My favorite part of the article is the photo that accompanies it. Two of my scientific visualizations are on there, the red/yellow picture of an Alzheimer's plaque being attacked by drugs (behind the N of TITAN) and the silver structure of a proposed ultra-capacitor made from nanotubes (to the right of the N).
Please do your homework first. While the supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories are primarily used for nuclear weapons work, the work of keeping the country's huge stockpile safe and reliable is a gigantic job, especially if you don't want to actually detonate any of the warheads. Yep, that's the trick. Simulate the ENTIRE weapon, from high explosive initiation all the way to final weapon delivery. With all of the hydrodynamics, chemistry, materials science, nuclear physics, and thermodynamics modeled accurately enough to be able to say with confidence that the entire stockpile is reliable and safe. Hard job! Someone likened it to having a fleet of thousands of cars that you can never start, but must certify are road-worthy the instant you turn the key. For 50 years.
But let's go past this. There are three other major Department of Energy laboratories that have major computing centers: Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Beyond just the nuclear weapons work that the first three labs do, all six labs use their massive computing power to advance the understanding of the Earth's changing climate, develop new materials, design new battery technologies, design new drugs, impact energy efficiency in vehicles and buildings, understand geology and groundwater propagation, help develop new power grid systems, design technologies for carbon sequestration, and delve into the origins of the universe. "Left over from the glory years"? Hardly.
And let's go beyond the Department of Energy. The National Science Foundation, as you suggest, has funded high-performance computing for years. There are at least five major computing centers that the NSF funds for an even wider range of scientific computing endeavors: the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. If you want to get a small sense of what the NSF funds in this area, look at the XSEDE web site (https://www.xsede.org/).
(Disclaimer: I work for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's supercomputing center, have worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's supercomputing center, and am currently helping to run the University of Tennessee NICS computing center.)
Sudoku doesn't have clever logic and elegant methods. There is only one method for solving sudoku puzzles, and it strongly resembles a computer doing brute force.
Sure, there are brute force methods. They are often techniques that dive into deep "consequence" trees to find contradictions. Those are, by their very nature, annoying for people to do and thus attractive for computer solutions. Nishio, tables, all of those just make sudoko boring and feel like you're executing a computer program in your limited-RAM brain.
But those aren't the "clever" or "elegant" methods. Sudoku techniques that I would consider elegant are things like sashimi x-wings, XYZ-wings, the various type of unique rectangles, and such. I enjoy trying to discover patterns like these in really tricky sudoku problems. I expect I'm not the only one, given the popularity of the puzzle over the last few years.
If you want to get really deep, you can use sudoku puzzles to explore mathematical group theory.
All of this (and what you said in your post) are true for other puzzles such as the Rubik's cube. Perfectly suitable for machine automation, but still fun for some of us us lowly humans as well.
True. Unless they were doing high performance computing on any of the Top500 computers in the world. The advances that Fortran has made in the last 10 years have been amazing, way beyond what you can do in C/C++ for scientific applications. And I'm not talking FORTRAN77, which is what most people think of when they think of Fortran. Please look at Fortran 90/95 and especially Fortran 2003 before dismissing it out of hand.
Um... This can't be the entire budget. As an example, I pulled down the section for the 23 billion dollar Department of Energy budget. The whole thing just about fills 5 pages.
5 pages.
For 23 billion dollars.
I know for sure the Congressional line items go way more detailed than that. And I know that the President's requests go more details than that as well. Maybe those details are in the spreadsheets or something...
And as usual, there is no explanation as to *why* lithium batteries are now illegal to carry.
Did you even read the second link? Quoting from the AP wire article:
To help reduce the risk of fires, air travelers will no longer be able to pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage beginning Jan. 1, the Transportation Department said Friday.... The Federal Aviation Administration has found that fire-protection systems in the cargo hold of passenger planes can't put out fires sparked in lithium batteries.
Why are people equating "distributed" with "no communication"? Distributed computing certainly allows internode communication and goes far beyond embarrassingly parallel problems. The architectures of grid-based computing reduce the ability to do cross-task communication. But there's nothing about a distributed architecture that would preclude an algorithm that requires parallel communication. In fact, I've deployed many machines and software systems on distributed architectures that require collective parallel communication.
Clusters of independent workstations do not preclude you from using a fast interconnect. I've designed and purchased (or helped my employer purchase) any number of clusters, including one that made it on the Top500 list when it was sited next to ASCI BlueGene/L. The most recent cluster I'm purchasing has an InfiniBand 4X DDR interconnect, sufficient for many supercomputing applications. You are in no way restricted to embarrassingly parallel problems with cluster computing.
I'll expand (seriously) on your #2, of how we know that the government could keep a secret that long. Part of it has to do with how well the U.S. Government has kept similar secrets. Given our history of keeping things like nuclear weapons designs, covert intelligence activities, and military operations secret, it's not a stretch to say that government employees are, in general, not very good at keeping things secret for the long term. Short term is one thing, but not long term. I've known nuclear weapons scientists, trusted by the government to keep Secret Restricted Data under wraps, say that they know, based on their own experience, that the infrastructure intended to keep things like Roswell secret couldn't operate for that long. They should know!
I believe it is under manual control. If I'm reading comments correctly, you configure the card (through an interface on your PC) to upload to a user-specified IP address.
MIT? This is basically the same curriculum that I followed at Purdue University. Nothing holier-than-thou about it. It's just a good plan. Not the only plan, of course, but one that has demonstrable successes.
The breakup was dangerous because the satellite's orbit was relatively high, some 530 miles up. That means the debris will remain in space for tens, thousands or even millions of years.
I remember using the Web at around that time - before Yahoo attempted to create a directory, and Altavista produced their webspider-driven search engine. O'Reilly had a small directory of useful sites, but other than that the only way to find pages was by surfing from link to link, or by being given a URL out-of-band.
Before any of them was the first, the World Wide Web Worm. It predated Altavista, Yahoo!, Excite, and all the others. And it was moderately useful.
Thing is, the WWWW debuted in September of 1994. It should have made shockwaves among whoever made these predictions. It's surprising to me that the authors didn't mention search engines when they were already starting to make the web easier to use by 1995.
I believe webspiders, and search engines built around data they collected, were the killer app that made the Web truly useful.
It's not enabled by default, but a simple preference change allows you to drag widgets right out of Dashboard into your normal windowing system. I don't know why this is "developer" mode. This should be the default.
Yes, there are programs like that. I can only mention one that I've used, OMeR (http://myriad-online.com/en/products/omer.htm). It does optical recognition of scanned sheet music. I've had varying results with it, but as good as 95% recognition. This was a few years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong plant. ORNL is a completely separate laboratory from Y-12, even though they're located in the same city.
My favorite part of the article is the photo that accompanies it. Two of my scientific visualizations are on there, the red/yellow picture of an Alzheimer's plaque being attacked by drugs (behind the N of TITAN) and the silver structure of a proposed ultra-capacitor made from nanotubes (to the right of the N).
Please do your homework first. While the supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories are primarily used for nuclear weapons work, the work of keeping the country's huge stockpile safe and reliable is a gigantic job, especially if you don't want to actually detonate any of the warheads. Yep, that's the trick. Simulate the ENTIRE weapon, from high explosive initiation all the way to final weapon delivery. With all of the hydrodynamics, chemistry, materials science, nuclear physics, and thermodynamics modeled accurately enough to be able to say with confidence that the entire stockpile is reliable and safe. Hard job! Someone likened it to having a fleet of thousands of cars that you can never start, but must certify are road-worthy the instant you turn the key. For 50 years.
But let's go past this. There are three other major Department of Energy laboratories that have major computing centers: Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Beyond just the nuclear weapons work that the first three labs do, all six labs use their massive computing power to advance the understanding of the Earth's changing climate, develop new materials, design new battery technologies, design new drugs, impact energy efficiency in vehicles and buildings, understand geology and groundwater propagation, help develop new power grid systems, design technologies for carbon sequestration, and delve into the origins of the universe. "Left over from the glory years"? Hardly.
And let's go beyond the Department of Energy. The National Science Foundation, as you suggest, has funded high-performance computing for years. There are at least five major computing centers that the NSF funds for an even wider range of scientific computing endeavors: the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. If you want to get a small sense of what the NSF funds in this area, look at the XSEDE web site (https://www.xsede.org/).
(Disclaimer: I work for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's supercomputing center, have worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's supercomputing center, and am currently helping to run the University of Tennessee NICS computing center.)
XCreatePixmapFromBitmapData
Sudoku doesn't have clever logic and elegant methods. There is only one method for solving sudoku puzzles, and it strongly resembles a computer doing brute force.
Sure, there are brute force methods. They are often techniques that dive into deep "consequence" trees to find contradictions. Those are, by their very nature, annoying for people to do and thus attractive for computer solutions. Nishio, tables, all of those just make sudoko boring and feel like you're executing a computer program in your limited-RAM brain.
But those aren't the "clever" or "elegant" methods. Sudoku techniques that I would consider elegant are things like sashimi x-wings, XYZ-wings, the various type of unique rectangles, and such. I enjoy trying to discover patterns like these in really tricky sudoku problems. I expect I'm not the only one, given the popularity of the puzzle over the last few years.
If you want to get really deep, you can use sudoku puzzles to explore mathematical group theory.
All of this (and what you said in your post) are true for other puzzles such as the Rubik's cube. Perfectly suitable for machine automation, but still fun for some of us us lowly humans as well.
True. Unless they were doing high performance computing on any of the Top500 computers in the world. The advances that Fortran has made in the last 10 years have been amazing, way beyond what you can do in C/C++ for scientific applications. And I'm not talking FORTRAN77, which is what most people think of when they think of Fortran. Please look at Fortran 90/95 and especially Fortran 2003 before dismissing it out of hand.
Um... This can't be the entire budget. As an example, I pulled down the section for the 23 billion dollar Department of Energy budget. The whole thing just about fills 5 pages.
5 pages.
For 23 billion dollars.
I know for sure the Congressional line items go way more detailed than that. And I know that the President's requests go more details than that as well. Maybe those details are in the spreadsheets or something...
So GMail already has threading. And it also has IMAP.
What does Yahoo offer you that GMail is lacking? Serious question.
alligators with huge advertisements
I hope I'm around to see those alligators! Now, about the sharks with the lasers...
Did you even read the second link? Quoting from the AP wire article:
I thought EMACS stood for "Eighty Megs And Continually Swapping". ;-)
Just like books.
Why are people equating "distributed" with "no communication"? Distributed computing certainly allows internode communication and goes far beyond embarrassingly parallel problems. The architectures of grid-based computing reduce the ability to do cross-task communication. But there's nothing about a distributed architecture that would preclude an algorithm that requires parallel communication. In fact, I've deployed many machines and software systems on distributed architectures that require collective parallel communication.
Clusters of independent workstations do not preclude you from using a fast interconnect. I've designed and purchased (or helped my employer purchase) any number of clusters, including one that made it on the Top500 list when it was sited next to ASCI BlueGene/L. The most recent cluster I'm purchasing has an InfiniBand 4X DDR interconnect, sufficient for many supercomputing applications. You are in no way restricted to embarrassingly parallel problems with cluster computing.
You whippersnappers!
Nice post! Very humorous.
I'll expand (seriously) on your #2, of how we know that the government could keep a secret that long. Part of it has to do with how well the U.S. Government has kept similar secrets. Given our history of keeping things like nuclear weapons designs, covert intelligence activities, and military operations secret, it's not a stretch to say that government employees are, in general, not very good at keeping things secret for the long term. Short term is one thing, but not long term. I've known nuclear weapons scientists, trusted by the government to keep Secret Restricted Data under wraps, say that they know, based on their own experience, that the infrastructure intended to keep things like Roswell secret couldn't operate for that long. They should know!
I believe it is under manual control. If I'm reading comments correctly, you configure the card (through an interface on your PC) to upload to a user-specified IP address.
My wife mentions that ANCHORS might have been a nice technology to invest in.
MIT? This is basically the same curriculum that I followed at Purdue University. Nothing holier-than-thou about it. It's just a good plan. Not the only plan, of course, but one that has demonstrable successes.
Um...that's not a partnership. That's two companies making different, unrelated products. Which is the situation we're in right now.
In your version, what exactly would the partnership be?
I remember using the Web at around that time - before Yahoo attempted to create a directory, and Altavista produced their webspider-driven search engine. O'Reilly had a small directory of useful sites, but other than that the only way to find pages was by surfing from link to link, or by being given a URL out-of-band.
Before any of them was the first, the World Wide Web Worm. It predated Altavista, Yahoo!, Excite, and all the others. And it was moderately useful.
Thing is, the WWWW debuted in September of 1994. It should have made shockwaves among whoever made these predictions. It's surprising to me that the authors didn't mention search engines when they were already starting to make the web easier to use by 1995.
I believe webspiders, and search engines built around data they collected, were the killer app that made the Web truly useful.
I couldn't agree with you more.
It's not enabled by default, but a simple preference change allows you to drag widgets right out of Dashboard into your normal windowing system. I don't know why this is "developer" mode. This should be the default.
That not a clarification. It's a reiteration.
GP was correct. The JVM that you run in Firefox was not written by Firefox developers. It was written by Sun.
Yes, there are programs like that. I can only mention one that I've used, OMeR (http://myriad-online.com/en/products/omer.htm). It does optical recognition of scanned sheet music. I've had varying results with it, but as good as 95% recognition. This was a few years ago.
(I am not affiliated with Myriad Online.)