Reading over the list of priorities in the PDF linked from the Whitehouse blog, the one that I was the most pleased about was improving HPC productivity.
Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
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Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but everyone knows that thing's doing illegal stuff (illegal now or soon-to-be illegal), and Obama doesn't want that on his record.
Do you have a source for that information?
http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/07/27/nsa-...
The NSA's currently being sued over its metadata collection. I wrote that comment slightly tongue-in-cheek, but repurposing that supercomputer for civilian use would actually be a great way to recoup some of your losses.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you extolling the virtues of a world that was shaped by the threat of nuclear annihilation for multiple generations?
No, militaries has been funding R&D long before the nuclear age. http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/wright-brothers/online... Rather than tell us how much you hate the military and capitalism maybe you can figure out a better way? I'd love to see more non-military funding. Perhaps medical research could be used to increase public interest in funding supercomputer research?
> Rather than tell us how much you hate the military and capitalism maybe you can figure out a better way.
Well, knowing a few scientists, I can say that I know well the creative and inquiring spirits that advance us. The world is structured so that the people who do the actual development and discovery have to sell their talents to the logic of property and capital, either directly, or to the government that enforces that structure.
So, I think we're probably in agreement on the forces wherefrom those technologies came. I think we're also in agreement on whose behalf those forces act. I think we're probably in disagreement that capital is any better a master than the government it is in collusion with.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#54Don't we already have a exabyte-scale supercomputer in Utah run by the NSA?
Er, do we?
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#55IMHO if you need to break down a task well enough to run on a supercomputer, there isn't a lot more to do to make it run on a regular server farm. edit: Actually, in the scenarios you'd use a supercomputer for, the added latency and overhead (shoddy servers, network, etc.) would most likely make the run time orders of magnitude higher.
Maybe for embarrassingly parallel tasks, but if you require nontrivial interprocess communication, a server farm can't compete with the interconnect of a modern supercomputer.
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Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#56Press: "What's it for?" Obama: "Uuuh... NASA."
I find it odd that a president would sign an executive order for a new kind of computer (even if the new kind of computer is technically impressive). Call me cynical, but I'll bet that there's a number of quid-pro-quo arrangements with big party donors (or soon to be donors) -- regardless of which party is in office.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#57I suppose that "supercomputers" are all multi-processor these days, so the colossal FLOP numbers are counted as an aggregation over many processors and one has to coordinate these processors in any application that takes advantage of the FLOP specs. Now I am curious what is the fastest single processor?
I use i7 2600k at 5.0 GHz for some time. Probably best option for ordinary human.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#58It looks like they are explicitly saying they want to make a machine that works for both types of HPC -- classic low-latency high-bandwidth internode communication (physics simulations) and modern Internet-driver high-bandwidth storage/node communications. This is because the supercomputer community has long ignored the Internet-style of computation (MapReduce etc). But most of the new generation of scientists are ad…
And it's not like there isn't precedent. I remember a couple years ago when Google showed off gene mapping at I/O (Urs' demo to visualize how easy it was to scale GCP From 1 to 10 to 1000 to 100000 cores), and now they've partnered with the Broad Institute to apply this more generally.
Re: Supercomputers: Obama orders world's fastest computer
#5910 years ago the fastest supercomputer was BlueGene/L which was rated at 136.8 TFlop/s. The current fastest supercomputer is rated at 33,862.7 TFlop/s, or 247 times faster. It seems to me that the aim of taking 10 years to build a supercomputer that is only 20 times faster than the current one might fall a little short if it's aiming to take the top spot.
Doubling time: 10 years * log(2)/log(247) ~ 15 months
x20 ought to take about five years and a half.