The Italians had to fight tooth and nail to get the Vega launch system to be accepted by ESA for development. Part of it was, again, iirc, because it was would be separate from Arianespace. The whole point was to have an European developed follow-on for the Scout rockets that the Italians were building under license from the US.
The ATV is an excellent idea. I find it a little sad at this point that ESA hasn't successfully gone down the path of an independant manned space flight capability. Sure, they can use the Russians or the US or even the Chinese, I suppose, but it'd be interesting to see ESA come up with their own. I know they tried the Hermes space plane, but that turned out to be something of a boondoggle, didn't it?
It is very good that we are changing gears about where we are going in space with NASA. NASA's track record has been less than impressive for manned flight and new launch vehicle development for the past 20 years (since the introduction of the shuttle). Anyone remember the X-30? The X-33? The X-34? The first two of those were such disasters it's embarassing to even think about them.
The second negative thing about this is that the first manned flight for the moon is in 2015. 2015. That's 3 terms of a president. Has almost ANY NASA project survived intact 12 years? The shuttle might be it! Now, 2030 for a Mars mission? 27 years from now? How many presidents? *flinches*
On the other hand, if it does pan out, the general strokes written so far are for a more sustainable model. Build the CEV for more than LEO. That's encouraging.
We'll wait and see.
BTW, anyone have a clue what $11 billion is getting reoriented in NASA? That mean the aeronautics section is getting cut? The supercomputing? The material sciences?
Oder was?
Actually, if Shrub wants to help give space a boost, designate a test range where Armadillo et al can test their possible shots at the X Prize and it's follow-ons without cost. THAT would move us forward...
Meanwhile, UK science minister, Lord Sainsbury, who was at a Beagle news conference in North London on Monday, gave the strongest indication yet that the British Government would help fund the European Space Agency's (Esa) Aurora programme.
"We need to be working with Esa to ensure that, in some form, there is a Beagle 3 that takes forward this technology. I very much hope that the Aurora programme which is currently being developed by Esa will take forward this kind of exploration."
The Aurora programme is Esa's bold vision to land probes, and perhaps eventually, astronauts on the Red Planet.
You're missing the Soviet Phobos missions from the 1980s.
PHOBOS 1 - First attempt to land probes on surface of Mars' largest moon, Phobos. Probe failed enroute in 1988 due to human/computer error.
PHOBOS 2 - Attempt to land probes on Martian moon Phobos. The probe did enter Mars orbit in early 1989, but signals ceased one week before scheduled Phobos landing.
With any luck we'll see regular manned access to space within the next ten years without a government involved. The X Prize and its follow-ons will be the equivalent of the barnstorming acts of yesteryear.
I found it to be pretty good. Much better than I expected. After all, I've been ratehr down about what they've been doing to Stargate SG-1 as late (*cough*lack of consequences *cough*), but this really surprised me. Big time.
There are also a lot of 'easter eggs' for SF fans too. Whether it be for those that are Knight Sabre fans or Firefly as two just off the top of my head.
It's also a lot more serious than the first series. This is about the genocide of humanity and it shows. The show benefited from it too.
A series? I'd say it's worth it. So long as they can keep up the writing, kep it consistant, and production values must stay high, then I'm there.
Actually, potentially this could be a boon to historians depending on how much information was encrypted as such. If the NSA had gobs of it or the KGB's successor organization did and released the encrypted messages, but possibly lost the keys...etc.
So far we've seen that it's a cluster and what the building blocks are. What's the interconnect? What's the OS? What are the nodes using for a network filesystem? Are they at all? Is this intended for parallel jobs or for embarassingly parallel work?
The crew hopes to launch the real deal at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
This, I have known for a while: I have a buddy that works in WSMR's flight safety group. I'm looking forward to it. I'm hoping that I'll get to watch. *crossed fingers*
However, John's attitude of build a little, test a little isn't just a software attitude. It's the old Xplanes or NACA (pre NASA) attitude towards aeronautics.
For those of you that still use usenet, go check out the sci.space.* heirarchy. You'll find that John's a contributor there, but he's empathetically not the first to espouse such views. However, I know of none that have compared it to software development like he did in this interview.
A lot of posters sem to think that DARPA, the US military, or the US government is a unified thing. It's not. Each part often have their own agendas. Research is very frequently driven by those agendas.
However, DARPA often CYAs when it comes to research too. If you come up with a whacky idea that might just work they often will fund it even though it is in competition with another they have. The reason being that they then can see which whacky idea actually works. Often none do. or one does. or nother that seemed like a sure thing doesn't.
A long story short, if quantum computing doesn't turn out to be all that, they've covered their techno @$$3$.
He's the first post cold-war president to actually be interested in nuclear weapons development.
I think your sample size is a wee bit small as yet. Wait for the next couple. Hopefully we'll ahve a new one next year.
However, back to the weapons, I can see the military types pitching this as something other than a nuke. Exotic High Energy Explosive or something, yeah, but not a nuke.
Actually, I have to wonder how much radioactive material is left. If 1 gram is the equivalent of 50 kg of TNT, then 20g is all that's needed for a 2000 lbs bomb equivalent. 20g is a lot less than amount of radioactive material left in even depleted uranium shells.
Interestingly, to get a std nuke size (200kt nominal yield), you "only" need 4kg. If they are saying that the cost per kilo is 'thousands' of dollars, depending on the cost of the rest of the apparatus, this could be as cheap as $100k for a strategic nuke yield equivalent.
Looking at the posts that come before my own, it seems that there is a basic assumption that there would be a 'forever young' situation: no aging and always in your 20s or 30s. Is this necessarily the case?
Look at those -now- that have lived to be over 100. Their quality of life is piss poor. As a matter of fact, most people's quality of life past 70 is pretty bad compared to their half century younger versions of themselves or quarter century younger versions, for that matter. That's just their physical health. Then shall we, the/. community, start discussing how many seniors begin losing their minds to alzheimers, senility, etc.?
If it means living forever, but being an invalid the whole time, um, forgive me, but count me out. The winter of my life will hopefully be blessedly short and my mind intact through it all as it stands. If they come up with UberYoung Disney Magic Drug(tm), then, maybe, if they have the comparable medical regeneration, we'll talk about immortality.
time to market in a market where delay means that the peasents will be nipping at your heels
Bloody peasants!
Actually, I hear ya. The T3E did have some horrible hardware problems in the beginning. In the end, it was vastly more stable. We could run for a long, long time w/o problems. However, the SP3 we have has problems even now. IDK if IBM will ever get the bugs ironed out with this and related architectures...:S Just IMNSHO.;)
You know, that's kinda funny, since it's my current job.;) I'm a NERSC employee.:P
You're right, until the the system hits maturity. Our T3E before being retired had a lot less hardware problems than our linux cluster does. Or the SP3 we have for that matter.
BTW, since it's rather hard to find a job these days for some people in the computing realm, we're hiring.
There are other uses too. Consider: the weather guys that are working on the global warming and other climate modeling want a 500 petaflop sustained speed, massive memory machine to get the granularity that they want.
BTW, what's the 15 YO machine? I can't think of any...certainly not ones that are still in the Top 500. Hell, the ones I worked on 10 years ago, you can nearly buy the floppage on the desktop now...
As an interesting aside, the DARPA contract is out in part because they think the traditional drivers in computing speed are going to peter out around 2010...the implications of that are definitely interesting, no?
Memory to processor feeding: std ots processors are often idle because the memory subsystem cannot feed the processor fast enough. This is bad now. It will be getting a lot worse.
Interconnections between processors: this goes beyond merely processors on a board, but between boxes. The bus architectures out there for the std ots hardware get saturated very quickly. This gets worse between boxes. In addition the latency on Myranet and Quadrics (compared to what Cray et al do) is horrible even if it is excellent compared to ethernet.
Problem set vs architecture: Not all problems map out well to clusters, or even SMP boxen. Some map best to vector machines. Some map best to tightly integrated MPPs. Some map out to moderately tight clusters. Some are just plain 'embarassingly parallel'. Others are highly threaded and don't work well on vector or scalar machines. etc, etc. The architecture ought to match the problem set.
MTBF: Mean time between failures. Commodity hardware goes kaputt much more often. A cluster capable of teraflop performance of custom hardware tends to need constant and evil levels of care and feeding: ie you better have a grad student on roller blades.
Those are just off the top of my head. I am sure that others will Tell you others before I can post again.;)
Summarized: bandwidth, latency, problem set, and failure rate.
I should have waiting 30 seconds more on that last post. Check here. Check the whole thread. That's Geoffery Landis again. The best of the bunch looks like Henry Spencer's answer (Yes *THAT* Henry Spencer).
You're right. It wasn't an orbiter. It flew by a handful of times. NASA is working on a new Mercury Orbiter though. IIRC, through the Discovery Program and called Messenger.
I'll keep looking for a reference on the solar panel bit.
The interesting thing is that the Mercury orbiter that NASA launched (one of the pioneer series) used the pressure of sunlight on its solar panels, just like a solar sail would on the sail material, to give it a spin. That, IMO, gives the theory supporting solar sails working a whole lot more credibility.
6. The overall plot turning into something that wasn't all that different from Space 1999 - each episode was either a throw-away event where the BG either meets aliens or suffers a cylon attack, and then escapes at the end - usually after being betrayed by the aliens or fighting off another cylon attack. The episodes dealing with the plot to find Earth were mostly "Gilligan and the Castaways almost, but not quite, make it off the island again" episodes.
Now if Braga would have just stopped going with that goofy morality episodes and actually worked on getting Janeway et al home...
Oh. Wait. For a second there, I thought you were talking ST:Voyager...my bad.
HPC Wire had an article that I referenced in my journal on 6/30.
It's an interesting machine. I'd love to get one to play with. I'm sure our benchmarkers will have some even more interesting comments once they're done. Expect teething problems, folks. Systems of this size and complexity take time to break in.
Slashdot Mirror
The Italians had to fight tooth and nail to get the Vega launch system to be accepted by ESA for development. Part of it was, again, iirc, because it was would be separate from Arianespace. The whole point was to have an European developed follow-on for the Scout rockets that the Italians were building under license from the US.
The ATV is an excellent idea. I find it a little sad at this point that ESA hasn't successfully gone down the path of an independant manned space flight capability. Sure, they can use the Russians or the US or even the Chinese, I suppose, but it'd be interesting to see ESA come up with their own. I know they tried the Hermes space plane, but that turned out to be something of a boondoggle, didn't it?
I have extremely mixed emotions about this.
It is very good that we are changing gears about where we are going in space with NASA. NASA's track record has been less than impressive for manned flight and new launch vehicle development for the past 20 years (since the introduction of the shuttle). Anyone remember the X-30? The X-33? The X-34? The first two of those were such disasters it's embarassing to even think about them.
The second negative thing about this is that the first manned flight for the moon is in 2015. 2015. That's 3 terms of a president. Has almost ANY NASA project survived intact 12 years? The shuttle might be it! Now, 2030 for a Mars mission? 27 years from now? How many presidents? *flinches*
On the other hand, if it does pan out, the general strokes written so far are for a more sustainable model. Build the CEV for more than LEO. That's encouraging.
We'll wait and see.
BTW, anyone have a clue what $11 billion is getting reoriented in NASA? That mean the aeronautics section is getting cut? The supercomputing? The material sciences?
Oder was?
Actually, if Shrub wants to help give space a boost, designate a test range where Armadillo et al can test their possible shots at the X Prize and it's follow-ons without cost. THAT would move us forward...
Beyond Beagle
Meanwhile, UK science minister, Lord Sainsbury, who was at a Beagle news conference in North London on Monday, gave the strongest indication yet that the British Government would help fund the European Space Agency's (Esa) Aurora programme.
"We need to be working with Esa to ensure that, in some form, there is a Beagle 3 that takes forward this technology. I very much hope that the Aurora programme which is currently being developed by Esa will take forward this kind of exploration."
The Aurora programme is Esa's bold vision to land probes, and perhaps eventually, astronauts on the Red Planet.
From here.
You're missing the Soviet Phobos missions from the 1980s.
PHOBOS 1 - First attempt to land probes on surface of Mars' largest moon, Phobos. Probe failed enroute in 1988 due to human/computer error.
PHOBOS 2 - Attempt to land probes on Martian moon Phobos. The probe did enter Mars orbit in early 1989, but signals ceased one week before scheduled Phobos landing.
HTH.
Here's another one.
With any luck we'll see regular manned access to space within the next ten years without a government involved. The X Prize and its follow-ons will be the equivalent of the barnstorming acts of yesteryear.
With any luck at least...
I found it to be pretty good. Much better than I expected. After all, I've been ratehr down about what they've been doing to Stargate SG-1 as late (*cough*lack of consequences *cough*), but this really surprised me. Big time.
There are also a lot of 'easter eggs' for SF fans too. Whether it be for those that are Knight Sabre fans or Firefly as two just off the top of my head.
It's also a lot more serious than the first series. This is about the genocide of humanity and it shows. The show benefited from it too.
A series? I'd say it's worth it. So long as they can keep up the writing, kep it consistant, and production values must stay high, then I'm there.
You can only be mostly sure. Mostly.
Actually, potentially this could be a boon to historians depending on how much information was encrypted as such. If the NSA had gobs of it or the KGB's successor organization did and released the encrypted messages, but possibly lost the keys...etc.
Just a thought...
So far we've seen that it's a cluster and what the building blocks are. What's the interconnect? What's the OS? What are the nodes using for a network filesystem? Are they at all? Is this intended for parallel jobs or for embarassingly parallel work?
The crew hopes to launch the real deal at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
This, I have known for a while: I have a buddy that works in WSMR's flight safety group. I'm looking forward to it. I'm hoping that I'll get to watch. *crossed fingers*
However, John's attitude of build a little, test a little isn't just a software attitude. It's the old Xplanes or NACA (pre NASA) attitude towards aeronautics.
For those of you that still use usenet, go check out the sci.space.* heirarchy. You'll find that John's a contributor there, but he's empathetically not the first to espouse such views. However, I know of none that have compared it to software development like he did in this interview.
A lot of posters sem to think that DARPA, the US military, or the US government is a unified thing. It's not. Each part often have their own agendas. Research is very frequently driven by those agendas.
However, DARPA often CYAs when it comes to research too. If you come up with a whacky idea that might just work they often will fund it even though it is in competition with another they have. The reason being that they then can see which whacky idea actually works. Often none do. or one does. or nother that seemed like a sure thing doesn't.
A long story short, if quantum computing doesn't turn out to be all that, they've covered their techno @$$3$.
He's the first post cold-war president to actually be interested in nuclear weapons development.
I think your sample size is a wee bit small as yet. Wait for the next couple. Hopefully we'll ahve a new one next year.
However, back to the weapons, I can see the military types pitching this as something other than a nuke. Exotic High Energy Explosive or something, yeah, but not a nuke.
Actually, I have to wonder how much radioactive material is left. If 1 gram is the equivalent of 50 kg of TNT, then 20g is all that's needed for a 2000 lbs bomb equivalent. 20g is a lot less than amount of radioactive material left in even depleted uranium shells.
Interestingly, to get a std nuke size (200kt nominal yield), you "only" need 4kg. If they are saying that the cost per kilo is 'thousands' of dollars, depending on the cost of the rest of the apparatus, this could be as cheap as $100k for a strategic nuke yield equivalent.
Wow. That's impressive. That's Holy Shit Impressive.
Do we have any chemists here that can talk about the toxicity of hafnium? Or is it so rare that its simply not been studied?
Looking at the posts that come before my own, it seems that there is a basic assumption that there would be a 'forever young' situation: no aging and always in your 20s or 30s. Is this necessarily the case?
Look at those -now- that have lived to be over 100. Their quality of life is piss poor. As a matter of fact, most people's quality of life past 70 is pretty bad compared to their half century younger versions of themselves or quarter century younger versions, for that matter. That's just their physical health. Then shall we, the /. community, start discussing how many seniors begin losing their minds to alzheimers, senility, etc.?
If it means living forever, but being an invalid the whole time, um, forgive me, but count me out. The winter of my life will hopefully be blessedly short and my mind intact through it all as it stands. If they come up with UberYoung Disney Magic Drug(tm), then, maybe, if they have the comparable medical regeneration, we'll talk about immortality.
time to market in a market where delay means that the peasents will be nipping at your heels
Bloody peasants!
Actually, I hear ya. The T3E did have some horrible hardware problems in the beginning. In the end, it was vastly more stable. We could run for a long, long time w/o problems. However, the SP3 we have has problems even now. IDK if IBM will ever get the bugs ironed out with this and related architectures...:S Just IMNSHO. ;)
Have you ever actually run a supercomputer?
You know, that's kinda funny, since it's my current job. ;) I'm a NERSC employee. :P
You're right, until the the system hits maturity. Our T3E before being retired had a lot less hardware problems than our linux cluster does. Or the SP3 we have for that matter.
BTW, since it's rather hard to find a job these days for some people in the computing realm, we're hiring.
The home page at Cray for the Cascade project.
There are some interesting PDFs there. Chew, mull, and consider.
Also consider what Horst Simon, head of NERSC said here too.
There are other uses too. Consider: the weather guys that are working on the global warming and other climate modeling want a 500 petaflop sustained speed, massive memory machine to get the granularity that they want.
BTW, what's the 15 YO machine? I can't think of any...certainly not ones that are still in the Top 500. Hell, the ones I worked on 10 years ago, you can nearly buy the floppage on the desktop now...
As an interesting aside, the DARPA contract is out in part because they think the traditional drivers in computing speed are going to peter out around 2010...the implications of that are definitely interesting, no?
Memory to processor feeding: std ots processors are often idle because the memory subsystem cannot feed the processor fast enough. This is bad now. It will be getting a lot worse.
Interconnections between processors: this goes beyond merely processors on a board, but between boxes. The bus architectures out there for the std ots hardware get saturated very quickly. This gets worse between boxes. In addition the latency on Myranet and Quadrics (compared to what Cray et al do) is horrible even if it is excellent compared to ethernet.
Problem set vs architecture: Not all problems map out well to clusters, or even SMP boxen. Some map best to vector machines. Some map best to tightly integrated MPPs. Some map out to moderately tight clusters. Some are just plain 'embarassingly parallel'. Others are highly threaded and don't work well on vector or scalar machines. etc, etc. The architecture ought to match the problem set.
MTBF: Mean time between failures. Commodity hardware goes kaputt much more often. A cluster capable of teraflop performance of custom hardware tends to need constant and evil levels of care and feeding: ie you better have a grad student on roller blades.
Those are just off the top of my head. I am sure that others will Tell you others before I can post again. ;)
Summarized: bandwidth, latency, problem set, and failure rate.
HTH.
LANL bought an 80 processor Onyx 4. Check HPC Wire for the story.
I should have waiting 30 seconds more on that last post. Check here. Check the whole thread. That's Geoffery Landis again. The best of the bunch looks like Henry Spencer's answer (Yes *THAT* Henry Spencer).
You're right. It wasn't an orbiter. It flew by a handful of times. NASA is working on a new Mercury Orbiter though. IIRC, through the Discovery Program and called Messenger.
I'll keep looking for a reference on the solar panel bit.
A Rebuttal by Geoffery Landis.
The interesting thing is that the Mercury orbiter that NASA launched (one of the pioneer series) used the pressure of sunlight on its solar panels, just like a solar sail would on the sail material, to give it a spin. That, IMO, gives the theory supporting solar sails working a whole lot more credibility.
6. The overall plot turning into something that wasn't all that different from Space 1999 - each episode was either a throw-away event where the BG either meets aliens or suffers a cylon attack, and then escapes at the end - usually after being betrayed by the aliens or fighting off another cylon attack. The episodes dealing with the plot to find Earth were mostly "Gilligan and the Castaways almost, but not quite, make it off the island again" episodes.
Now if Braga would have just stopped going with that goofy morality episodes and actually worked on getting Janeway et al home...
Oh. Wait. For a second there, I thought you were talking ST:Voyager...my bad.
HPC Wire had an article that I referenced in my journal on 6/30.
It's an interesting machine. I'd love to get one to play with. I'm sure our benchmarkers will have some even more interesting comments once they're done. Expect teething problems, folks. Systems of this size and complexity take time to break in.