Crichton seems to be a reasonable writer. I say this in the sense that his style is readable and engaging. The topics are rarely boring. The characters seem to be plausible.
The problem is that he gets details in science often wildly wrong. Almost all the geneticists I spoke to flinch at _Jurassic Park_. The supercomputer people I work with smirk about his treatment of our field. The situation is not unlike how the military people and defense contractor engineers read Clancy: it's a good read, but don't expect anything like reality from it. (re my own experiences having worked @ one of the laser test ranges in NM and comparing it to _Cardinal of the Kremlin_ or the reactions from engineers to people that cite Clancy on sci.military.naval or rec.aviation.military).
The good question is...is this a service he's doing for us, the scientists and engineers? Or is it a massive disservice? The weighing that needs to be done is whether or not the service of bringing up the fact that people need to pay attention to new technologies and their implications vs the really bad extrapolations and wrong impressions the guy gives people about what we are able to do or even how the stuff works at all...
People will react with "This is only fiction..." but then most people don't often read about the real science and get caught up, do they? They find it dull and, thus, get their impressions from these works...
They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.
It ought to be noted that the SNO guys that did all the hardwork to find out what was going on with the neutrinos used PDSF, a large linux cluster used in a batch farm configuration. The Japanese observatory that verified the work also used PDSF, as I understand.
The PDSF guys got a lot of thank yous and praise for the help they gave in building, running, and growing their cluster. PDSF as a result has been getting a lot of kudos from the NERSC management. With any luck that will translate into better backing.
At any rate, I thought I'd include them since/. readers like to hear how Linux is used IRL science.
heh. Well, if I were willing to spend around $7k per person for a flight, then I'd consider it. However, since I'd rather spend $1.1k or less per person...
IIRC, the projected ticket costs were not higher for the sonic cruiser...
There has been a lot of rumbling in the aerospace industry that Boeing is a sick company. I wanted to believe that they were wrong because Boeing was getting out the Sonic cruiser and the Delta IV rocket (their successful EELV design). It looked to me at the time that the the people claiming such were just wanking and wanting a Big Aerospace (tm) to choke. (there is an undercurrent in some aerospace circles, not unlike some software circles that being BIG is bad).
Part of the reason I had thought that Boeing's Sonic Cruiser would do well is because, frankly, they'd been saying they'd had the airlines lined up from the get-go. However, Post 9/11 might have changed some airlines minds.
Which just sucks. IDK about the rest of you, but when I get on a trans atlantic flight, I'd *LOVE* for it to take only 80% of the time it would have.
That what they say online is often archived and then a part of the public record. I've said this many times online that what you will say cana nd will come back to haunt you.
It doesn't necessarily mean that Big Brother is watching. What it means is that if you develop a reputation online - a flame thrower, lunatic, nutcase, All-Information-Wants-To-Be-Free-Die-Private-Softw are-makers-Die - it might just come out in the least oppurtune times. During a job interview or say if the general public becomes net savvy at last...
Remember that Usenet convo that you are embarassed to think about? Yeah, we do too. Soon your future SOs and employers will be looking too.
THINK before you open your mouth. It was good advice before the net came about and its even better now.
Actually, it's a lot more than you think. Let's say you want to do this in red cedar (aromatic, nice color, and not that expensive). For material you're looking at ~$10/sq ft. Labour is at least $20/hour. To panel a 15x15x8 ft room, you're talking at least $10k for a rudimentry job and probably double plus that for detail work.
All told, you're looking at *EASILY* doubly the cost of your home by doing a rudimentry job.
Great. Just what a Geek needs. Something the promotes sunlight deprivation all teh more. *shakes head*
Really though, half of what makes Bag End from the movie so damn kewl was the woodwork and *THAT* isn't cheap. My uncle did it for a living (before going back to school again and becoming a newspaper editor) and the cost of godly woodwork of the Hobbit or Elf is enough to buy another whole house...
Note though: the SGI press release states that it only scales to 512 processors. it looks like they are having problems scaling beyond that. It is probably having to do with the interconnect and SSI approaches they are taking (at a guess).
That means that you will see a peak of around 5 teraflops. The density is impressive for that speed. The peak performance and scalability is not.
Speaking from the Supercomputing world that is. It is something to be proud of (for SGI), but if they want to take the SC world by storm they need to scale higher. The high end of machines that will be ordered over the next 5 years are going to be in the 100+ teraflop range for peak performance. (re: Blue Planet)
While most of the market does not care about the very high end systems - they can't afford them - they ARE excellent PR. Bragging rights can go a long way.
A bit of Karma whoring here, wish I'd gotten online sooner so that people would see this much earlier:
TheHigh Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (so-called HELSTF). Let's see if Tom's webserver can survive this...This is the laser test facility for the army and navy at White Sands Missile Range. They've got the world's most powerful laser (MIRACL: Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser) there.
Being developed for them, by Livermore by the same guys that are doing the National Ignition Facility is a solid state laser. It works.
Also at HELSTF, and the first functional laser weapon, is Tactical High Energy Laser (aka THEL, and I hate that URL, btw...)
Search TRW for more stuff on lasers as well as Lockmart and Boeing, of course.
They have had a few stories this season that have been a bit more fast and loose than the equivalents were on Showtime. Admittedly, the USAF has been working on alien tech for a while now, and they have been very good about making it obvious that while we can replicate and understand how to make some of the technology, once they moved over to the Scifi channel, tech starts popping out all the place. The fighter with the hyper drive, the warship (which cost a bit too little for it being made of such rare materials under such secrecy and with such one-off parts...and in a ridiculous shape for the task at hand too...sheesh), and so on.
Well, a good way of putting it is that there has been a lot of ideas thrown around without thought of what the consequences might be unlike before.
Don't get me wrong, it's still orders of magnitude better than Trek, but...the flavour change isn't quite as tasty as before. Think New Coke.
It seems we have someone predicting the "Imminent Death of the 'Net" again. While this is concerning, unless we can have certificable proof (like the test locations for example), then we really ought to take these things with a bit of a grain of salt. Just IMNSHO.
I donated time to volunteer work at a then local high school - I have since moved - teaching students in project oriented programming competition formerly called the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge (now called the Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge when they rolled it and the Sandia NL sponsored rival program together).
Students were brogutht ogether in small teams and taught programming, often from the ground up, math, and science towards a project. Often a lot of backfilling took place to get the students up to the point where they could understand the math and science behind the project as well as actually grasp what it would take to write code for the supercomputers. It was very challenging and a lot of fun.
It has always perplexed me when we have people so constantly complaining about the school system that those that have the time and energy to volunteer do not simply go down to their local school system and volunteer. Make an appointment with the principal and see where you can help. I betcha he or she will be very ecstatic if you can bring ideas and time to the table so long as it does not tax the school resource wise (budgets being tight things...)
The rewards of seeing a student's face light up when they get it are well worth the time...
Yes...and no. What we have been upset by is that people have been trying to shoehorn in all problem sets to MPPs and clusters. There are problems which do so, and do so well.
HOWEVER! Not all do by any stretch. Certain problems map well onto certain architectures.
The second reason is that quite frankly, clusters are boring. Rack, after rack of parts I can buy at Fry's or as a workstation just doesn't have much interest for us. I mean, where's the excitement in thousands of PCs...It's kewl for about 30 seconds and then you have to deal with teh headaches of keeping it up and running...
I'd love to have dozens of interesting architectures running around, not just vector, cluster, and MPP. If five of them could be spun out of slashdot - yeah, right - or anywhere, then we'd be very happy campers.
Cray and Sandia say it is a 40 tera*OP* system, not a 100 teraflop one. See what Cray says here and what Sandia says here
The really interesting thing is not the processor, but rather the interconnect which seems to be very similar to the torus used in the T3E.
That's true, however, note that I said that when talking about people moving, trains were dead. the military, for example, loves trains because it moves all their tanks that way.
However, in cargo moving speed is not necessary. Aircraft handle the high speed, low volume traffice quite well.
Currently, except for regional trains or overgrown subways, the people moving business for trains in NorAm is pretty dead. Planes and automobiles pretty much dominate the possibilities.
If air travel could be reduced yet again in cost for bulk, it might well finish wiping out the trains altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
Crichton seems to be a reasonable writer. I say this in the sense that his style is readable and engaging. The topics are rarely boring. The characters seem to be plausible.
The problem is that he gets details in science often wildly wrong. Almost all the geneticists I spoke to flinch at _Jurassic Park_. The supercomputer people I work with smirk about his treatment of our field. The situation is not unlike how the military people and defense contractor engineers read Clancy: it's a good read, but don't expect anything like reality from it. (re my own experiences having worked @ one of the laser test ranges in NM and comparing it to _Cardinal of the Kremlin_ or the reactions from engineers to people that cite Clancy on sci.military.naval or rec.aviation.military).
The good question is...is this a service he's doing for us, the scientists and engineers? Or is it a massive disservice? The weighing that needs to be done is whether or not the service of bringing up the fact that people need to pay attention to new technologies and their implications vs the really bad extrapolations and wrong impressions the guy gives people about what we are able to do or even how the stuff works at all...
People will react with "This is only fiction..." but then most people don't often read about the real science and get caught up, do they? They find it dull and, thus, get their impressions from these works...
erm. Slight update on the Cray thing.
They also sell the MTA, a hardware threaded architecture - from the Tera days - and the SV2 is now called the X1. They are also doing an AMD Opteron derived one-off system for Sandia National Laboratories. Though, from what I am hearing, it might not be a one-off system - they're considering productizing it.
It ought to be noted that the SNO guys that did all the hardwork to find out what was going on with the neutrinos used PDSF, a large linux cluster used in a batch farm configuration. The Japanese observatory that verified the work also used PDSF, as I understand.
The PDSF guys got a lot of thank yous and praise for the help they gave in building, running, and growing their cluster. PDSF as a result has been getting a lot of kudos from the NERSC management. With any luck that will translate into better backing.
At any rate, I thought I'd include them since /. readers like to hear how Linux is used IRL science.
heh. Well, if I were willing to spend around $7k per person for a flight, then I'd consider it. However, since I'd rather spend $1.1k or less per person...
IIRC, the projected ticket costs were not higher for the sonic cruiser...
Slashdot needs /whine/ tag. ;)
There has been a lot of rumbling in the aerospace industry that Boeing is a sick company. I wanted to believe that they were wrong because Boeing was getting out the Sonic cruiser and the Delta IV rocket (their successful EELV design). It looked to me at the time that the the people claiming such were just wanking and wanting a Big Aerospace (tm) to choke. (there is an undercurrent in some aerospace circles, not unlike some software circles that being BIG is bad).
Part of the reason I had thought that Boeing's Sonic Cruiser would do well is because, frankly, they'd been saying they'd had the airlines lined up from the get-go. However, Post 9/11 might have changed some airlines minds.
Which just sucks. IDK about the rest of you, but when I get on a trans atlantic flight, I'd *LOVE* for it to take only 80% of the time it would have.
That what they say online is often archived and then a part of the public record. I've said this many times online that what you will say cana nd will come back to haunt you.
It doesn't necessarily mean that Big Brother is watching. What it means is that if you develop a reputation online - a flame thrower, lunatic, nutcase, All-Information-Wants-To-Be-Free-Die-Private-Softw are-makers-Die - it might just come out in the least oppurtune times. During a job interview or say if the general public becomes net savvy at last...
Remember that Usenet convo that you are embarassed to think about? Yeah, we do too. Soon your future SOs and employers will be looking too.
THINK before you open your mouth. It was good advice before the net came about and its even better now.
Actually, it's a lot more than you think. Let's say you want to do this in red cedar (aromatic, nice color, and not that expensive). For material you're looking at ~$10/sq ft. Labour is at least $20/hour. To panel a 15x15x8 ft room, you're talking at least $10k for a rudimentry job and probably double plus that for detail work.
All told, you're looking at *EASILY* doubly the cost of your home by doing a rudimentry job.
Great. Just what a Geek needs. Something the promotes sunlight deprivation all teh more. *shakes head*
Really though, half of what makes Bag End from the movie so damn kewl was the woodwork and *THAT* isn't cheap. My uncle did it for a living (before going back to school again and becoming a newspaper editor) and the cost of godly woodwork of the Hobbit or Elf is enough to buy another whole house...
My Vorpal Sword is bigger than yours.
Aw. How cute. Munckinism Lives...
Man...talk about airsickness then...
Swinging back and forth...back and forth...
in a 747 and scared out of your skull...
Obviously you want some boxers made of this stuff.
It's a joke, people...The N word shouldn't automatically provoke FUD when it's mentioned...
Note though: the SGI press release states that it only scales to 512 processors. it looks like they are having problems scaling beyond that. It is probably having to do with the interconnect and SSI approaches they are taking (at a guess).
That means that you will see a peak of around 5 teraflops. The density is impressive for that speed. The peak performance and scalability is not. Speaking from the Supercomputing world that is. It is something to be proud of (for SGI), but if they want to take the SC world by storm they need to scale higher. The high end of machines that will be ordered over the next 5 years are going to be in the 100+ teraflop range for peak performance. (re: Blue Planet)
While most of the market does not care about the very high end systems - they can't afford them - they ARE excellent PR. Bragging rights can go a long way.
Because, well, then, they'd /. themselves?
Indeed. It's like saying that an exoflop (or op) supercomputer is impossible.
It is. Right now.
However, give us 20 years, then easily you'll have it.
After all, it's just technology between here and there.
A bit of Karma whoring here, wish I'd gotten online sooner so that people would see this much earlier:
TheHigh Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (so-called HELSTF). Let's see if Tom's webserver can survive this...This is the laser test facility for the army and navy at White Sands Missile Range. They've got the world's most powerful laser (MIRACL: Mid Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser) there.
Being developed for them, by Livermore by the same guys that are doing the National Ignition Facility is a solid state laser. It works.
Also at HELSTF, and the first functional laser weapon, is Tactical High Energy Laser (aka THEL, and I hate that URL, btw...)
Search TRW for more stuff on lasers as well as Lockmart and Boeing, of course.
They have had a few stories this season that have been a bit more fast and loose than the equivalents were on Showtime. Admittedly, the USAF has been working on alien tech for a while now, and they have been very good about making it obvious that while we can replicate and understand how to make some of the technology, once they moved over to the Scifi channel, tech starts popping out all the place. The fighter with the hyper drive, the warship (which cost a bit too little for it being made of such rare materials under such secrecy and with such one-off parts...and in a ridiculous shape for the task at hand too...sheesh), and so on.
Well, a good way of putting it is that there has been a lot of ideas thrown around without thought of what the consequences might be unlike before.
Don't get me wrong, it's still orders of magnitude better than Trek, but...the flavour change isn't quite as tasty as before. Think New Coke.
That's covered by the guys doing the I-smell or whatever it was...
It seems we have someone predicting the "Imminent Death of the 'Net" again. While this is concerning, unless we can have certificable proof (like the test locations for example), then we really ought to take these things with a bit of a grain of salt. Just IMNSHO.
And here I thought it would be for the type of court they'd prefer...
I donated time to volunteer work at a then local high school - I have since moved - teaching students in project oriented programming competition formerly called the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge (now called the Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge when they rolled it and the Sandia NL sponsored rival program together).
Students were brogutht ogether in small teams and taught programming, often from the ground up, math, and science towards a project. Often a lot of backfilling took place to get the students up to the point where they could understand the math and science behind the project as well as actually grasp what it would take to write code for the supercomputers. It was very challenging and a lot of fun.
It has always perplexed me when we have people so constantly complaining about the school system that those that have the time and energy to volunteer do not simply go down to their local school system and volunteer. Make an appointment with the principal and see where you can help. I betcha he or she will be very ecstatic if you can bring ideas and time to the table so long as it does not tax the school resource wise (budgets being tight things...)
The rewards of seeing a student's face light up when they get it are well worth the time...
Better reparse what he said. it uses the same design philosophy, not the same architecture. The X1 and Red Storm are distinctly different machines.
More of what you are worried about is this. That might be both scary and fun to code for.
However, it looks like vector processing is on the upswing, not down. It hit rock bottom during the 90s...
Yes...and no. What we have been upset by is that people have been trying to shoehorn in all problem sets to MPPs and clusters. There are problems which do so, and do so well.
HOWEVER! Not all do by any stretch. Certain problems map well onto certain architectures.
The second reason is that quite frankly, clusters are boring. Rack, after rack of parts I can buy at Fry's or as a workstation just doesn't have much interest for us. I mean, where's the excitement in thousands of PCs...It's kewl for about 30 seconds and then you have to deal with teh headaches of keeping it up and running...
I'd love to have dozens of interesting architectures running around, not just vector, cluster, and MPP. If five of them could be spun out of slashdot - yeah, right - or anywhere, then we'd be very happy campers.
Cray and Sandia say it is a 40 tera*OP* system, not a 100 teraflop one. See what Cray says here and what Sandia says here The really interesting thing is not the processor, but rather the interconnect which seems to be very similar to the torus used in the T3E.
In other supercomputing news, check out what NERSC is proposing for their Earth Simulator Response Proposal. It's a 160 teraflop machine...
That's true, however, note that I said that when talking about people moving, trains were dead. the military, for example, loves trains because it moves all their tanks that way.
However, in cargo moving speed is not necessary. Aircraft handle the high speed, low volume traffice quite well.
Currently, except for regional trains or overgrown subways, the people moving business for trains in NorAm is pretty dead. Planes and automobiles pretty much dominate the possibilities.
If air travel could be reduced yet again in cost for bulk, it might well finish wiping out the trains altogether.