biggest.
http://kb.iu.edu/data/bcqt.html
So who was it dedicated to?