With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline.
All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
121–130 of 206 posts
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth First: yes, there are ethical reasons to accumulate so many resources : because some problems are incredibly hard to solve and need a lot of resources to even start to solve. Second, it is not on the people who have earned something to prove why they should be "permitted" to keep it; it's on the people who belie…
> yes, there are ethical reasons to accumulate so many resources: because some problems are incredibly hard to solve and need a lot of resources to even start to solve. Allowing people to become billionaires is a hideously inefficient way to solve hard problems. Most billionaires hoard their wealth, or spend it on the hard problem of ostentatious display of wealth. Billionaires who solve hard problems: Bill Gates and…
> Allowing
One word in, and already the same inverted burden of proof problem as the comment I replied to.
> people to become billionaires is a hideously inefficient way to solve hard problems
It's a good thing that's not the reason, nor is any reason required, and that's not your choice to make. And, also critically important: it's a great way to solve specific hard problems that aren't the ones most people are focused on.
Over the course of my lifetime, I expect to donate 99+% of my lifetime earnings towards specific charitable causes that are not something that the vast majority of people care about, though I believe they should.
> If even a fraction of that money funded university research departments, say, we'd get far more problems solved.
University research departments are a passable way to solve some problems, motivated by the ability to attract grant money and publish papers. Many problems are far more efficiently and quickly solved when motivated directly by producing a product or service people will pay for.
Again, the problem is not that we have millionaires and billionaires. The problem is that we have people with nothing. Let's fix that.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be OK if one person controlled 99% of the world's wealth? If so then what percent of the world's wealth concentrated in one person would make you uncomfortable? Why this percentage and not a lower one? As it stands now there is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth. Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so. My wife is a doctor in…
So let's accept as a hypothetical we do cap wealth. We all get to vote how much people are allowed to have. Yay. The people who have more have to do what exactly? They have to leave the country with the fear of extradition at some point? They have to give away their excess, but who gets/takes the money? They go to jail? Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed? It's sounds virt…
It doesn't get ugly fast. The tax rate for the wealthy used to be 90%. There was a time in the country where it was recognized that robber barons were not in our collective interest. This is not an unsolvable problem.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.) Giving poor people free access to untested-investment-vehicle-X is basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs. Mistakes will be made, and the people making them—lacking resources as they do—won't be able to recover from them. Right now, we're spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get people out of these ruts. (Free housing s…
"Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.)" No it doesn't. It's pure nanny statism. The government has no business telling people what they can and can't invest in or spend their money on. Yes startups are risky. So are lots of things. Why should the wealthy have no restrictions on them, but the poor do? This is literally "class warfare".
So. Much. This.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why on earth would you want a RTOS for HPC? RT is all about privileging latency over throughput, whereas in HPC throughput is everything.
Perhaps because a lot of tasks are not embarassingly parallel, which means moving data around, which means network interconnects, which means latency matters. Every millisecond delay in forwarding a packet is thousands of instructions stalled. I'm not saying this is actually a sensible tradeoff for any extant HPC architecture, but it could be. You certainly want the 'OS' that runs the pipeline on your CPU to be real…
True, a lot of tasks are not embarrassingly parallel, as you point out, but most tasks that run on supercomputers are embarassingly parallel. That's why those supercomputers have value in that problem domain in the first place.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#126Ronald Minnich (if you don't know him see [1]) comments : [1] https://share-ng.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/san... ----------------- "The semiannual TOP500 Supercomputer List was released yesterday. It also shows that China now claims 202 systems within the TOP500, while the United States claims 143 systems." My fellow Americans: Did you ever want to directly experience the transition to being a Tier 2 cou…
While I don't completely disagree with the premise, I'm not sure that having the most supercomputers in the TOP500 is evidence of it.
The PRC is striving to become a global competitor in as many fields as it can, as quickly as possible. But sometimes they go after the status symbols of achievement versus actual productive achievements. Both the ghost cities that stood initially empty and the supercomputer clusters that lay idle are results of this pursuit of the appearance of being a global player. [Apologies for not providing references here]
Most countries these days (post cold war) don't build super computers for bragging rights; they build them for defined tasks that drive their specification. Economics, budgetary concerns, and even power consumption often trump absolute performance when specifying a machine for a task.
The rise of clustered machines with commodity parts also distorts things since a faster computer (by some measures) can be made by adding more nodes rather than applying any fundamentally "better" technology.
That's not to say that the PRCs efforts are in vain. Focusing on competitiveness has produced results, and politics notwithstanding, the existence of these capabilities will create opportunities for their use.
But yeah, I was bummed about the SSC (especially given the decision's geopolitical context). I also agree that given fundamental research's past dividends, we should be funding a whole lot more of it.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> yes, there are ethical reasons to accumulate so many resources: because some problems are incredibly hard to solve and need a lot of resources to even start to solve. Allowing people to become billionaires is a hideously inefficient way to solve hard problems. Most billionaires hoard their wealth, or spend it on the hard problem of ostentatious display of wealth. Billionaires who solve hard problems: Bill Gates and…
> Allowing One word in, and already the same inverted burden of proof problem as the comment I replied to. > people to become billionaires is a hideously inefficient way to solve hard problems It's a good thing that's not the reason, nor is any reason required, and that's not your choice to make. And, also critically important: it's a great way to solve specific hard problems that aren't the ones most people are focu…
> I expect to donate 99+% of my lifetime earnings
Good on you.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#128With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline.
This is idiotic. The new admin could well commission new supercomputers for espionage or other military purposes.
The constant politicization of every single aspect of life is going too far.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#129A win for open source. I was just thinking the other day that it's a shame that Linus is not a billionaire. Seems he's doing just fine however: "Finnish-American software engineer and hacker Linus Torvalds has as estimated net worth of $150 million and an estimated annual salary of $10 million. He earned his net worth as the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel." Source: https://www.therichest.c…
To me $150 million is not much different from $1 billion. Maybe that just indicates I'm poor :)
It indicates you don't have the disease that is collecting money for the sake of collecting money.
You can absolutely SPEND $1 billion. There's no way you can ever APPRECIATE that money.
Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blame the SEC for this one. Their accredited investor regulation gave the future to the rich. Seed round, series A, B, C, etc should be a vehicle for class mobility. Instead it's a way for the rich and powerful to accumulate more wealth. With YC and other incubators acting as a filter for where investors should put money, it matters more which zipcode you were born into than your overall intelligence and creativity.…
Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.) Giving poor people free access to untested-investment-vehicle-X is basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs. Mistakes will be made, and the people making them—lacking resources as they do—won't be able to recover from them. Right now, we're spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get people out of these ruts. (Free housing s…
I can see that being a millionaire already is (somewhat) correlated with being less vulnerable to scams, but if you were designing a rule to protect the vulnerable, is that really what you'd come up with?
The first thing to come to mind for me, besides taking a test, is for people to show they can make it as a blackjack card-counter -- seriously, wouldn't an official investor-accrediting poker league, even, do a better job of sorting out or educating the marks and freeing up much more of the population to invest? If we have to deal with this problem by prior restraint at all.