Cray-Research basically went under when the Cray-3 contract was axed.
Cray has already taken more than $25 million in orders for the X1, a computer that hasn't even been built yet. Cray has had a rough time, but they're doing just fine.
lets say that MOSIX and 10Gig ethernet advances
What if it does? Bandwidth between nodes isn't as big a problem as latency in that case. No matter how fast-- in terms of bits per second-- your network transport is, you're always going to have latencies that are a million times higher than node-to-node latencies inside a NUMA system like the Origin. Seriously, a million times; we're talking milliseconds versus nanoseconds here. Your dismissal of single-system-image designs in favor of cluster designs shows a distinct lack of vision on your part, I'm afraid.
then will 2.9m for a machine still seem justified ?
If you set up the hypothetical situation such that the less-expensive system does everything that the more-expensive system can do, then no, of course the more-expensive system isn't justifable. But that's not reality. SGI can deliver 1,024-processor systems right now. You can call them up and place and order for a 512-processor system right out of their main price list. (Bigger systems are special deals, but the 512-processor configuration has its own part number, just like a workstation or a monitor.)
Two or three years from now, when everything you just described is possible, let's see what SGI has in its price book and revisit the question. I imagine the answer then will be the same as the answer now, just with the facts ratched up a few notches. "Yeah," you'll say, "SGI can deliver 8 kiloprocessors for $3 million, but is it justified? A 2 kilonode wintel cluster is cheaper...."
Well, in all fairness, SGI is still selling the hell out of Fuel and Octane2. And, unless they've cancelled their plans in the last few months-- a distinct possibility-- they've got something new and interesting coming down the pipe. Code-named Chimera, it's supposed to apply the same principles of scalability and modularity to a single-user workstation that they applied years ago to servers and supercomputers. So SGI's workstation business isn't dead, per se, they're just scaling it back to where it needs to be. I don't think you'll ever see another SGI PC. Thank heavens.
Aggregate, 12.8 GB/s. Actual STREAM TRIAD performance will be considerably higher than that. A 64-processor prototype system using this same architecture and Itanium2 CPUs scored the world record STREAM TRIAD benchmark back in early September. There's little argument that the Origin 3000 architecture is among the fastest architectures in the world.
I have been told-- not officially, but close to it-- that when SGI divested itself of MIPS, it retained all the IP surrounding the R10000 family, which includes the R10000, R12000, R14000, and R14000A, and the rumored R16000, R18000, and R20000 lines. So while MIPS makes more RISC processors than anybody else in the world, only SGI has the rights to develop and produce the really cool ones.
I can't believe this got moderated as "insightful." Crap like Indys and O2s is what put SGI in a bad place to begin with. SGI always had fantastic graphics technology and a kick-ass operating system. When they tried to sell low-end workstations-- Indys and O2s running IRIX, and all the stupid stuff with Intel machines running NT and Linux-- their net revenues went into the toilet. SGI's biggest sources of revenue have always been scientific and technical computing customers, the government, and the petrochemical/geological industries. It's when SGI de-focuses to talk about stuff like PCs with fancy cases or video servers or data mining software that they start to lose their way.
This isn't SGI finding a new reason to exist. This is SGI going back to what has always been one of its best reasons to exist. Over time, SGI's technical lead in graphics has diminished, fueled primarily by (believe it or not) home computer games. But even now, nobody can touch SGI for high-performance scalable servers like the 3900.
Close, but no kewpie doll. A superbrick hold 16 processors (not 64; I think that was a typo on your part), and connects externally via NUMAlink to other superbricks. But, if I remember my numbers right, the maximum memory latency across the longest multi-router NUMAlink hop in a 128-processor Origin 3000-series system is less than the normal processor-to-processor latency in the Sun Fire 15K. NUMAlink is incredibly fast. The ratio of local memory latency to remote memory latency is something 1:1.5, as opposed to about 1:10 in IBM's and Sun's big systems.
That's true-- or at least they did-- but this particular machine is not a cluster. It's a single computer. You can cluster these with your favorite technology, of course, using Myrinet or gigabit Ethernet or what-have-you. ASCI Blue Mountain at Los Alamos National Labs is a cluster of 6,144 Origin 2000-series processors. I guess it'd be the acme of hyperbole to call that system a megacluster, but the name sounds pretty good.
I remember eading an article on Slashdot some time ago on how processors were becoming so hot that at the current trend, they would be hotter than nuclear reactors by 2025.
When I got up this morning, it was 59 F outside. Now, just after lunch, it's over 65 F. If this trend continues, it will be hot enough to melt lead outside by next spring!
I'd worry about the bus chipset heating up more than the processors.
It does. The Bedrock chip is both considerably larger and considerably hotter than the R14000A is. (Bedrock is the memory controller, node crossbar, and "bus" arbitrator.)
As to your other comment, SGI got a lot for their money when they bought Cray back in the mid 90's. They took a lot of good Cray technology-- like crossbar-based NUMA system design principles-- and incorporated them into their large server systems. I believe SGI was the first company-- other than Cray itself-- to break the one-hundred CPU barrier on a single system image. (The T3 series was a monster, but I don't recall exactly how many CPUs you could cram into one.)
I think it was Seymour himself who once said, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O bound problems."
There are 128 cpu intel/amd solutions that fit in a single rack. I know of at least 3 companies that produce them and they are cheap.
There are a few blade systems that can squeeze 128 or more processors into a rack, but those are blade systems, not single-system-image compute servers. You can't use a blade server to do the job of an Origin 3900. (Of course, the converse is also true; you wouldn't buy an Origin 3900 to do something you could do with a blade server instead.)
SGI tends to produce exactly what the customer wants. It's just that their customer is more often than not the federal government, or a very large corporation. It's not well-known-- in fact, for a time it was classified-- but SGI designed, manufactured, and sold an entire line of what were basically DSP coprocessor units specifically for Lockheed's satellite division. Called the "tensor processing unit," each one was basically an expansion module for the Origin 2000. SGI built it just like a commercial product, complete with documentation and everything, and manufactured them in large quantities. It's just that you couldn't buy them unless you were Lockheed.
It's only when SGI tries to branch out that they do poorly. I don't know WTF they were thinking when they decided to try selling inexpensive (relative to other SGI products) workstations running NT or Linux. That was just insane. But as SGI strips more and more of that BS away, they get closer and closer to being a sound company again.
Right but wrong. The target market for this system is definitely government and university HPC labs, but those labs are definitely short of floor space. Putting more MIPS per floor tile is an important advancement.
Sun fits 106 processors into a rack. They were previously the record holder. The Origin 3900 is considerably denser than the Sun Fire 15K, both in terms of processor count and PCI-X slot count-- though not at the same time, of course.
I compared the density of SGI's system to blade systems because those are widely considered to be the densest computers in the world, with something like 90 or 100 individual one-processor computers per rack. This system is not only dense in terms of pure processor count that most-- not all, but most-- blade servers, but it's also got all the advantages of a single system image for HPC applications.
(I'm answering these questions off-the-cuff, so if I mistype any details, sorry.)
If you know what a first-generation C-brick looks like, imagine squeezing that board into a one-rack-unit form factor and stacking four of them together.
Each superbrick includes four boards, spaced one unit apart, with four R14Ks, the Bedrock, and some RAM. The boards are connected with an internal eight-port crossbar router, making the superbrick a self-contained 16-processor unit. Externally, the superbrick connects to the base I/O brick via XIO+; the base I/O brick contains stuff like the system disk and the first 11 PCI-X slots.
I'm not positive how the superbricks are configured. Theoretically, you can partially populate them in one-node increments (meaning 4 CPUs and some RAM), but SGI may or may not sell them that way for manufacturing and QA reasons.
I believe the CPUs come with 8 MB of s-cache each.
The CPU-to-CPU and CPU-to-RAM bandwidths vary depending on the topology you're crossing, but I believe the minimum is 1.6 GB/s unidirectional, or 3.2 GB/s bidirectional. Intra-node bandwidths are somewhat higher, I believe.
No, the CPUs are regular single-core MIPS R14000As. They're tiny chips that don't consume much power, so you can really squeeze 'em in there.
Keep an eye on techpubs.sgi.com, because SGI will be releasing the developer and owner docs for the new system there shortly. (By "shortly" I mean as soon as a few hours or as long as a few weeks, depending on when the docs get released.) You'll find all the technical data you want when those docs go up.
Obviously, that should be 64 gigabytes of RAM, not 64 megs.
Interesting thing about this system will be, rather than the maximum RAM capacity, the minimum RAM required. The original Origin 3000 required some minimal amount of RAM-- 256 or 512 MB or something-- for every four processors. I'm not sure if this new model has the same requirement, but I'd imagine that it does. (It's an architectural thing. Every node board has to have some RAM on it, because that node board may be nominated at boot time to act as the boot master, among other reasons.)
If that's true, then a 128-processor system would require a minimum of either 32 or 64 GB of RAM, depending on whether you can put 256 MB on a node board.
No, it's not. This is a single-system-image server. The 128-processor rack boots a single kernel. (In fact, you can connect four 128-p racks together to make a 512-p system, and larger systems than that are supported under special contract to SGI. I believe NASA Ames has a 1,024-p.)
The four-processor, 1-unit server you talked about stops there: at four processors. You can't compare that to a system that scales to be 256 times that size.
What we need is faster, cheaper hardware that makes sense!
The 128-processor Origin 3900 lists for $2.9 million. There's nothing "cheaper" about this. Faster, yeah; this is one of-- not "the," but one of-- the fastest computers in the world. And it's the densest. But it's nowhere near cheap.
I meant to mention this in my submission, but it slipped my mind. The R14000A only consumes 17 watts of power. Four of them, plus the Bedrock memory controller chip, plus up to 8 GB of RAM, fit on a board inside a 1 RU clearance. Four of them, plus some nifty backplane hardware, fit into a "superbrick," meaning sixteen processors in 4 RU.
As far as heat loading goes, the "superbrick" is basically one big wind tunnel, with giant fans on the front and ventilation out the back. It pumps a lot of heat into the room, but the temperature in and around the CPUs is really pretty low. I think it peaks around 35 C.
On the other hand, industry specific portals are hugely successful. You're looking at one right now...
At this point, the definition of "portal" becomes blurry. I would consider Slashdot to be more like a weblog than a portal; Slashdot is, ultimately, a collection of links (a la Metafilter or Memepool) smooshed up against a pretty nice posting board system. I wouldn't consider that to be a portal, by any useful definition.
I would put netscape.com down as the canonical example of a portal. Just typing "netscape.com" into my browser shows me these things: "Eminem's a Movie Star!"; "Workplace Weasels Beware: Dilbert's Back"; "DJ30 8418.95 -118.18"; "Deal of the Day: Big Stereo Sound at Half the Price!"; "Weather (Enter ZIP:)"; and "When will the tech sector rebound? [Vote]". In other words, Netscape's site tries to look like the front page of a newspaper, with a couple of articles above the fold, the weather forecast in the corner, stock market statistics in the other corner, some ads, and a bunch of smaller articles and ads below the fold. It does this by scraping web sites or web services, assembling the content according to a template and/or some user preferences, adding a dash of advertising, and stirring until blended. This basic pattern is true of general portal sites, like my.yahoo.com and netscape.com and others; industry-specific portal sites; and corporate portal sites. The only difference is the sources from which the content is collected and how it's presented.
I don't think Slashdot (or K5, or MacSlash, or Metafilter, or any similar site) qualifies as a portal, in the traditional sense. Of course, if the definition of "portal" has changed over the past few years without my noticing-- before this morning, I hadn't been to netscape.com since about 1997, and that was to download Netscape Navigator 3 for IRIX-- then pretty much everything I've said here is outdated and irrelevant.
But I suppose, if I'm anywhere close to being right about this, that a discussion of what, exactly, constitutes a "portal" in the context of this Ask Slashdot is in order. Then again, I don't really care, so WTF.
If it is the website owner, this sets a very bad precident for protecting consumers from crap like popups and excessive adverts (ahem, he says on/.).
I think you've got it backwards. I don't believe there is any precedent at this time in favor of what you describe. Though some people find it distasteful, there's no clear evidence that advertising is actually harmful to adults, and so there's been no movement toward "protecting" adults from it. If a TV network wanted to swap the ratios and start showing 22 minutes of advertising per half hour, nobody would stop them. (Except market forces, of course.)
All of this is dependent on the word "adult," though. Advertising has different effects on adults and on children, and organizations like the FTC and the FCC have guidelines about advertising to kids. But as far as adults go... it's a free country.
In other words, nobody has said that "crap like popups and excessive adverts" are something that reasonable adults should be protected from.
The data size you require can easily fit in a single rackmounted disk array.
I think your calculation may be broken. Spacechicken is asking about storage in the range of one terabyte (lower bound, very easy to achieve) to one thousand terabytes (definitely possible, but bigger than damn near everything). You can squeeze about 1.8 TB into a rackmounted disk array using 160 GB drives; the new 320 GB drives will double this to about 3.6 TB, at least in theory. You're still 996.2 TB short of Spacechicken's high number.
Slashdot Mirror
Cray-Research basically went under when the Cray-3 contract was axed.
Cray has already taken more than $25 million in orders for the X1, a computer that hasn't even been built yet. Cray has had a rough time, but they're doing just fine.
lets say that MOSIX and 10Gig ethernet advances
What if it does? Bandwidth between nodes isn't as big a problem as latency in that case. No matter how fast-- in terms of bits per second-- your network transport is, you're always going to have latencies that are a million times higher than node-to-node latencies inside a NUMA system like the Origin. Seriously, a million times; we're talking milliseconds versus nanoseconds here. Your dismissal of single-system-image designs in favor of cluster designs shows a distinct lack of vision on your part, I'm afraid.
then will 2.9m for a machine still seem justified ?
If you set up the hypothetical situation such that the less-expensive system does everything that the more-expensive system can do, then no, of course the more-expensive system isn't justifable. But that's not reality. SGI can deliver 1,024-processor systems right now. You can call them up and place and order for a 512-processor system right out of their main price list. (Bigger systems are special deals, but the 512-processor configuration has its own part number, just like a workstation or a monitor.)
Two or three years from now, when everything you just described is possible, let's see what SGI has in its price book and revisit the question. I imagine the answer then will be the same as the answer now, just with the facts ratched up a few notches. "Yeah," you'll say, "SGI can deliver 8 kiloprocessors for $3 million, but is it justified? A 2 kilonode wintel cluster is cheaper...."
Well, in all fairness, SGI is still selling the hell out of Fuel and Octane2. And, unless they've cancelled their plans in the last few months-- a distinct possibility-- they've got something new and interesting coming down the pipe. Code-named Chimera, it's supposed to apply the same principles of scalability and modularity to a single-user workstation that they applied years ago to servers and supercomputers. So SGI's workstation business isn't dead, per se, they're just scaling it back to where it needs to be. I don't think you'll ever see another SGI PC. Thank heavens.
So what is the memory bandwidth of this baby?
Aggregate, 12.8 GB/s. Actual STREAM TRIAD performance will be considerably higher than that. A 64-processor prototype system using this same architecture and Itanium2 CPUs scored the world record STREAM TRIAD benchmark back in early September. There's little argument that the Origin 3000 architecture is among the fastest architectures in the world.
The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project (or: How To Turn a $175.000 High-End SGI Challenge DM Server into a Fridge)
Oh, don't exaggerate. It's closer to 7 times lower. Well, maybe 8. ;-)
I have been told-- not officially, but close to it-- that when SGI divested itself of MIPS, it retained all the IP surrounding the R10000 family, which includes the R10000, R12000, R14000, and R14000A, and the rumored R16000, R18000, and R20000 lines. So while MIPS makes more RISC processors than anybody else in the world, only SGI has the rights to develop and produce the really cool ones.
I can't believe this got moderated as "insightful." Crap like Indys and O2s is what put SGI in a bad place to begin with. SGI always had fantastic graphics technology and a kick-ass operating system. When they tried to sell low-end workstations-- Indys and O2s running IRIX, and all the stupid stuff with Intel machines running NT and Linux-- their net revenues went into the toilet. SGI's biggest sources of revenue have always been scientific and technical computing customers, the government, and the petrochemical/geological industries. It's when SGI de-focuses to talk about stuff like PCs with fancy cases or video servers or data mining software that they start to lose their way.
This isn't SGI finding a new reason to exist. This is SGI going back to what has always been one of its best reasons to exist. Over time, SGI's technical lead in graphics has diminished, fueled primarily by (believe it or not) home computer games. But even now, nobody can touch SGI for high-performance scalable servers like the 3900.
Doesn't count. It's not a single system image. The Origin 3900 is. But apart from that, that's a lot of processors in a small space.
Close, but no kewpie doll. A superbrick hold 16 processors (not 64; I think that was a typo on your part), and connects externally via NUMAlink to other superbricks. But, if I remember my numbers right, the maximum memory latency across the longest multi-router NUMAlink hop in a 128-processor Origin 3000-series system is less than the normal processor-to-processor latency in the Sun Fire 15K. NUMAlink is incredibly fast. The ratio of local memory latency to remote memory latency is something 1:1.5, as opposed to about 1:10 in IBM's and Sun's big systems.
That's true-- or at least they did-- but this particular machine is not a cluster. It's a single computer. You can cluster these with your favorite technology, of course, using Myrinet or gigabit Ethernet or what-have-you. ASCI Blue Mountain at Los Alamos National Labs is a cluster of 6,144 Origin 2000-series processors. I guess it'd be the acme of hyperbole to call that system a megacluster, but the name sounds pretty good.
I remember eading an article on Slashdot some time ago on how processors were becoming so hot that at the current trend, they would be hotter than nuclear reactors by 2025.
When I got up this morning, it was 59 F outside. Now, just after lunch, it's over 65 F. If this trend continues, it will be hot enough to melt lead outside by next spring!
Beware statistical projections.
You got ripped off. I wouldn't take a machine with SI graphics if you paid me $10 to haul it away. Ugh.
I guess you can still use the Octane as a space-heater, though. That's a plus.
I'd worry about the bus chipset heating up more than the processors.
It does. The Bedrock chip is both considerably larger and considerably hotter than the R14000A is. (Bedrock is the memory controller, node crossbar, and "bus" arbitrator.)
As to your other comment, SGI got a lot for their money when they bought Cray back in the mid 90's. They took a lot of good Cray technology-- like crossbar-based NUMA system design principles-- and incorporated them into their large server systems. I believe SGI was the first company-- other than Cray itself-- to break the one-hundred CPU barrier on a single system image. (The T3 series was a monster, but I don't recall exactly how many CPUs you could cram into one.)
I think it was Seymour himself who once said, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O bound problems."
There are 128 cpu intel/amd solutions that fit in a single rack. I know of at least 3 companies that produce them and they are cheap.
There are a few blade systems that can squeeze 128 or more processors into a rack, but those are blade systems, not single-system-image compute servers. You can't use a blade server to do the job of an Origin 3900. (Of course, the converse is also true; you wouldn't buy an Origin 3900 to do something you could do with a blade server instead.)
SGI tends to produce exactly what the customer wants. It's just that their customer is more often than not the federal government, or a very large corporation. It's not well-known-- in fact, for a time it was classified-- but SGI designed, manufactured, and sold an entire line of what were basically DSP coprocessor units specifically for Lockheed's satellite division. Called the "tensor processing unit," each one was basically an expansion module for the Origin 2000. SGI built it just like a commercial product, complete with documentation and everything, and manufactured them in large quantities. It's just that you couldn't buy them unless you were Lockheed.
It's only when SGI tries to branch out that they do poorly. I don't know WTF they were thinking when they decided to try selling inexpensive (relative to other SGI products) workstations running NT or Linux. That was just insane. But as SGI strips more and more of that BS away, they get closer and closer to being a sound company again.
Right but wrong. The target market for this system is definitely government and university HPC labs, but those labs are definitely short of floor space. Putting more MIPS per floor tile is an important advancement.
Sun fits 106 processors into a rack. They were previously the record holder. The Origin 3900 is considerably denser than the Sun Fire 15K, both in terms of processor count and PCI-X slot count-- though not at the same time, of course.
I compared the density of SGI's system to blade systems because those are widely considered to be the densest computers in the world, with something like 90 or 100 individual one-processor computers per rack. This system is not only dense in terms of pure processor count that most-- not all, but most-- blade servers, but it's also got all the advantages of a single system image for HPC applications.
(I'm answering these questions off-the-cuff, so if I mistype any details, sorry.)
If you know what a first-generation C-brick looks like, imagine squeezing that board into a one-rack-unit form factor and stacking four of them together.
Each superbrick includes four boards, spaced one unit apart, with four R14Ks, the Bedrock, and some RAM. The boards are connected with an internal eight-port crossbar router, making the superbrick a self-contained 16-processor unit. Externally, the superbrick connects to the base I/O brick via XIO+; the base I/O brick contains stuff like the system disk and the first 11 PCI-X slots.
I'm not positive how the superbricks are configured. Theoretically, you can partially populate them in one-node increments (meaning 4 CPUs and some RAM), but SGI may or may not sell them that way for manufacturing and QA reasons.
I believe the CPUs come with 8 MB of s-cache each.
The CPU-to-CPU and CPU-to-RAM bandwidths vary depending on the topology you're crossing, but I believe the minimum is 1.6 GB/s unidirectional, or 3.2 GB/s bidirectional. Intra-node bandwidths are somewhat higher, I believe.
No, the CPUs are regular single-core MIPS R14000As. They're tiny chips that don't consume much power, so you can really squeeze 'em in there.
Keep an eye on techpubs.sgi.com, because SGI will be releasing the developer and owner docs for the new system there shortly. (By "shortly" I mean as soon as a few hours or as long as a few weeks, depending on when the docs get released.) You'll find all the technical data you want when those docs go up.
Obviously, that should be 64 gigabytes of RAM, not 64 megs.
Interesting thing about this system will be, rather than the maximum RAM capacity, the minimum RAM required. The original Origin 3000 required some minimal amount of RAM-- 256 or 512 MB or something-- for every four processors. I'm not sure if this new model has the same requirement, but I'd imagine that it does. (It's an architectural thing. Every node board has to have some RAM on it, because that node board may be nominated at boot time to act as the boot master, among other reasons.)
If that's true, then a 128-processor system would require a minimum of either 32 or 64 GB of RAM, depending on whether you can put 256 MB on a node board.
No, it's not. This is a single-system-image server. The 128-processor rack boots a single kernel. (In fact, you can connect four 128-p racks together to make a 512-p system, and larger systems than that are supported under special contract to SGI. I believe NASA Ames has a 1,024-p.)
The four-processor, 1-unit server you talked about stops there: at four processors. You can't compare that to a system that scales to be 256 times that size.
What we need is faster, cheaper hardware that makes sense!
The 128-processor Origin 3900 lists for $2.9 million. There's nothing "cheaper" about this. Faster, yeah; this is one of-- not "the," but one of-- the fastest computers in the world. And it's the densest. But it's nowhere near cheap.
I meant to mention this in my submission, but it slipped my mind. The R14000A only consumes 17 watts of power. Four of them, plus the Bedrock memory controller chip, plus up to 8 GB of RAM, fit on a board inside a 1 RU clearance. Four of them, plus some nifty backplane hardware, fit into a "superbrick," meaning sixteen processors in 4 RU.
As far as heat loading goes, the "superbrick" is basically one big wind tunnel, with giant fans on the front and ventilation out the back. It pumps a lot of heat into the room, but the temperature in and around the CPUs is really pretty low. I think it peaks around 35 C.
On the other hand, industry specific portals are hugely successful. You're looking at one right now...
At this point, the definition of "portal" becomes blurry. I would consider Slashdot to be more like a weblog than a portal; Slashdot is, ultimately, a collection of links (a la Metafilter or Memepool) smooshed up against a pretty nice posting board system. I wouldn't consider that to be a portal, by any useful definition.
I would put netscape.com down as the canonical example of a portal. Just typing "netscape.com" into my browser shows me these things: "Eminem's a Movie Star!"; "Workplace Weasels Beware: Dilbert's Back"; "DJ30 8418.95 -118.18"; "Deal of the Day: Big Stereo Sound at Half the Price!"; "Weather (Enter ZIP:)"; and "When will the tech sector rebound? [Vote]". In other words, Netscape's site tries to look like the front page of a newspaper, with a couple of articles above the fold, the weather forecast in the corner, stock market statistics in the other corner, some ads, and a bunch of smaller articles and ads below the fold. It does this by scraping web sites or web services, assembling the content according to a template and/or some user preferences, adding a dash of advertising, and stirring until blended. This basic pattern is true of general portal sites, like my.yahoo.com and netscape.com and others; industry-specific portal sites; and corporate portal sites. The only difference is the sources from which the content is collected and how it's presented.
I don't think Slashdot (or K5, or MacSlash, or Metafilter, or any similar site) qualifies as a portal, in the traditional sense. Of course, if the definition of "portal" has changed over the past few years without my noticing-- before this morning, I hadn't been to netscape.com since about 1997, and that was to download Netscape Navigator 3 for IRIX-- then pretty much everything I've said here is outdated and irrelevant.
But I suppose, if I'm anywhere close to being right about this, that a discussion of what, exactly, constitutes a "portal" in the context of this Ask Slashdot is in order. Then again, I don't really care, so WTF.
I thought portals went out with stock options, VRML, and "push."
If it is the website owner, this sets a very bad precident for protecting consumers from crap like popups and excessive adverts (ahem, he says on /.).
I think you've got it backwards. I don't believe there is any precedent at this time in favor of what you describe. Though some people find it distasteful, there's no clear evidence that advertising is actually harmful to adults, and so there's been no movement toward "protecting" adults from it. If a TV network wanted to swap the ratios and start showing 22 minutes of advertising per half hour, nobody would stop them. (Except market forces, of course.)
All of this is dependent on the word "adult," though. Advertising has different effects on adults and on children, and organizations like the FTC and the FCC have guidelines about advertising to kids. But as far as adults go... it's a free country.
In other words, nobody has said that "crap like popups and excessive adverts" are something that reasonable adults should be protected from.
The data size you require can easily fit in a single rackmounted disk array.
I think your calculation may be broken. Spacechicken is asking about storage in the range of one terabyte (lower bound, very easy to achieve) to one thousand terabytes (definitely possible, but bigger than damn near everything). You can squeeze about 1.8 TB into a rackmounted disk array using 160 GB drives; the new 320 GB drives will double this to about 3.6 TB, at least in theory. You're still 996.2 TB short of Spacechicken's high number.