Everyone expects things to go bang eventually, no matter how careful you are, Musk is no fool here. I'm sure that SpaceX fully realizes that their number will come up, sooner or later. That doesn't make Musk a fool. Their success rate is still an order of magnitude better than Orbital's.
Again, for the last time, it's not NASA's business to build stuff, and it never was. NASA is there to fund contractors that build stuff, and to design, plan, oversee and execute various space missions and research. NASA's problem isn't bureaucracy, it's the lack of flexibility in spending the money the way it'd wish to spend it. NASA is highly limited in how it can spend the money, so much so that it isn't funny. The reason for this is known as pork. That's all there's to it.
The pumps are almost by definition a part of the engine. It's not like a fuel pump in a car, with its rather puny flow rate. Those engines are fed literally tons of fuel and oxidizer per second, and there's no stand-alone power source to deliver the megawatts needed for the pump. Both the turbine and the pump are an integral part of the engine design.
Sure they could do that, but there's simply no cloud provider out there who has sufficient connectivity for the needs of a supercomputing system. The stuff one runs on a supercomputer would completely saturate the normal "cloud" datacenter interconnect, while leaving the nodes hopelessly underutilized. Serving web apps and doing large-scale computations have very different scalability requirements. That's why it's easy to scale a big cloud storage/app serving facility, while it's really hard to scale a supercomputer.
The grid that NASA used for those Neptune weather predictions probably had a cell the size of a large Earth country, or a small Earth continent. Neptune is fucking big.
And how is improved forecasting going to really help here, when you get past the platitudes? Is the transportation and rescue infrastructure up to par to cope with the evacuations prior to a forecast flooding? I somehow doubt it is. But feel free to prove me wrong, of course.
I should probably say that it speaks to the incredible flexibility and scalability of our grid-based methods that they even can be scaled in such a fashion. Some numerical methods simply don't scale at all, and throwing more computational power at them gives slower-than-linear increases in accuracy or decreases in computation time. For example, good luck with scaling up the grade-school long multiplication, or with single-polynomial approximations that span more than a dozen points...
In the end, you have to do those additions and multiplications, there's nothing to be more efficient about. All those computations run on a grid, and the elements in the grid can approximate effects of various orders (think polynomial orders). Up to a certain point, increasing the order of individual elements decreases the net amount of computations done, since the increase in number of computations within an element is outcompensated by the decrease in the needed number of elements. At a certain point, your hardware is not accurate enough to go to higher order elements, and by doing multiprecision arithmetic you're decreasing the effective number of computations that could be done, so you're stuck there.
Unfortunately, brute computational power and inter-node link speeds are the only way to attack large, grid-based calculations such as weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, mechanics of solids, etc.
Of course the mention of 6502 was a joke, but let's see how close one could get. Let's say that you could get one FLOP in 1000 cycles on a legacy 6502. With 2MHz clock, we're talking 2kFLOPs per chip. With half a million of them, we get 1GFLOP. That's still 7 orders of magnitude away from where one needs to be... This tells us, indirectly, that the desktop processors we currently have are essentially the realm of 1980s science fiction:)
It might also be that Intel has a bit too much capacity for E5s, and needs to utilize it. Unused semiconductor capacity is costly. Now don't get me wrong: this might simply be a case of more efficient capacity being available. E5s and E7s may be all made on the same equipment, but if said equipment makes E5s at half the cost of E7s, and you can sell them for more than half the cost of E7s, you really have more capacity in terms of what's sensible to use for ROI.
The main problem with using the bible here is that it has no predictive power at all. It's all the classical case of "hindsight is 20-20". We can't read into the bible as to what to look for in future scientific endeavors. All we can do is do science the right way, and then try to use it and claim "hurr durr see bible was right - here here and there". The revisionist approach many religious people seem so fond of can be reduced to: the religious text X must be right, let's see if we can fit it to our current understanding of reality. I shouldn't need to state the obvious problem here: any time spent on such revisionism is a big waste and has nothing but faint entertainment value. If you're easily amused, that is.
Not everyone is in your line of work:) I'm talking from a small-business perspective, where we are consumers of our own services. We don't serve anything to the public, apart from our public phone number and email addresses.
That's how any unmodified RHEL 6 and prior system with nontrivial commercial software on it will boot, and the only fix short of developing lots of software (scripts) is to use systemd. I don't care whether you call it an "implementation issue", the fact is that the "true Unix way hurr durr" init + rc.d setup fails miserably at it, while with systemd it's rather trivial to get it working right - it's a matter of slight configuration, not of extra software development.
By unmodified I mean that I don't change executables that are provided as part of the distribution packages coming from either the OS or the vendors for the commercial software I use.
So, again, I only claim that systemd fixes a longstanding mess in this respect, and requires less work on my end to get things to work the way they should have been working. It also allows me to easily work around the fuckups common in commercial software (mostly running on Java app servers).
That's a rather minor change. In the end, it's you, the taxpayer, funding any failures, only that the failures are covered from your savings or retirement accounts, not from your taxes.
That's true, but it doesn't change things too much. The taxpayer still pays for the failure, just that it doesn't go out of their taxes, but, say, out of their retirement accounts that were partially invested in space launch providers.
You're arguing against yourself, in a fashion. While those European explorers were certainly working for the rulers at the time, there was also a lot of commercial interests backing it up. The rulers were only as powerful as the commerce was willing to back them up. These days, it's completely changed: the "government" craft you allude to were funded by the taxpayers, their missions directed by government labs, but they were all built by businesses. Western government labs are not and weren't ever in spacecraft-building business, with very, very limited exceptions. There's a reason why Lockheed and Boeing have such enormous launch experience. It's demonstrably not because the government used to do any space work - those businesses did!
didn't NASA also provide the funding for research, design and testing that went into the development of their rockets?
It a rather superficial difference. Whether you call it a "development contract" or an "orbital supply contract", doesn't matter much in practice. In the end, NASA's funds get the stuff NASA needs gotten into the place where they want it. If it doesn't blow up first, of course. The new-ish style launch contracts shift the risk around a bit.
I know because that's what I use. Most of those things come with network adapters, and that's all you need to run apps headlessly, either via X or via vnc+framebuffer. A framebuffer doesn't imply a physical graphics card.
That's a silly distinction to make, because neither NASA nor the government is in the business of building anything. It's all done by subcontractors, and most of the time the design and development is done by those subcontractors, too. NASA is in the program management and science business, not in building or launching anything much. There are and were some NASA payloads, IIRC, but that's about it. The whole "commercial" launch thing is a misnomer. It's business as usual, except that this time NASA does less micromanagement, and there are some new faces at the table. That's all.
Contrary to popular bullshit propaganda, the popular U.S. rocket launches are all done by businesses, not NASA. NASA provides program management, mission design for their own payloads, and so on, but they were never in rocket-making business, ever. Both Apollo and Space Shuttle were managed by NASA, but designed and built by subcontractors. Launched too. NASA has more input into design of their science payloads, but even then it's design only, not manufacturing. That's done by subcontractors still.
The only difference between the "commercial" launches and those prior to that is the amount of NASA management involvement. From the business standpoint, nothing much has changed between the "noncommercial" and "commercial" launches.
I hate to point out that NASA was never in rocket-making business. Everything launched was made by subcontractors. NASA only provides various payloads, and in the past provided program oversight. Everything that NASA launched that you might recall was in fact done by the private sector. Including all elements of Apollo.
This was a fixed-performance contract. The only thing lost, from NASA's viewpoint, was some cargo - not a big deal. It's not like ISS is running on fumes, they can plan around a lost delivery. Orbital still has to uphold their end of the deal. The only people getting a short end of the stick are the investors.
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Everyone expects things to go bang eventually, no matter how careful you are, Musk is no fool here. I'm sure that SpaceX fully realizes that their number will come up, sooner or later. That doesn't make Musk a fool. Their success rate is still an order of magnitude better than Orbital's.
Again, for the last time, it's not NASA's business to build stuff, and it never was. NASA is there to fund contractors that build stuff, and to design, plan, oversee and execute various space missions and research. NASA's problem isn't bureaucracy, it's the lack of flexibility in spending the money the way it'd wish to spend it. NASA is highly limited in how it can spend the money, so much so that it isn't funny. The reason for this is known as pork. That's all there's to it.
The pumps are almost by definition a part of the engine. It's not like a fuel pump in a car, with its rather puny flow rate. Those engines are fed literally tons of fuel and oxidizer per second, and there's no stand-alone power source to deliver the megawatts needed for the pump. Both the turbine and the pump are an integral part of the engine design.
Sure they could do that, but there's simply no cloud provider out there who has sufficient connectivity for the needs of a supercomputing system. The stuff one runs on a supercomputer would completely saturate the normal "cloud" datacenter interconnect, while leaving the nodes hopelessly underutilized. Serving web apps and doing large-scale computations have very different scalability requirements. That's why it's easy to scale a big cloud storage/app serving facility, while it's really hard to scale a supercomputer.
The grid that NASA used for those Neptune weather predictions probably had a cell the size of a large Earth country, or a small Earth continent. Neptune is fucking big.
And how is improved forecasting going to really help here, when you get past the platitudes? Is the transportation and rescue infrastructure up to par to cope with the evacuations prior to a forecast flooding? I somehow doubt it is. But feel free to prove me wrong, of course.
I should probably say that it speaks to the incredible flexibility and scalability of our grid-based methods that they even can be scaled in such a fashion. Some numerical methods simply don't scale at all, and throwing more computational power at them gives slower-than-linear increases in accuracy or decreases in computation time. For example, good luck with scaling up the grade-school long multiplication, or with single-polynomial approximations that span more than a dozen points...
In the end, you have to do those additions and multiplications, there's nothing to be more efficient about. All those computations run on a grid, and the elements in the grid can approximate effects of various orders (think polynomial orders). Up to a certain point, increasing the order of individual elements decreases the net amount of computations done, since the increase in number of computations within an element is outcompensated by the decrease in the needed number of elements. At a certain point, your hardware is not accurate enough to go to higher order elements, and by doing multiprecision arithmetic you're decreasing the effective number of computations that could be done, so you're stuck there.
Unfortunately, brute computational power and inter-node link speeds are the only way to attack large, grid-based calculations such as weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, mechanics of solids, etc.
Of course the mention of 6502 was a joke, but let's see how close one could get. Let's say that you could get one FLOP in 1000 cycles on a legacy 6502. With 2MHz clock, we're talking 2kFLOPs per chip. With half a million of them, we get 1GFLOP. That's still 7 orders of magnitude away from where one needs to be... This tells us, indirectly, that the desktop processors we currently have are essentially the realm of 1980s science fiction :)
It might also be that Intel has a bit too much capacity for E5s, and needs to utilize it. Unused semiconductor capacity is costly. Now don't get me wrong: this might simply be a case of more efficient capacity being available. E5s and E7s may be all made on the same equipment, but if said equipment makes E5s at half the cost of E7s, and you can sell them for more than half the cost of E7s, you really have more capacity in terms of what's sensible to use for ROI.
Yeah, I thought what the heck? I could probably stuff 16 teraflops worth of compute power in a couple desktop machines, easy.
The main problem with using the bible here is that it has no predictive power at all. It's all the classical case of "hindsight is 20-20". We can't read into the bible as to what to look for in future scientific endeavors. All we can do is do science the right way, and then try to use it and claim "hurr durr see bible was right - here here and there". The revisionist approach many religious people seem so fond of can be reduced to: the religious text X must be right, let's see if we can fit it to our current understanding of reality. I shouldn't need to state the obvious problem here: any time spent on such revisionism is a big waste and has nothing but faint entertainment value. If you're easily amused, that is.
Not everyone is in your line of work :) I'm talking from a small-business perspective, where we are consumers of our own services. We don't serve anything to the public, apart from our public phone number and email addresses.
That's how any unmodified RHEL 6 and prior system with nontrivial commercial software on it will boot, and the only fix short of developing lots of software (scripts) is to use systemd. I don't care whether you call it an "implementation issue", the fact is that the "true Unix way hurr durr" init + rc.d setup fails miserably at it, while with systemd it's rather trivial to get it working right - it's a matter of slight configuration, not of extra software development.
By unmodified I mean that I don't change executables that are provided as part of the distribution packages coming from either the OS or the vendors for the commercial software I use.
So, again, I only claim that systemd fixes a longstanding mess in this respect, and requires less work on my end to get things to work the way they should have been working. It also allows me to easily work around the fuckups common in commercial software (mostly running on Java app servers).
That's a rather minor change. In the end, it's you, the taxpayer, funding any failures, only that the failures are covered from your savings or retirement accounts, not from your taxes.
That's true, but it doesn't change things too much. The taxpayer still pays for the failure, just that it doesn't go out of their taxes, but, say, out of their retirement accounts that were partially invested in space launch providers.
You're arguing against yourself, in a fashion. While those European explorers were certainly working for the rulers at the time, there was also a lot of commercial interests backing it up. The rulers were only as powerful as the commerce was willing to back them up. These days, it's completely changed: the "government" craft you allude to were funded by the taxpayers, their missions directed by government labs, but they were all built by businesses. Western government labs are not and weren't ever in spacecraft-building business, with very, very limited exceptions. There's a reason why Lockheed and Boeing have such enormous launch experience. It's demonstrably not because the government used to do any space work - those businesses did!
didn't NASA also provide the funding for research, design and testing that went into the development of their rockets?
It a rather superficial difference. Whether you call it a "development contract" or an "orbital supply contract", doesn't matter much in practice. In the end, NASA's funds get the stuff NASA needs gotten into the place where they want it. If it doesn't blow up first, of course. The new-ish style launch contracts shift the risk around a bit.
I know because that's what I use. Most of those things come with network adapters, and that's all you need to run apps headlessly, either via X or via vnc+framebuffer. A framebuffer doesn't imply a physical graphics card.
Whoops, this wasn't an ISS cargo mission. Sorry :/
That's a silly distinction to make, because neither NASA nor the government is in the business of building anything. It's all done by subcontractors, and most of the time the design and development is done by those subcontractors, too. NASA is in the program management and science business, not in building or launching anything much. There are and were some NASA payloads, IIRC, but that's about it. The whole "commercial" launch thing is a misnomer. It's business as usual, except that this time NASA does less micromanagement, and there are some new faces at the table. That's all.
Contrary to popular bullshit propaganda, the popular U.S. rocket launches are all done by businesses, not NASA. NASA provides program management, mission design for their own payloads, and so on, but they were never in rocket-making business, ever. Both Apollo and Space Shuttle were managed by NASA, but designed and built by subcontractors. Launched too. NASA has more input into design of their science payloads, but even then it's design only, not manufacturing. That's done by subcontractors still.
The only difference between the "commercial" launches and those prior to that is the amount of NASA management involvement. From the business standpoint, nothing much has changed between the "noncommercial" and "commercial" launches.
I hate to point out that NASA was never in rocket-making business. Everything launched was made by subcontractors. NASA only provides various payloads, and in the past provided program oversight. Everything that NASA launched that you might recall was in fact done by the private sector. Including all elements of Apollo.
This was a fixed-performance contract. The only thing lost, from NASA's viewpoint, was some cargo - not a big deal. It's not like ISS is running on fumes, they can plan around a lost delivery. Orbital still has to uphold their end of the deal. The only people getting a short end of the stick are the investors.
CAD/CAE, that wasn't so hard now, was it?