That being said, NASA's funding is extremely small, most small tech startups have more money to work with.
Um, huh? NASA's FY06 budget, across all missions, is about 16.5 billion. It goes up by about 1.5 billion over the next 4 years. I'm going to avoid getting into whether this is enough money or not. I work at a NASA center and I have my own views of how money is spent & allocated.
If you can point me out a tech startup that is seeded with a 16 BILLION dollar budget PER YEAR, please post because they must be doing some seriously cool things. I'm not even sure that Microsoft, arguably the worlds biggest software company (or is it Oracle now) has that type of yearly operating budget.
More realistically, NASA's supercomputer guys stand to gain from learning how to build even bigger supercompuers than their for cheaper.
Disclaimer: I work at NAS, but in no way speak for them.
The kinds of computing work and research (and problems) that we deal with here are traditionally of the shared memory kind. It's a lot more challenging problem space than linking up a few thousand 1U boxes over gigE and calling it a supercomputer (hello va tech); even if the linpack runs are fairly impressive for that type of system. This isn't to say that both sides won't benefit from the partnership, but as far as I can tell, Google doesn't do supercomputing.
The Mac division gives great support, even talking and giving support on forums like Inside Mac Games.
I'll second this. I've gotten great support from one of the mac developers at Blizzard on everything from mac specific bugs (always seem to get fixed in the next release while they give me a work around) to how to tweak the settings to take advantage of the less-than-optimal-drivers for our video boards.
Sun's very serious about x86 but the Sparc builds are being released at the same time. What a lot of people forget is that Linux on x86 cannot compete with Sun's high-end servers.
Really? I guess it depends on what you mean by compete. SGI's Altix runs quite nicely at 512 CPU's per node. Significantly more than any Sun system from the point of performance and scalability. Solaris certainly has other advantages, etc, but my point is to qualify your statement of "can't compete", because in some cases you're right, the competition is over and Sun never showed up. Each architecture has it's advantages.
I hear Standard Oil, Rocky Mountain Non-Ferrous Metals, Amtrak, and Mrs. Mitten's Olde Fashioned Tea Shoppe are also companies that are currently not supporting the bill.
Wonder how they are going to wriggle out of it? Heh, it'll be interesting to watch them squirm!
The issue isn't that they aren't supporting it, the issue is that they changed their position for some reason. No one (generally) worries that a for-profit company doesn't support some law (copyright, patents aside, blah blah), but when they change their stance....it's time to ask why?
So what are they doing, sending lawsuits for $180 to these people, or are they not bothering to go after the people only sharing a dozen movies at a time?
There is generally a fine. Obvioulsy it's not about the cost of the movie media. But once you tack on things like 150K for each violation, plus damages, plus this plus that, plus possibly jail time, blah blah, it *can* be significant. That's why the RIAA was succesful in getting basically what amounts to pocket change from their lawsuits. "Either pay us 7K now or pay thousands in lawyers fees plus the potential maxium fine of one billion dollars!!!"
If i recall correctly, there were a few people that bascially said 'Fine RIAA, take me to court and prove your case." Does anyone know what happened with any of those people?
Another good reason for not using Oracle is because it sucks. We've found recent releases of their software to be buggy and a headache to install and configure.
I can't decide if you are being funny or not. You must not have been using Oracle for very long if you've only recently discovered this. It's *always* been buggy and semi-difficult to install.
After reading the article I was curious as to how much room 10K or so processors take up.
I don't have a square footage number, but it's the overwhelming majority of the server floor. We had to "clear the floor" earlier this summer to make room.
Good news for Intel indeed, but wouldn't the same deployment with AMD Opterons been cheaper AND faster??
Well, until the final numbers come out, we aren't speculating on performance. Needless to say we hope to claim the top slot in computing power. Also, keep in mind that parts availability is a major concern. We are assembling the system to be fully up and running by SuperComputing '05 in November. Intel has fully committed to delivering all 10K CPU's with no problems. Also, perhaps the biggest reason for Intel, is SGI was chosen as the vendor and they use Intel.
Because the un-manned exploration of space is run through JPL not directly through NASA.
JPL is part of NASA, it's just run by the folks from UC (yes, that's an anomaly and in this case it seems to work very well). They get their funding from the same places the rest of us do, ie the overall NASA budget which has slightly increased this year if I recall correctly.
If your friend can't find a job, perhaps he needs to switch location, career, or both. It's quite possible there aren't a lot of open positions for Unix gurus in Southern California these days.
Just for clarification, we consider Santa Cruz to be in Northern California, being about 60 miles or so south of San Francisco and about 15 miles west of Silicon Valley.
They already went down that path. The result (or lack thereof) was what prompted MS to dump all the money into their own search technology in the first place. Much like Ford did to Ferrari in the 60's, MS is hoping to out spend Google (which they'll probably succeed in doing).
all the publisher needs to do is put some sort of crappy encryption, and DMCA prevents you from unencrypting it.
Just a syntax point. The DMCA does not prevent me from copying something, it makes it illegal to so. It's an important distinction. The law makes it illegal for to drive above the speed limit but does not prevent me from doing it. I just take the risk if I do.
You cannot buy Windows without Media Player, so you do not have the opportunity to compare it's price and value against other similar products.
I don't think you can OS X without Quicktime either (it's been on the last two macs i purchased at least). However, you can uninstall it fairly easily.
Selling out on launch isn't impressive, the dreamcast did that, continuing to make sales after you sold to your hardcore fanbase is what matters.
But it's not a new product. I'm not a big console person, but wasn't the dreamcast a new product, the follow-on to genesis? What's impressive is that it sold out in a market that's been iPod saturated for years. It's not like the mini-iPod has any new functionality. I'm baffled...
How is this a big deal, they can track cell phones... not news.
Someone please mod this guys as insightful. Law enforcement and various governments have the ability to track cell phone calls and draw conclusions based upon the interactions of various callers and call'ees. If you're doing something nefarious, you run this the risk of being monitored and apprehended.
In other news, when I woke up this morning, the run had risen, I had to go to work, and traffic sucked.
o your saying that its more cost effective for you to upgrade every 6 to 9 months? Thats fine if it pays off for you. You probably don't have that many processors to worry about either. Trust me, its not trivial to upgrade 60 to 120 processors that often, even if the machines were given to me.
It depends, I'm not trying to make a blanket statement that this is always the case, but yes, I can certainly envision scenarios in that the benefit to customers is worth the price of the upgrade when you get less than a 200% return as you mentioned. I hope I didn't come across by saying uprade every 9 months for the latest and greatest.
As far as having too many processors, I work in one of the premier supercomputing centers in the world (shameless link) and we probably have more processors in a single computer than some people have at their entire sites. So I have *some* understanding of the logistics involved. Having said that, you're absolutely correct, replacing hundreds or thousands of CPU's isn't something that you do every year (or even every three).
As before, you make good points and I'm not really disagreeing with most of what your saying. Just trying to point out that it can make sense to upgrade when you get less than a 200% or 400% return on speed. Espeically when you have world-wide support dependencies, like providing the CPU time for the Return to Flight Initiative.
I don't start to get interested until there is at least 20% difference, and even then that would only determine my choice for an initial purchase, I would never upgrade a system unless there was at least 100% speedup, preferably 200 -> 400% is worthy of doing an upgrade.
Good post. However the one comment that I didn't agree with was the above.
My guess is that you aren't involved with any applications where compute time = money. When you are running simulations (say large CFD runs for example) that can takes days or weeks per run, a 50% improvement in speed is a major breakthrough if you get it by not touching code, ie hardware upgrades. Optimzing code is great and all, but it can introduce bugs and other expected behavior. Plus, us development people are pricey. Hardware is relatively cheap. Add in the fact that you generally get charged for CPU time on these big machines (or clusters of little ones), then *any* speed that you get is a major breakthrough, ie you can run more simulations in the same time for the same money.
In your environment, it's probably okay for you to only upgrade every three years when you get a doubling or more of performance, but there are enviroments where any speed increase is sought after highly, even if it's 20%. I suspect this is true of the special effects industry too, guys like Pixar, ILM, etc. If they can render more frames in the same time or even render the frames in the same time at a higher level of detail, that's worth paying for. Perhaps someone who knows more would care to enlighten us, I'm curious if I'm interpreting that correctly.
I forsee that I'll be about as interested in owning music as I am in owning an encyclopedia. Welcome to the on demand world.
I didn't read the article, nor do I have any plans on checking out the service. Having said that, this is a pretty lame analogy for most of us. I can't recall the last time I wanted to jam out with a good article on the Vietnam War while cruising up highway 280 to san francisco. But, when I feel like listening to Front 242 (hello 90's music) and putting the transmission in to Sport mode, thank god I have my iPod and a non-RF interface. And when was the last time you wanted to share a good piece of reference material at a party?
Let's face it, a lot of things *may* work on demand (movies seem to be what most people think of), but music is something that people like to share in a portable fashion: in the car, at a party, on the boat, wherever you spend your time.
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Um, huh? NASA's FY06 budget, across all missions, is about 16.5 billion. It goes up by about 1.5 billion over the next 4 years. I'm going to avoid getting into whether this is enough money or not. I work at a NASA center and I have my own views of how money is spent & allocated.
If you can point me out a tech startup that is seeded with a 16 BILLION dollar budget PER YEAR, please post because they must be doing some seriously cool things. I'm not even sure that Microsoft, arguably the worlds biggest software company (or is it Oracle now) has that type of yearly operating budget.
In the case of Columbia, it's listed right on the systems page.
Disclaimer: I work at NAS, but in no way speak for them.
The kinds of computing work and research (and problems) that we deal with here are traditionally of the shared memory kind. It's a lot more challenging problem space than linking up a few thousand 1U boxes over gigE and calling it a supercomputer (hello va tech); even if the linpack runs are fairly impressive for that type of system. This isn't to say that both sides won't benefit from the partnership, but as far as I can tell, Google doesn't do supercomputing.
I'll second this. I've gotten great support from one of the mac developers at Blizzard on everything from mac specific bugs (always seem to get fixed in the next release while they give me a work around) to how to tweak the settings to take advantage of the less-than-optimal-drivers for our video boards.
Really? I guess it depends on what you mean by compete. SGI's Altix runs quite nicely at 512 CPU's per node. Significantly more than any Sun system from the point of performance and scalability. Solaris certainly has other advantages, etc, but my point is to qualify your statement of "can't compete", because in some cases you're right, the competition is over and Sun never showed up. Each architecture has it's advantages.
You mean like the X-prize? We saw how badly that one worked out for people? Seriously, competition is a good thing.
Wonder how they are going to wriggle out of it? Heh, it'll be interesting to watch them squirm!
The issue isn't that they aren't supporting it, the issue is that they changed their position for some reason. No one (generally) worries that a for-profit company doesn't support some law (copyright, patents aside, blah blah), but when they change their stance....it's time to ask why?
There is generally a fine. Obvioulsy it's not about the cost of the movie media. But once you tack on things like 150K for each violation, plus damages, plus this plus that, plus possibly jail time, blah blah, it *can* be significant. That's why the RIAA was succesful in getting basically what amounts to pocket change from their lawsuits. "Either pay us 7K now or pay thousands in lawyers fees plus the potential maxium fine of one billion dollars!!!"
If i recall correctly, there were a few people that bascially said 'Fine RIAA, take me to court and prove your case." Does anyone know what happened with any of those people?
I can't decide if you are being funny or not. You must not have been using Oracle for very long if you've only recently discovered this. It's *always* been buggy and semi-difficult to install.
I don't have a square footage number, but it's the overwhelming majority of the server floor. We had to "clear the floor" earlier this summer to make room.
Sigh, that's Supercomputing '04 in November. Of this year. Sorry about that.
Well, until the final numbers come out, we aren't speculating on performance. Needless to say we hope to claim the top slot in computing power. Also, keep in mind that parts availability is a major concern. We are assembling the system to be fully up and running by SuperComputing '05 in November. Intel has fully committed to delivering all 10K CPU's with no problems. Also, perhaps the biggest reason for Intel, is SGI was chosen as the vendor and they use Intel.
JPL is part of NASA, it's just run by the folks from UC (yes, that's an anomaly and in this case it seems to work very well). They get their funding from the same places the rest of us do, ie the overall NASA budget which has slightly increased this year if I recall correctly.
Just for clarification, we consider Santa Cruz to be in Northern California, being about 60 miles or so south of San Francisco and about 15 miles west of Silicon Valley.
Ahem....Eolas?
They already went down that path. The result (or lack thereof) was what prompted MS to dump all the money into their own search technology in the first place. Much like Ford did to Ferrari in the 60's, MS is hoping to out spend Google (which they'll probably succeed in doing).
Just a syntax point. The DMCA does not prevent me from copying something, it makes it illegal to so. It's an important distinction. The law makes it illegal for to drive above the speed limit but does not prevent me from doing it. I just take the risk if I do.
I don't think you can OS X without Quicktime either (it's been on the last two macs i purchased at least). However, you can uninstall it fairly easily.
But it's not a new product. I'm not a big console person, but wasn't the dreamcast a new product, the follow-on to genesis? What's impressive is that it sold out in a market that's been iPod saturated for years. It's not like the mini-iPod has any new functionality. I'm baffled...
Someone please mod this guys as insightful. Law enforcement and various governments have the ability to track cell phone calls and draw conclusions based upon the interactions of various callers and call'ees. If you're doing something nefarious, you run this the risk of being monitored and apprehended.
In other news, when I woke up this morning, the run had risen, I had to go to work, and traffic sucked.
It depends, I'm not trying to make a blanket statement that this is always the case, but yes, I can certainly envision scenarios in that the benefit to customers is worth the price of the upgrade when you get less than a 200% return as you mentioned. I hope I didn't come across by saying uprade every 9 months for the latest and greatest.
As far as having too many processors, I work in one of the premier supercomputing centers in the world (shameless link) and we probably have more processors in a single computer than some people have at their entire sites. So I have *some* understanding of the logistics involved. Having said that, you're absolutely correct, replacing hundreds or thousands of CPU's isn't something that you do every year (or even every three).
As before, you make good points and I'm not really disagreeing with most of what your saying. Just trying to point out that it can make sense to upgrade when you get less than a 200% or 400% return on speed. Espeically when you have world-wide support dependencies, like providing the CPU time for the Return to Flight Initiative.
Good post. However the one comment that I didn't agree with was the above.
My guess is that you aren't involved with any applications where compute time = money. When you are running simulations (say large CFD runs for example) that can takes days or weeks per run, a 50% improvement in speed is a major breakthrough if you get it by not touching code, ie hardware upgrades. Optimzing code is great and all, but it can introduce bugs and other expected behavior. Plus, us development people are pricey. Hardware is relatively cheap. Add in the fact that you generally get charged for CPU time on these big machines (or clusters of little ones), then *any* speed that you get is a major breakthrough, ie you can run more simulations in the same time for the same money.
In your environment, it's probably okay for you to only upgrade every three years when you get a doubling or more of performance, but there are enviroments where any speed increase is sought after highly, even if it's 20%. I suspect this is true of the special effects industry too, guys like Pixar, ILM, etc. If they can render more frames in the same time or even render the frames in the same time at a higher level of detail, that's worth paying for. Perhaps someone who knows more would care to enlighten us, I'm curious if I'm interpreting that correctly.
Wow, be careful, you almost passed off your opinion as fact for all Front 242 fans. Geez, how about Up Evil & Off? Those were in '93 if I recall.
I didn't read the article, nor do I have any plans on checking out the service. Having said that, this is a pretty lame analogy for most of us. I can't recall the last time I wanted to jam out with a good article on the Vietnam War while cruising up highway 280 to san francisco. But, when I feel like listening to Front 242 (hello 90's music) and putting the transmission in to Sport mode, thank god I have my iPod and a non-RF interface. And when was the last time you wanted to share a good piece of reference material at a party?
Let's face it, a lot of things *may* work on demand (movies seem to be what most people think of), but music is something that people like to share in a portable fashion: in the car, at a party, on the boat, wherever you spend your time.
You expect us to take you seriously when you don't even know the basic recipe for heating a $20?
Quack.