"Supercomputer" might mean cluster, a big node (to go in a cluster), or big-iron mainframe.
It's not a cluster, and it's not much of a mainframe, but it has a helluva lot of FLOPS for a single node. To me, it looks similar to the nodes that went into Roadrunner's TriBlades - 2 Opterons (as general purpose processors) plus 4 PowerXCell 8i (for heavyweight vector processing), and a total of 16G memory. But I'm not an expert.
Still, I bet that if you could hook 3240 of them together, you would have a strong Top500 contender.
The PSU is only 1100W. It's not that intensive - three teslas are like three big graphics cards. 2 or 3 kittens would be sufficient, so you've got enough to share.
Palm oil and canola oil both cost a similar amount, so they should have the same order-of-magnitude damage. Palm oil may have a large impact, but it's a cherry-picked example of a bad product.
At the end of the day, you can make a bunch of IO (a.k.a Leontief) matrices to calculate the "embedded" cost of the products. "Energy" costs will end up with a high weighting. "Labor" costs will end up with a medium weighting. "Skilled labor" will be lower. So the "embedded cost" will look like:
Energy cost of product (in dollars) * energy factor + labor cost of product * labor factor *..
But like I said, the first-order-approximation can just use total cost. It won't be very accurate, but it's an easy way to compare a dog to a SUV on the back of a napkin.
Yeah, it seems dodgy. Cost can be used as a first-order estimate of environmental impact. A $50 fuel bill has a the same order-of-magnitude environmental impact to a $50 food bill.
And don't forget capital and disposal costs. Dogs are pretty cheap to build (since they are self-replicating), and easy to dispose. SUVs are a bit more expensive.
I think it's safe to say that an SUV costs more to run than a dog. It also costs a lot more to purchase. Ergo, the SUV has a higher footprint.
CDs are for personal use, and priced accordingly. That's fair. The radio thing is a bit weird, since radio is all about broadcast, but I suppose that is to stop nightclubs using radio to avoid paying hefty music license fees.
Still, it's horrendous that our common culture (popular songs, catchphrases, etc) are now all copyright. People used to sing folk songs, but now these have been replaced with pop songs. Perhaps we need some creative common songs?
It's obvious that the big distributors are following Microsoft's strategy. Get popular and crush the competition, then extract money from whoever has big pockets.
Why is it so damn huge? My 2nd computer ran Windows 95 on 16 RAM, a 100 mb HDD, and a pentium 100 (IIRC). People ran Windows 95 on 486 machines, with 8 mb ram.
Now, I know that WIndows 95 was buggy, but it could surf the net and play games. Now a SMALL system take 64mb RAM (4 times the size), and 2g hard drive space.
It's not the (Linux) kernel - some people claim that DSL can run on a beefy 486... what's taking up all the space? Firefox?
CSIRO is only about 50% publicly funded. The rest comes from patents, product sales, and other commercial work. I personally think it should be 100% publicly funded (so it could give its good work to the public for free), but that's another argument.
Extreme Programming has it's uses, especially when the job is "just implementation".
1 person is more creative than 2, but that's often a disadvantage. Corporate in-house stuff needs drones, and XP is good for dumbing good programmers down just enough that they don't hang themselves on their own ropes.
"A flu shot does not mean you won't get the flu [it is based on] predictions are made a year in advance"
Yeah, but they usually work. Have you ever had a flu? I'd rather a prick on the arm and a bit of nausea for a day, even if it wasn't 100% likely to stop the flu.
I'll agree that the swine flu is bad, but not catastrophic (it might mutate into something really deadly over the next 5 years, just like the Spanish one but the vaccine will be useless), and that big pharma will do anything for a buck, but it's still worth getting vaccinated.
Who should be taxed more? A businessman (lets call him Warren) who earns a huge amount of money, but invests it back (creating more jobs), and lives a normal life; or a rich heiress (lets call her Paris) who earns a moderate amount, but spends a huge amount on consumer goods?
I like consumption tax, because it encourages people to live a balanced life.
If you want to help poor people, there are other ways. Improve buses. Fund public schools and hospitals. Etc.
Agile programming focus on a reduced feature set that is actually tested.
I would guess there were lots of programs written 30 years ago that were crap, but you can bet that they didn't last. COBOL programs are only survivors because they got them right the first time.
$10k can buy a lot of "timmy tries chemistry sets". There will be some good experiments that you can't do (for safety reasons, or equipment limitations) from home, but you could do some longer running experiments.
Teamwork would be a problem, as most students need to learn lab practices from other students (with a bit of input from the tutor).
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"Supercomputer" might mean cluster, a big node (to go in a cluster), or big-iron mainframe.
It's not a cluster, and it's not much of a mainframe, but it has a helluva lot of FLOPS for a single node. To me, it looks similar to the nodes that went into Roadrunner's TriBlades - 2 Opterons (as general purpose processors) plus 4 PowerXCell 8i (for heavyweight vector processing), and a total of 16G memory. But I'm not an expert.
Still, I bet that if you could hook 3240 of them together, you would have a strong Top500 contender.
If error rates are a problem, just use implicit algorithms, and maybe a bit of smoothing. (Ducks).
The PSU is only 1100W. It's not that intensive - three teslas are like three big graphics cards. 2 or 3 kittens would be sufficient, so you've got enough to share.
Do you have pepper sauce?
By morons, do you mean "Windows experts with no Linux experience", or "Complete beginners who just want to surf the net"?
Once the internet works, Ubuntu is fine for complete technophobes. It only gets to be high maintenance why you try to do interesting things.
I said that cost is a first-order approximation.
Palm oil and canola oil both cost a similar amount, so they should have the same order-of-magnitude damage. Palm oil may have a large impact, but it's a cherry-picked example of a bad product.
At the end of the day, you can make a bunch of IO (a.k.a Leontief) matrices to calculate the "embedded" cost of the products. "Energy" costs will end up with a high weighting. "Labor" costs will end up with a medium weighting. "Skilled labor" will be lower. So the "embedded cost" will look like:
Energy cost of product (in dollars) * energy factor + labor cost of product * labor factor * ..
But like I said, the first-order-approximation can just use total cost. It won't be very accurate, but it's an easy way to compare a dog to a SUV on the back of a napkin.
... and just imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
Yeah, it seems dodgy. Cost can be used as a first-order estimate of environmental impact. A $50 fuel bill has a the same order-of-magnitude environmental impact to a $50 food bill.
And don't forget capital and disposal costs. Dogs are pretty cheap to build (since they are self-replicating), and easy to dispose. SUVs are a bit more expensive.
I think it's safe to say that an SUV costs more to run than a dog. It also costs a lot more to purchase. Ergo, the SUV has a higher footprint.
CDs are for personal use, and priced accordingly. That's fair. The radio thing is a bit weird, since radio is all about broadcast, but I suppose that is to stop nightclubs using radio to avoid paying hefty music license fees.
Still, it's horrendous that our common culture (popular songs, catchphrases, etc) are now all copyright. People used to sing folk songs, but now these have been replaced with pop songs. Perhaps we need some creative common songs?
It's obvious that the big distributors are following Microsoft's strategy. Get popular and crush the competition, then extract money from whoever has big pockets.
Why is it so damn huge? My 2nd computer ran Windows 95 on 16 RAM, a 100 mb HDD, and a pentium 100 (IIRC). People ran Windows 95 on 486 machines, with 8 mb ram.
Now, I know that WIndows 95 was buggy, but it could surf the net and play games. Now a SMALL system take 64mb RAM (4 times the size), and 2g hard drive space.
It's not the (Linux) kernel - some people claim that DSL can run on a beefy 486 ... what's taking up all the space? Firefox?
My grandfather has an old axe. It's had 3 new handles, and 2 new heads ...
Mod AC parent up. Very informative.
They are suing Apple. How many Apple fans are out there these days? 1 in 12?
Riiight. So it's Google Wave for a Microsoft shop? I'll pass.
Plus, it's good for your career. While the other drones were just adding value to the company, you were "making yourself more valuable". Snicker.
You can point a great big space laser at them (from space station with a big array of solar panels), but the crew might get a bit nervous.
And in 12 months time, Richard Branson will probably have one.
CSIRO is only about 50% publicly funded. The rest comes from patents, product sales, and other commercial work. I personally think it should be 100% publicly funded (so it could give its good work to the public for free), but that's another argument.
Plus, all the data is online. Maybe one day we will have the internet EVERYWHERE we take our laptops, but until that day I'd rather keep a local copy.
And Twitter and Facebook are blocked in some countries.
Extreme Programming has it's uses, especially when the job is "just implementation".
1 person is more creative than 2, but that's often a disadvantage. Corporate in-house stuff needs drones, and XP is good for dumbing good programmers down just enough that they don't hang themselves on their own ropes.
"A flu shot does not mean you won't get the flu [it is based on] predictions are made a year in advance"
Yeah, but they usually work. Have you ever had a flu? I'd rather a prick on the arm and a bit of nausea for a day, even if it wasn't 100% likely to stop the flu.
I'll agree that the swine flu is bad, but not catastrophic (it might mutate into something really deadly over the next 5 years, just like the Spanish one but the vaccine will be useless), and that big pharma will do anything for a buck, but it's still worth getting vaccinated.
Bio-infomatics is where the fundamental science is being done these days, not physics.
It's on Damn Interesting as well: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-extraordinary-dymaxion-automobile
The car flopped because the prototype had a fatal accident in an auto show, so the investors pulled out.
Sales tax is regressive? Is that a problem?
Who should be taxed more? A businessman (lets call him Warren) who earns a huge amount of money, but invests it back (creating more jobs), and lives a normal life; or a rich heiress (lets call her Paris) who earns a moderate amount, but spends a huge amount on consumer goods?
I like consumption tax, because it encourages people to live a balanced life.
If you want to help poor people, there are other ways. Improve buses. Fund public schools and hospitals. Etc.
Agile programming focus on a reduced feature set that is actually tested.
I would guess there were lots of programs written 30 years ago that were crap, but you can bet that they didn't last. COBOL programs are only survivors because they got them right the first time.
$10k can buy a lot of "timmy tries chemistry sets". There will be some good experiments that you can't do (for safety reasons, or equipment limitations) from home, but you could do some longer running experiments.
Teamwork would be a problem, as most students need to learn lab practices from other students (with a bit of input from the tutor).