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All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

zdnet.com

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Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#131

Ronald 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…

FWIW Ron has been around a looooong time. He used to work on FreeBSD in the early 90s.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#132
post #121

With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. Brutal to be confronted with such a cutting opinion in an otherwise congenial article and to have no thoughts of disagreement.

America is a bet that chaos has some advantages over good governance.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#133
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the realistic alternative is that there is effectively even more centralized wealth, or wealth control with governments. It would be neat if money was spread even more evenly. But the costs of the intervention to try and wangle it would probably outweigh the benefits. That isn't to say that taxes shouldn't be higher or benefits higher. But even Sweden and France have billionaires. They just have t…

> It would be neat if money was spread even more evenly. Change "neat" to "critical", and I'll agree with you. My gut feel is that the US is close to another revolution. All those less-educated white males with several automatic rifles each are not going to like it when they find out their beloved Donald (oh look, another billionaire solving hard problems!) makes their lot worse instead of better.

People are mad, but they aren't mad at the powers that be, they are mad at arbitrary groups of "others" whom they dehumanize into a threat to their way of life.

Its an intentional misdirection through disinformation, but rich and powerful men have been adept at it for centuries now, they learned well from the examples of the French, Bolshevik, and similar revolutions on how to make sure the impoverished masses are focusing their discontent on anyone but the ones truly responsible for their plight.

If you wield power as long as you keep the poor fighting amongst themselves they can never organize against you. See how Occupy Wall Street fell apart through mostly infighting and misinformation as a simple example of this effect that isn't exactly contemporary.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#134
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very natural, and very logical. Being natural and logical doesn't make it moral or ethical. I think you're only kidding yourself if you believe that people deserve that much money and power. > How about folks who centralize powers like politicians in high level functions, who have not even been elected but appointed? How do you feel about that? They also can have massive influence on the world's affairs, even…

Ideologies and violence caused so many disasters in history. At least money does not directly terrify us like that. Billionaires usually became victims of such disasters. In the end, money is not the ultimate power. It's violence that matters most on this planet.

And money grants control of violence. Either direct, as a drug lord in Mexico in the absence of a strong central state monopoly on violence, or indirect by simply being above the law in the US if you have enough zeroes in your bank account to afford the lawyers to make any accusations go away when there is a strong central monopoly on violence. Or on the reciprocal, you can use money to inflict violence through frivolous lawsuits or even worse the kind of patent trolling used by heinous groups to ruin ventures.

Turns out people want money, and will offer you violence in return for it if you offer enough to justify it.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right, it's just too hard. We'll leave it to the billionaires to solve - I know one who says he's the only one who can fix it. Sorry, my cynicism is showing. But we already have the organisation (IRS) in place to regulate people's income, and they already do exactly this job. Yes, we do need to find an impartial way to redistribute the wealth, but we have working models of an array of options around the world.…

This hints at the ideological chicken and egg problem here - wealth centralization breeds power centralization which breeds state corruption. The corruption of power through centralized wealth is presented as defenders of such wealth as an indicator of the states inability to impartially control such corruption.

The trick is the corruption already happened. The money was already too centralized, and has already done damage to the integrity of public institutions. That however is not a reason to abandon such institutions in favor of the monied interests that brought about the corruption, it is a reason to more seriously pursue means to purge the corruption and restore democracy. When that centralization of wealth causes that corruption, that means you need to address that vector in your ideology and policy goals as a citizen.

Ignoring it is just a long term means to eventually collapse the society as a self sustaining growth of both inequality and corruption consumes all prosperity and growth.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#136
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its so much a shame that Linus isn't a billionaire than it is we have billionaires at all. There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth. There is being rewarded for hard work / skill / innovation and there is exploiting people to become rich, and the line between those is very hard to distinguish when talking about individuals making more than…

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.…

And if you put your life savings into a hedge fund and it blows up ?

See http://hf-implode.com/index.html#lists for a partial list.

Even the famous Marc Mezvinsky's notoriously "well supported" Eaglevale Partners fund has shutdown up after losing 48% of investors funds.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#137
post #94
post #61

Earlier 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…

It is a misconception that RT means "lowest possible latency".

It actually means "latency with a known upper bound". The point of it is to be able to give engineering guarantees - the actuators on the rocket engine vanes will move within N milliseconds of the input voltage from the gyroscope module changing; the robot arm motor will be de-energised within N milliseconds of the laser perimeter sensor activating.

Bounding the worst case can often mean making trade-offs in the best case, and that doesn't make sense in HPC because the hard upper bound just isn't necessary in this environment.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#138

Earlier 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.…

And if you put your life savings into a hedge fund and it blows up ? See http://hf-implode.com/index.html#lists for a partial list. Even the famous Marc Mezvinsky's notoriously "well supported" Eaglevale Partners fund has shutdown up after losing 48% of investors funds.

[deleted]

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the FDA I don't think the government should be telling me what drugs I can and can't take. Plenty of people are denied from taking early stage drugs because they are not FDA approved and dangerous, but if people are aware of the risks I think they should have every right to take them. In your poison cucumber example I think this would qualify as knowingly poisoning someone else which is clearly illegal and…

> Regarding the FDA I don't think the government should be telling me what drugs I can and can't take. That's not what the FDA does (the DEA, OTOH...) The FDA deals with how drugs can be marketed, not what people can take.

> The FDA deals with how drugs can be marketed, not what people can take.

If that's all it did, the FDA would be an ideal system. However, that's not true; the FDA also deals with which drugs can be marketed. Effectively, the FDA is indirectly preventing citizens from taking experimental drugs, whether they have a terminal illness or not.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#140

Earlier 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…

> who gets/takes the money?

The default option is putting it in the government budget. Seems obvious to me.

If we reach the point where this cap-tax is able to pay for the entire government by itself, and we still have extra, then we can worry about where the rest goes.

> Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed?

The IRS.

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