Whereas the police report makes it pretty clear that CI's just lying about what happened, I should point out that repeatedly hitting an insecure location is actually pretty common. Think about it from the criminal's perspective: you research the place, hit the place once and it's a success; you walk away with fat monies. Six months later, you look again, and nothing's changed. Want more fat monies? Hit 'em again. One of the worst parts about a cycle like that is that if the target isn't sufficiently insured, in the process of replacing what was stolen they might be left unable to afford security upgrades.
Again, I'm not saying that's what happened to CI - they've been caught in too many lies for me to take them seriously. But, fourth time isn't that uncommon at all. One place you see this sort of thing relatively commonly is small town banks. There isn't enough money in the town to justify a new bank, the small bank can't afford better security, and so criminals go back and hit it repeatedly, just because they know that the chances they'll succeed are better there than at unknown locations.
Wait, let me get this straight. One of CI Host's customers either does something bad or gets hacked. AOL, in response, blocks *all* of CI's customers. CI contacts AOL and is ignored. All of CI's customers suffer because of one bad egg. CI takes legal action, since the inability to email the entire AOL userbase is actually a very serious problem for all its customers. And you think CI is the scumbag here?
I kind-of sort-of went through something like this back before I owned an ISP, when I had a dedicated box. My neighbor by IP started throwing spam because his box had been hacked. As a result, AOL and several other large ISPs blocked not just him, but everyone else in the Class D. Even though I was perfectly happy with my dedicated host, and even though they'd done nothing wrong, I very seriously started thinking about taking my business elsewhere, because suddenly I just couldn't reach my customers. It took AOL four days to fix it. Guesswork and averages suggest I lost almost two thousand dollars in those several days.
I'm certainly not standing up for CI - they're apparently lying about their facility, which is about the worst thing a host like that can do, except to fake intrusions (which may or may not have happened.) But, please, explain to me why you're angry at their action in the linked article. Isn't that exactly what a responsible host would do?
A datacenter is a site for server location. Though CI Host seems to be kind of a joke, datacenters are generally chosen for their redundant backbones, deeply redundant power and environment control and the cheap high-end bandwidth. (It's a lot cheaper to get a DS3 at a datacenter than at the office, since you don't have to pay the phone company to lay a loop out to your office.) Combine that with that a real datacenter tends to have a much better security system - these guys seem to have just been lying, but real datacenters like Level3 have armed guards, dogs, huge walls and so on - and you've got a good buy. The datacenter I host at is in a building with six foot thick walls - it used to be a grocery warehouse.
It's usually best to visit your datacenter, or if it's in another city, to have a friend visit it. I wish one of CI Host's customers (or the Illinois State Attorney General) would sue them for false advertising. It's hard for real datacenters to sell service when your competition just lies to make their offerings look better than they really are.
Press passes are a commercial convenience, meant to help arrange public events, and do not convey rights of any form. In as regards the underlying question, though, why should bloggers be afforded defenses typically considered the privy of "real" press, the defense of the press is critically hinged on the defense of small press. Oftentimes those are the only organizations with the scope and scale to deal with local issues and local problems. If we attempt to associate those defenses with a certain level of distribution, we begin to lose the intent of that protection beneath that level.
Freedom of the press must extend even to some guy in his garage with an inkjet printer writing his very first flyer. The mechanism and scale of distribution aren't important. What is important is to defend the ability of individuals and groups to disseminate information, and blogs are a mechanism for exactly that.
bandwidth and storage - and indeed everything but ram - is measured base 2 instead of base 10.
Did you actually mean it the other way round
Yes.:( I'm having one of those days. I cited the wrong prefix and I got units backwards. I should really be shutting up. Anyway, I've already admitted the other mistake half a dozen times, and I have to wait two minutes between each, which means I can't keep up with the flood of people pointing out the same thing over and over. The first supercomputer was IBM Stretch in 1961, the line is gigaflops (not teraflops like I said,) and I'm going to go flush myself.
Wikipedia doesn't have the faintest clue what it's talking about. I responded to the other people who caught this same mistake that I made civilly. However, the tone you've taken really pisses me off, so I'm just going to flip you the bird. (By the by, if you genuinely believe Wikipedia is credible, then I don't actually give enough of a damn what you think for you to bother replying.)
I remembered the prefix wrongly. It's gigaflop, not teraflop. The first supercomputer was IBM's Stretch project in 1961. Wikipedia's supercomputer articles are full of crap; for example, it cites 800 MFLOPS for the Cray X-MP, when the X-MP could have between two and 192 CPUs, each of which did 230 MFLOPS. Generally speaking, try to refer to something authoratative, like Cray documents on Cray's websites; Wikipedia is not sufficiently vetted. Yes, yes, I know, that comparison to Brittanica and all; I don't care, I find mistakes on Wikipedia all the time. There are two you can see for yourself, one of which is contextually germane.
But, you're right: the line isn't teraflops, I was mistaken. The supercomputer line was broken as a research project in 1961, and became available commercially in 1972. Cray's third machine, the 1S, was their first supercomputer.
The cray-1 isn't a computer at all. It's a specification. The Cray 1A was the first implementation of the Cray 1 specification, and it actually performed 160 MFLOPS, not 250. See the citation in the grandparent post. As I've noted in other posts, you're right, I had the line wrong: it's gigaflop, not teraflop. The MP-X doesn't exist at all; I assume you mean the X-MP. That machine had a broad range of performances. Each chip did 230 MFLOPS. The X-MP/48, thus, did 11 GFLOPS total. (You really need to stop turning to wikipedia for technical data. It is full of crap as a general rule. I see that 800 MFLOPS number right there in the article. It's dead fucking wrong. 230 MFLOPS per cpu, 2-192 CPUs per system.)
So, no, the 1A was not a supercomputer, but yes, the X-MP was. The first supercomputer was 1961's IBM Stretch research project. Cray's first supercomputer was the Cray 1S. That's why when you say "was the cray-1 a supercomputer," you make it hard to answer: it's a ten year line of machines (the 1A, the 1M, the 1S, the 1T and so on.)
In summary: I call bullshit.
So, yes, I made a mistake: I was hooking on the wrong metric prefix by memory. And, yes, Cray released a machine - two, in fact - which weren't supercomputers, back in the 70s. And yes, you made a mistake too: you believed wikipedia without citation. Nonetheless, supercomputer is still a hard line, whether Wikipedia knows about it or not. That's why it takes eight PS3s to make a supercomputer, not six or ten or "many," why it took four release-era G3s to make a supercomputer instead of three or five or whatever marketing believes would sell, et cetera.
Call bullshit all you want. When you have a more authoratative citation than a wiki, lemme know.
Yeah, my mistake. On checking, it's gigaflop, not teraflop. The first supercomputer was the IBM Stretch, in 1961. As far as the wikipedia article, Wikipedia technical articles are not adequately vetted. The phrase in 1929 was "super computing;" that that should be related to supercomputers is rather silly, since the electronic computer wouldn't even appear for another 16 years. It's just a coincidence. A mechanical tabulator computes numbers. No doubt in that era you can also find articles that say "amazing calculator" and "superior abacus." Nonetheless, if either of those became terms in the future, the articles about other such things would not presage them. I should point out that one of Euler's biographies refers to him as a super computer. Should that be considered to impact the definition of the current term, as well?
So, in response to intent, yes, supercomputers appeared in a specific year. I just had the line wrongly; it's gigaflop, which is 1961, not teraflop, which is 1996/7.
the first TeraFlop computer didn't appear until 1997. Does that mean that there were no supercomputers before this date?
You are correct. On checking, the number is gigaflop, not teraflop. My mistake: I misremembered on which line the term hinged. The first supercomputer appeared in 1961 - the IBM Stretch. But, in response to the intent of the question, yes, there is a specific date on which we crossed the supercomputing barrier.
Extrapolating power consumption over the last ten years would seem to indicate that this "super computer in your hand" would probably be glowing red hot.
Oh, bullshit. There are several laptops on the open market right now that are over the 50% line. The only palmtops that glow red hot will be doing so because they use Sony batteries. Saying things like "extrapolating" without actually doing the math really just makes you look like an asshole. You aren't extrapolating. You're guessing.
Technically, isn't my cell phone a super-computer by the standards of previous generations?
No. Supercomputer is a specific FLOPS threshhold established by the government in the 1970s as a basis for export restrictions on hardware. A supercomputer from 1972 is a supercomputer today. It has nothing to do with generational standards; otherwise, stapling 8 PS3s together wouldn't prove anything, and it would be impossible to ever get a supercomputer in one's hand, given that the standards of the day would be some room-sized box in a university or government lab somewhere.
And, well, cell phones aren't quite that far yet. It takes eight PS3s to make a supercomputer. Where'd you get your phone?
i can hold a stack of eight ps3 units in my hand today.
I'll mail you a dollar if you do that. The PS3 is eleven pounds; it'd be hard enough to hold up fifteen pounds as a stack of eight unbalanced pieces of that size, one on top of the next, and around half of people couldn't hold 88lbs with a single hand. Holding up an unbalanced stack of 88 lbs would be a serious feat of balance.
And remember, if you try it with an XBox, you're not even going to be able to lift two controllers...
Damnit, I forgot to finish my thought. The Cray 1A is not a supercomputer; it's only 16% of the speed required for that moniker. Supercomputer doesn't mean "fastest computer of its day;" it has a specific numeric meaning. It's a legal term invented by the government to give a basis for export restrictions on computing hardware.
No, really. An iPhone is much more powerful than the Cray-1, and probably significantly more powerful than a Cray X-MP.
I'm not sure why you believe this. I'll assume you mean the Cray 1A, since the Cray 1 is just a specification; it's a bit like talking about the 386, since the 386 ran at about a dozen different clock speeds. The Cray 1A was the first actual implementation of the Cray 1 spec, and was initially installed at Los Alamos. SCD's Cray 1 was installed about six months later, and ran at 160 megaflops. (The Los Alamos Lab one almost certainly ran at the same speed.)
Gen3 IPods use a pp5002d as a CPU. I'm not able to track down its actual performance, but in several places I see a Rio engineer saying that Vorbis is just at the edge of its performance capabilities. Tremor, a Vorbis implementation, runs just fine on the Nintendo DS - it eats about 40% of your CPU time if you're running it on the Arm9/75. Sony cites their UX50 - an Arm9/125 - as performing 2.51 megaflops. yCPUbench quotes 2.44, suggesting Sony has a slightly better tuned test set for that architecture, which isn't surprising. If tremor needs 40% of a 75mHz arm9, or ~30mHz, then it needs 24% of the UX50, or about 0.6 megaflops. This suggests that the iPod has a bit over 0.6 megaflops to bring to bear. Considering that all it does is play music, it should be no surprise that it has less CPU than a Nintendo DS, which needs to do many things in parallel with playing music.
What is surprising, however, is that you believe that it's faster than a Cray 1A. 160 to 0.6 - the cray from the 70s is approx. 265 times as fast.
Now, the Cray X-MP ran at a huge range of speeds, because it was a modular design; there are deployments that were several thousand times as fast as the base install. But, if you check that same SCD history PDF as above, their X-MP/48 ran at 0.91 gigaflops, or about one point five million times as fast as your iPod. Still, that was kind of a lower end X-MP, because SCD was saving up for a TMC CM-2. The X-MP is about half as powerful as an XBox running untuned linux. The iPod is nowhere near that ballpark; it's only about twice as fast as a Gameboy Advance.
The iPhone certainly has much more RAM and storage than they typical early Crays
Storage, yes. RAM, not even close - your iPod has 96k, and in 1970, the Cray 1A at SCD hat 8 meg. Please stop making things up.
Maybe you should try doing the math before getting on the soapbox. When someone fills in the numbers you thought you could pull out of the air, and you're wrong by an average of six orders of magnitude, you start looking pretty bad.
If you can put a supercomputer in your hand, it's not a supercomputer. A week ago, we had an article here on a guy who'd wired several PS3s together and called it a supercomputer.
Yeah, you're just dead wrong, here. That guy is a professor of computer science at North Carolina Sate; his name is Frank Mueller. And, surprise surprise, he knows comp sci better than you do. "Supercomputer" is a legal term coined in the 1970s by the US government to define export restrictions on computing hardware. It has a concrete meaning: a computer capable of one trillion floating point operations per second. It's really just that simple. The very first supercomputer ever made is still a supercomputer today, and supercomputers can in fact fit in the palm of your hand. Dell is currently selling a laptop which is just a hair short of halfway to a supercomputer.
Folks didn't agree with the supercomputer designation
Only the ones who didn't know what they were talking about.
even though he was getting flops that would clearly have been supercomputer speed just five or six years ago.
See? There it is right now. If a supercomputer is a supercomputer today, it will also be in 100 years, ten thousand years, a billion years, as long as it's still functioning. Why must people like you use words that you learned from other people like you? Is it really that hard to understand that you might be less up to par with formal definitions than a tenured professor of engineering at one of the nation's best schools?
Honestly, the depth of hubris it must take for you to get up on the soapbox and preach about a word you can't even define...
Most of todays cellphones are the super computers of yesteryear.
A supercomputer is a legal term meaning a computer which can perform one teraflop or more. There is no cellular phone (yet) which has crossed that threshhold, and the very first supercomputer made is still a supercomputer today. Please stop attempting to learn your computer science from Wikipedia, as it's written by people whose knowledge is akin to yours.
No. A supercomputer is a computer which can perform one teraflop. The origin of the term was to give the US Government a way to set export restrictions on computing hardware. A supercomputer from the 1970s is a supercomputer today. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever computers are fast today; the example that people seem to remember is the north carolina state professor who clustered eight PS3s to make a supercomputer. If the term was defined in the context of the speed of its day, why wasn't he laughed off of campus?
The article wouldn't make sense if it was a relative term. "Supercomputer" means one trillion floating point operations per second or better, period.
No, they aren't. A supercomputer can perform a teraflop. That's the definition of supercomputer, and it has been since the word was coined by the government in the 1970s in order to define export restrictions. That's what the article is about: a teraflop in the palm of your hand. That's why that NC State professor was able to cluster eight PS3s and call it a supercomputer. Remember that? He would have been laughed off of campus if supercomputer meant "omg whatever is fast this week."
Nobody cares whose socks are being blown off. Supercomputers from the 1970s are still supercomputers today. It's a specific measurement. Please read a book.
No. Supercomputer is a specific term with a specific speed attached, and has been since the word was coined in the 1970s. The word is backed by law, because of export restrictions. A supercomputer can perform a trillion floating point operations per second (one teraflop,) which was a goal that was difficult at government scale in the 1970s, and is now not all that big a deal. You remember when that North Carolina State professor made a supercomputer out of eight PS3s? He couldn't have done that if "supercomputer" didn't have a rock solid meaning. It's one of those things that only old people seem to know anymore, like that a byte is not necessarily an octet, that bits per second and baud aren't the same thing, or that bandwidth and storage - and indeed everything but ram - is measured base 2 instead of base 10.
Surely the measure of what is a super-computer and what isn't must be based upon what the fastest machines are in the world at that time.
Nope. That would mean that something that's a supercomputer in year 1 might not be in year 2, which would reduce supercomputer to a marketing term. Believe it or not, computers are measurable. Some terms have actual meanings. This is one of those.
I mean, I don't know the exact figure but I would that my Dual Core Intel box at home is probably a good deal faster than a super-computer from the 80s.
Nope. Home PCs will likely cross the teraflop threshhold around 2012. All supercomputers from every era have the same processing threshhold. A current quad-CPU dual core box would be enough.
Perhaps what he means is that what we currently do with supercomputers today will be able to be done with low cost computing.
Nope. He means a teraflop.
However, the improvements in computing speed will also apply to super-computers.
Generally speaking, once a computer has been manufactured, technology improvements do not alter it. There are exceptions, especially in computers which are limited by temperature, but not many. A supercomputer from the 1970s is still a supercomputer today. Please stop attempting to argue with an article on grounds of metaphor structured around words of which you don't know the meaning.
In short, I can't really understand the super-computer slant of the article. Why not just talk about general-purpose computing instead?
The interviewee is old enough to know that supercomputer means something fixed, and that therefore there is a threshhold to be crossed in the fashion of getting a supercomputer into a specific form factor. The interviewer doesn't understand geeks well enough to know that they won't know what a supercomputer is, and fails to explain, probably expecting people to go read the deeply wrong article on Wikipedia. That help?
Why must every post with whom some disagree, be suspect for "seeking attention"??
You seem to be confused. It's not every post with whom I disagree to which I react as I reacted to you. The way people treat you is because of how you act.
I find that to be pretty a pretty arrogant attitude.
Yes, and I find it arrogant for someone to get up on a soapbox preaching about how everyone's doing everything wrong without any actual apparent suggestion about what else should be being done, when the things you suggest are wrong are actually fairly right. What's your point?
I find that to be pretty a pretty arrogant attitude. Nothing personal, you understand
Making a personal insult then saying "nothing personal" is simple cowardice. At least have the spine to stand up for what you say for a full paragraph.
some other posters were rather rude.
Uh huh. You were one of them. Quit pointing the finger.
Bigger concerns? How about problems that we KNOW are serious, rather than just hypothetical? For example, economist Bjorn Lomborg (closest English spelling) calculates that the cost of reducing CO2 levels enough to keep the earth cooler by approximately 1/2 degree over the next hudred years (and that is even assuming that the CO2-driven model of global warming is correct as presented... something that is far from demonstrated)... that same cost would be enough to completely eliminate human hunger on earth.
Well, let's see. Maybe you should start by looking up what caused the Ethiopian and the Zaire droughts over the last 30 years. Then, take a look at world food production. We're actually already producing more than enough food. The problem is the infrastructure: you can't reasonably get most food from the production centers to the starving areas before it's rotten, unless you can it, which at that scale would be a tremendous drain on limited metal resources (before you flip out about bauxite, there's more to an aluminum can than aluminum; try looking it up.) And no, you can't dehydrate it, because the water's their problem in the first place.
So, okay. We have enough food. What would we need to get it to them? Infrastructure. And so, if we get it to them, what problem naturally goes up?
Now, let's look at it from the other direction. The world's weather patterns are already changing. There are already several major anoxic areas in the ocean, one of which is starting to cover America's second largest fishery. Areas that used to get huge amounts of rain find themselves petering off. Africa's breadbasket is weakening; in the 1960s, Africa was a food exporter.
Which do you think is better? 1/2 degree cooler (if the scare mongers are correct), or NO CHILDREN ON EARTH STARVING?
Well, if that were really the choice, I'd agree with you. Which do you think is better? Santa Claus fighting off the martians, or Jerry Springer being the Reasonable President of Earth?
Much of our current food problems are caused by global warming, and even then we have a food surplus. The real problem is the distribution infrastructure, and if you'd bother to read the books of the guy you're half-citing, you'll discover that at no point does he attempt to take infrastructure into account. Maybe you didn't know this, but Americans are capitalists. We've already got entrepreneurs trying to take on global warming as a capital intensive research problem, because it's profitable to pull dirt out of the sky. Do you really, honestly believe that we wouldn't have capitalists solving the hunger problem if it were really cheaper than the global warming problem?
I mean, we didn't even know about global warming until the 60s. Do you think starvation is new, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas the police report makes it pretty clear that CI's just lying about what happened, I should point out that repeatedly hitting an insecure location is actually pretty common. Think about it from the criminal's perspective: you research the place, hit the place once and it's a success; you walk away with fat monies. Six months later, you look again, and nothing's changed. Want more fat monies? Hit 'em again. One of the worst parts about a cycle like that is that if the target isn't sufficiently insured, in the process of replacing what was stolen they might be left unable to afford security upgrades.
Again, I'm not saying that's what happened to CI - they've been caught in too many lies for me to take them seriously. But, fourth time isn't that uncommon at all. One place you see this sort of thing relatively commonly is small town banks. There isn't enough money in the town to justify a new bank, the small bank can't afford better security, and so criminals go back and hit it repeatedly, just because they know that the chances they'll succeed are better there than at unknown locations.
Wait, let me get this straight. One of CI Host's customers either does something bad or gets hacked. AOL, in response, blocks *all* of CI's customers. CI contacts AOL and is ignored. All of CI's customers suffer because of one bad egg. CI takes legal action, since the inability to email the entire AOL userbase is actually a very serious problem for all its customers. And you think CI is the scumbag here?
I kind-of sort-of went through something like this back before I owned an ISP, when I had a dedicated box. My neighbor by IP started throwing spam because his box had been hacked. As a result, AOL and several other large ISPs blocked not just him, but everyone else in the Class D. Even though I was perfectly happy with my dedicated host, and even though they'd done nothing wrong, I very seriously started thinking about taking my business elsewhere, because suddenly I just couldn't reach my customers. It took AOL four days to fix it. Guesswork and averages suggest I lost almost two thousand dollars in those several days.
I'm certainly not standing up for CI - they're apparently lying about their facility, which is about the worst thing a host like that can do, except to fake intrusions (which may or may not have happened.) But, please, explain to me why you're angry at their action in the linked article. Isn't that exactly what a responsible host would do?
A datacenter is a site for server location. Though CI Host seems to be kind of a joke, datacenters are generally chosen for their redundant backbones, deeply redundant power and environment control and the cheap high-end bandwidth. (It's a lot cheaper to get a DS3 at a datacenter than at the office, since you don't have to pay the phone company to lay a loop out to your office.) Combine that with that a real datacenter tends to have a much better security system - these guys seem to have just been lying, but real datacenters like Level3 have armed guards, dogs, huge walls and so on - and you've got a good buy. The datacenter I host at is in a building with six foot thick walls - it used to be a grocery warehouse.
It's usually best to visit your datacenter, or if it's in another city, to have a friend visit it. I wish one of CI Host's customers (or the Illinois State Attorney General) would sue them for false advertising. It's hard for real datacenters to sell service when your competition just lies to make their offerings look better than they really are.
Press passes are a commercial convenience, meant to help arrange public events, and do not convey rights of any form. In as regards the underlying question, though, why should bloggers be afforded defenses typically considered the privy of "real" press, the defense of the press is critically hinged on the defense of small press. Oftentimes those are the only organizations with the scope and scale to deal with local issues and local problems. If we attempt to associate those defenses with a certain level of distribution, we begin to lose the intent of that protection beneath that level.
Freedom of the press must extend even to some guy in his garage with an inkjet printer writing his very first flyer. The mechanism and scale of distribution aren't important. What is important is to defend the ability of individuals and groups to disseminate information, and blogs are a mechanism for exactly that.
Wikipedia doesn't have the faintest clue what it's talking about. I responded to the other people who caught this same mistake that I made civilly. However, the tone you've taken really pisses me off, so I'm just going to flip you the bird. (By the by, if you genuinely believe Wikipedia is credible, then I don't actually give enough of a damn what you think for you to bother replying.)
I remembered the prefix wrongly. It's gigaflop, not teraflop. The first supercomputer was IBM's Stretch project in 1961. Wikipedia's supercomputer articles are full of crap; for example, it cites 800 MFLOPS for the Cray X-MP, when the X-MP could have between two and 192 CPUs, each of which did 230 MFLOPS. Generally speaking, try to refer to something authoratative, like Cray documents on Cray's websites; Wikipedia is not sufficiently vetted. Yes, yes, I know, that comparison to Brittanica and all; I don't care, I find mistakes on Wikipedia all the time. There are two you can see for yourself, one of which is contextually germane.
But, you're right: the line isn't teraflops, I was mistaken. The supercomputer line was broken as a research project in 1961, and became available commercially in 1972. Cray's third machine, the 1S, was their first supercomputer.
So, no, the 1A was not a supercomputer, but yes, the X-MP was. The first supercomputer was 1961's IBM Stretch research project. Cray's first supercomputer was the Cray 1S. That's why when you say "was the cray-1 a supercomputer," you make it hard to answer: it's a ten year line of machines (the 1A, the 1M, the 1S, the 1T and so on.)So, yes, I made a mistake: I was hooking on the wrong metric prefix by memory. And, yes, Cray released a machine - two, in fact - which weren't supercomputers, back in the 70s. And yes, you made a mistake too: you believed wikipedia without citation. Nonetheless, supercomputer is still a hard line, whether Wikipedia knows about it or not. That's why it takes eight PS3s to make a supercomputer, not six or ten or "many," why it took four release-era G3s to make a supercomputer instead of three or five or whatever marketing believes would sell, et cetera.
Call bullshit all you want. When you have a more authoratative citation than a wiki, lemme know.
Yeah, my mistake. On checking, it's gigaflop, not teraflop. The first supercomputer was the IBM Stretch, in 1961. As far as the wikipedia article, Wikipedia technical articles are not adequately vetted. The phrase in 1929 was "super computing;" that that should be related to supercomputers is rather silly, since the electronic computer wouldn't even appear for another 16 years. It's just a coincidence. A mechanical tabulator computes numbers. No doubt in that era you can also find articles that say "amazing calculator" and "superior abacus." Nonetheless, if either of those became terms in the future, the articles about other such things would not presage them. I should point out that one of Euler's biographies refers to him as a super computer. Should that be considered to impact the definition of the current term, as well?
So, in response to intent, yes, supercomputers appeared in a specific year. I just had the line wrongly; it's gigaflop, which is 1961, not teraflop, which is 1996/7.
The 1970s will have to pry its hype from Intel's marketing department's cold, dead hands.
And, well, cell phones aren't quite that far yet. It takes eight PS3s to make a supercomputer. Where'd you get your phone?
And remember, if you try it with an XBox, you're not even going to be able to lift two controllers...
Damnit, I forgot to finish my thought. The Cray 1A is not a supercomputer; it's only 16% of the speed required for that moniker. Supercomputer doesn't mean "fastest computer of its day;" it has a specific numeric meaning. It's a legal term invented by the government to give a basis for export restrictions on computing hardware.
Do your homework.
Gen3 IPods use a pp5002d as a CPU. I'm not able to track down its actual performance, but in several places I see a Rio engineer saying that Vorbis is just at the edge of its performance capabilities. Tremor, a Vorbis implementation, runs just fine on the Nintendo DS - it eats about 40% of your CPU time if you're running it on the Arm9/75. Sony cites their UX50 - an Arm9/125 - as performing 2.51 megaflops. yCPUbench quotes 2.44, suggesting Sony has a slightly better tuned test set for that architecture, which isn't surprising. If tremor needs 40% of a 75mHz arm9, or ~30mHz, then it needs 24% of the UX50, or about 0.6 megaflops. This suggests that the iPod has a bit over 0.6 megaflops to bring to bear. Considering that all it does is play music, it should be no surprise that it has less CPU than a Nintendo DS, which needs to do many things in parallel with playing music.
What is surprising, however, is that you believe that it's faster than a Cray 1A. 160 to 0.6 - the cray from the 70s is approx. 265 times as fast.
Now, the Cray X-MP ran at a huge range of speeds, because it was a modular design; there are deployments that were several thousand times as fast as the base install. But, if you check that same SCD history PDF as above, their X-MP/48 ran at 0.91 gigaflops, or about one point five million times as fast as your iPod. Still, that was kind of a lower end X-MP, because SCD was saving up for a TMC CM-2. The X-MP is about half as powerful as an XBox running untuned linux. The iPod is nowhere near that ballpark; it's only about twice as fast as a Gameboy Advance.Storage, yes. RAM, not even close - your iPod has 96k, and in 1970, the Cray 1A at SCD hat 8 meg. Please stop making things up.
Maybe you should try doing the math before getting on the soapbox. When someone fills in the numbers you thought you could pull out of the air, and you're wrong by an average of six orders of magnitude, you start looking pretty bad.
By the way, that week ago was back in February.Only the ones who didn't know what they were talking about.See? There it is right now. If a supercomputer is a supercomputer today, it will also be in 100 years, ten thousand years, a billion years, as long as it's still functioning. Why must people like you use words that you learned from other people like you? Is it really that hard to understand that you might be less up to par with formal definitions than a tenured professor of engineering at one of the nation's best schools?
Honestly, the depth of hubris it must take for you to get up on the soapbox and preach about a word you can't even define...
The article wouldn't make sense if it was a relative term. "Supercomputer" means one trillion floating point operations per second or better, period.
No, they aren't. A supercomputer can perform a teraflop. That's the definition of supercomputer, and it has been since the word was coined by the government in the 1970s in order to define export restrictions. That's what the article is about: a teraflop in the palm of your hand. That's why that NC State professor was able to cluster eight PS3s and call it a supercomputer. Remember that? He would have been laughed off of campus if supercomputer meant "omg whatever is fast this week."
Nobody cares whose socks are being blown off. Supercomputers from the 1970s are still supercomputers today. It's a specific measurement. Please read a book.
You seem to be confused. It's not every post with whom I disagree to which I react as I reacted to you. The way people treat you is because of how you act.
Yes, and I find it arrogant for someone to get up on a soapbox preaching about how everyone's doing everything wrong without any actual apparent suggestion about what else should be being done, when the things you suggest are wrong are actually fairly right. What's your point?
Making a personal insult then saying "nothing personal" is simple cowardice. At least have the spine to stand up for what you say for a full paragraph.
Uh huh. You were one of them. Quit pointing the finger.
Well, let's see. Maybe you should start by looking up what caused the Ethiopian and the Zaire droughts over the last 30 years. Then, take a look at world food production. We're actually already producing more than enough food. The problem is the infrastructure: you can't reasonably get most food from the production centers to the starving areas before it's rotten, unless you can it, which at that scale would be a tremendous drain on limited metal resources (before you flip out about bauxite, there's more to an aluminum can than aluminum; try looking it up.) And no, you can't dehydrate it, because the water's their problem in the first place.
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So, okay. We have enough food. What would we need to get it to them? Infrastructure. And so, if we get it to them, what problem naturally goes up?
Now, let's look at it from the other direction. The world's weather patterns are already changing. There are already several major anoxic areas in the ocean, one of which is starting to cover America's second largest fishery. Areas that used to get huge amounts of rain find themselves petering off. Africa's breadbasket is weakening; in the 1960s, Africa was a food exporter
Well, if that were really the choice, I'd agree with you. Which do you think is better? Santa Claus fighting off the martians, or Jerry Springer being the Reasonable President of Earth?
Much of our current food problems are caused by global warming , and even then we have a food surplus. The real problem is the distribution infrastructure, and if you'd bother to read the books of the guy you're half-citing, you'll discover that at no point does he attempt to take infrastructure into account. Maybe you didn't know this, but Americans are capitalists. We've already got entrepreneurs trying to take on global warming as a capital intensive research problem, because it's profitable to pull dirt out of the sky. Do you really, honestly believe that we wouldn't have capitalists solving the hunger problem if it were really cheaper than the global warming problem?
I mean, we didn't even know about global warming until the 60s. Do you think starvation is new, or what?
A