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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
Can you imagine how many Bitcoins this thing could mine per hour?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Cray is still kicking around??
I don't think they've kicked out an original processor design in ages; but they are still(among) those you talk to if you want something a little more tightly coupled, and/or a bit more 'turnkey' than "10,000 of whatever dell is selling, and some 10GbE switches".
you must be new here.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
Indiana University is not simply a university; it is a state school system with several regional campuses. Oddly enough, Purdue is Indiana's second state school system with its own regional campuses. They both share a campus at IUPUI (Indianapolis). I'd be very surprised if there is any free time left for this. And if there is, IU would likely just lease it to Purdue.
All in all, it is probably cost effective for them to do this. They are unlikely to have made this decision in a vacuum; they are well aware of the alternatives. (I'm an IU alum).
Maybe it is because Seymour Cray died in 1996 of complications from a automobile accident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray I would think that most people who have a passing interest in supercomputer would have known that fact. Seymour Cray did a lot of work in establishing the supercomputers. I can remember seeing his supercomputers on the cover of Popular Science back in the 70's. I think he deserves a little more respect than shown here by that remark.
Cloud computing is not appropriate for all types of research computing. Let's say you want to use Amazon's cloud offering, but you have a genomic and geospatial dataset of 60 TB. While not ubiquitous in research computing, it is not unheard of, especially in the fields of bioinformatics. The cost of storage and the cost of transfer will each away at whatever grant that is funding the research. This is a business decision. Does the cost of the computing resource and operation result in [ more grants / better faculty retention ] than not having it?
The cost-benefit analysis has been done, and while cloud computing has its place, there are additional costs that make it problematic. The cloud is not a panacea.
That said, in five years IU could very well be looking for its next big computer. The average lifespan of a supercomputer is 5-8 years. So, five years is on the early side of looking for the next big thing, but not outrageously so.
Disclaimer -- I run high speed data storage for a university. I've written acceptance test measures for high performance computing resources. I've done the cost-benefit analyses.
...if this got as much attention in the local press as throwing a ball into a basket does.