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University of Texas is Getting a $60 Million Supercomputer (cnet.com)
The University of Texas at Austin, will soon be home to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. From a report: The National Science Foundation awarded a $60 million grant to the school's Texas Advanced Computing Center, UT Austin and NSF said Wednesday. The supercomputer, named Frontera, is set to become operational roughly a year from now in 2019, and will be "among the most powerful in the world," according to a statement. To be exact, it will be the fifth most powerful in the world, third most powerful in the US, and the most powerful at a university.
I can't wait to play Quake on that thing.
will they name it "HAL"?
Back in the day, supercomputers used to be about cutting edge system architecture, making CPUs as absolutely fast as possible, and even shortening connecting wires in the system to squeeze every last bit of performance out of a system. Think back to the Cray systems and such.
These days, supercomputers are just about who can spend the most money to build the biggest data center and buy the largest number of generic blade servers. It's just not interesting anymore; whoever can spend the most money will have the fastest system simply because they can buy the most blades.
Is in China. Because China has eclipsed the US in every conceivable way possible. In 50 years the US will be speaking Mandarin and there's nothing you can do about it.
Explaining how #CocksNotGlocks makes sense to anyone with an IQ above 60.
The real problem is you have to have an IQ under about 40 to even post something as inane as "#CocksNotGlocks".
Look UT Austin, just because you bought yourself a supercomputer doesn't mean its going to be enough to help the Longhorns beat the Sooners no matter how many xFLOPS it can do, or if it can run Witcher 3 in 4k smoothly.
How big is a beowulf cluster of twelve million Raspberry Pi Zero?
#DeleteFacebook
will it scroll text?
Until the difficulty rises.
No, Fortnite - this is Texas
Two priests.
> To be exact, it will be the fifth most powerful in the world, third most powerful in the US, and the most powerful at a university.
If it were to come online today.
A year (and likely more) from now, you can probably multiply all those numbers by 2 or 3.
Odd that the new supercomputer is named "Border" in Spanish, and will be located in Texas.
On a side note, will this new supercomputer generate new tasty, Mexican-themed recipes for Rick Bayless' Frontera Grill??
I was wondering why this years meal plan costs so much more than last year. It's because we're getting a $60m super-computer.
My university got a "supercomputer" and I got excited about what I could do with all of its capabilities. Then I started submitting jobs in batch that were limited to 64gb of ram. I could request 128gb batch machines which would take hours to become available and the maximum machines were 256gb which would sometimes take days to get. Storage was limited to 1TB. Of course I didn't have the permissions to install software so it was an endless hassle to request installation of new versions. So I went back to my own dual E5-2667v2 processors ($590 for both) and 96gb of ram. My z620 is no supercomputer, but it is better than my share of the supercomputer.
Oh yay. More Govt. welfare for Dell and UT at our expense!
Per the June 2018 Top 500 List, the US owns the title of fastest supercomputer. In fact, 6 of the top 10 on the list are installed in the United States. And for those opining the days of Cray's dominance in this space, I'll point out that several of the systems in the top 10 are identified with Cray as the vendor. Just two computers in the top 10 are hosted in Jackie Chan's home country.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Not even the US 200 Petaflop supercomputer is the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
The Ethereum Network has greater computing power than the top 1000 supercomputers of the world... combined.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those, biatches...
Modded down. How...expected. Slashdot is essentially the same libtard echo chamber as Fark these days.
Delicious tears. Still so salty two years later.
http://cocksnotglocks.org/
Ignore this.
A beowulf of RISC-V processors.
...a Beowulf cluster of these?
It's off-topic. Duh.
I'm an atmospheric scientist who has been using federal supercomputing hardware to better understand thunderstorms [orf.media] for years. Blue Waters is the current "Leadership Class" NSF-sponsored supercomputer. My Blue Waters allocation is currently winding down, and I can speak to how great it has been as a machine that has enabled (I know it's a cliche, but it's true) breakthrough science. A typical Blue Waters node contains 16 floating point AMD cores and 64 GB of memory. Many of the Blue Waters nodes contain a GPU, but it's miles behind the times since the machine was created about 7 years ago.
Frontera (for some reason the Canyonera theme song plays in my head) is the Phase 1 machine for the next Leadership Class supercomputer. The Phase 1 machine is supposed to come on line in 2019 and hold us over until 2024 when the next machine will come on line. When you look at how much money is being spent on Fronterra, and you compare it to Blue Waters, you realize that the vendor is being asked to create a much more powerful machine for a fraction of the price. What this will mean in practice, and what most of the scientific computing world is not ready for, is that a large bulk of the FLOPS on this new machine will be GPU flops. GPUs are not easy to use for doing heavy lifting (say, fluid dynamics solvers) using existing code. So a lot of people are going to have to decide whether to try to shoehorn their current MPI only (or MPI + some OpenMP) code to MPI, OpenMP + OpenACL (or nvidia CUDA), or to start from scratch (nobody wants to start from scratch). You have to remember that the vast majority of us scientists are NOT trained computer scientists, and most of us code for shit. I am off to a hackathon at NCSA in a couple weeks with some students to optimize some radiation code for GPUS... I spend half of my time doing computer stuff, and the other half doing science (and the other other half writing proposals, etc.).
So for those of you who aren't excited about new supercomputers, or don't understand their true power, I'm here to say that it's currently a very exciting time to be a numerical modeler, if you're willing to learn a bit on how to best wrestle these supercomputers into submission. I've spend over a decade just figuring out the most efficient way to write, organize, and analyze the TB-PB of data that a high resolution model can produce, and trying to make sense out of the firehose of data that these things can make. The hard-won benefits are crystal clear to me, but as always, tech is a moving target, so what works today might not work tomorrow...
The nice thing about supercomputers is they serve as a virtual lab for just about any field you can imagine. There are people in the humanities using supercomputers to do interesting things, beyond all the usual astrophysics, chemistry, and geophysical modeling.
Yay supercomputers, and yay NSF.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
and spare batteries.
Have gnu, will travel.
So they got $60 million. What was the proposal, just "give us $60 million and we'll think about how to spend it?". Seems reasonable.
The last one, Stampede2, was Xeons + NVidia. Will this one be Ryzen + Radeon? I expect there are a number of Intel and NVidia salesmen now stalking their prey on campus.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.