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NSF Announces Supercomputer Grant Winners

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Aug 08, 2007 08:01 PM
from the I-can't-allow-you-to-do-that-dave dept.
Supercomputing Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "The NSF has tentatively announced that the Track 1 leadership class supercomputer will be awarded to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Track 2 award winner is University of Tennessee-Knoxville and its partners." From the article: "In the first award, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will receive $208 million over 4.5 years to acquire and make available a petascale computer it calls "Blue Waters," which is 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011. The second award will fund the deployment and operation of an extremely powerful supercomputer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS). The $65 million, 5-year project will include partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research."
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  • But is this the same award everyone was pissed about because it was going to IBM?

    I'm curious if that was separate, if it was false or fake information or if they changed their minds afterwards?

  • TGDaily coverage (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2007, @08:07PM (#20164143)
    TG Daily is also covering this with more details [tgdaily.com], and has a picture tour of the current NCSA supercomputer facility [tgdaily.com].

  • I approve (Score:5, Funny)

    by weak* (1137369) on Wednesday August 08 2007, @08:12PM (#20164189)
    I'm glad we have the NSF out there supporting the development of faster and faster supercomputers. Pretty soon these machines will be able to locate the correct Sarah Connor in the phone book on the first try.

  • wow... (Score:5, Informative)

    by djupedal (584558) on Wednesday August 08 2007, @08:26PM (#20164325)
    "Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."

    • "Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."
      Who gave this guy E?
  • I can't help but wonder whether these super machines are ever actually used to capacity. Since they are housed at universities I suspect that some professor runs two or three stupid little mental exercises on it and then it just sits there, glomps electricity and gathers dust.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Entropius (188861)
      My PhD advisor does computational quantum chromodynamics on supercomputers. Quantum chromodynamics is the current theory of the nuclear force. Unfortunately, nobody can actually calculate all that much with it because the math is too hard, but we think it's the right theory because of some symmetry arguments. One of the big challenges at the moment in high-energy theory is to actually see what QCD predicts. Basically the perturbation + renormalization approach that worked so well for quantum electrodynamics

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Minter92 (148860)
      I worked as a system engineer on the supercomputers at NCSA from 97 till 2000. Once they are up and stable they are pretty much pushed to the limits. The users are constantly pushing for more procs, more memory, more storage. They'll use every flop they can get.
  • Since it's going to be massively parallel, it's only 500 times more powerful than some other computer if it has a beautifully parallelized problem to solve.

    I've programmed computers scientifically for twenty-odd years, and one thing I've found is that massively parallel computers are very difficult to use efficiently, except when you're solving one of the relatively few problems which are obviously parallelizable and yet have interesting results. For example, solving 500 million tic-tac-toe games simultane

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by OldChemist (978484)
      You make a good point. It is now possible to buy a quad core from Dell for about $750 (or less) to play around with. However, as mentioned earlier in this discussion, the work of Klaus Schulten at Illinois is quite instructive. His program NAMD (not another molecular dynamics program) has been designed from the ground up to scale well on many processors. This program does a lot better in this respect than most other md programs out there, although this will no doubt change. So don't despair about this

      • Throwing a bunch of rocks at a single bulldozer is a serial act.

        The parallel problem is to get a fleet of 100 bulldozers or 1000 bulldozers or 10,000 bulldozers simultaneously attacking a pile of rocks so that:

        A) The bulldozers aren't constantly colliding with one another, and

        B) When the bulldozers back off to avoid colliding with one another, they aren't all just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, needlessly burning diesel fuel [not to mention "prevailing" union wages & time value of the loa
  • though it would be at least 6 years too late.

  • .."Blue Waters," which is 500 times more powerful than today's typical supercomputers. The system is expected to go online in 2011.

    But how much powerful is it than supercomputers in 2011? :)

  • I took my grant check straight to the bank. They refused to cash it. When I asked why, they pointed out that it has N.S.F. written right on the front.
  • Oh my, 1 PFLOPS... that's not [stanford.edu] that big anymore. 4 years from now they should be talking 20+ PFLOPS at least.

    I'm very interested in their bandwidth numbers and architecture, which the ydo not mention.

    .
    • Well, they did say petascale. It could be say, 10 or 20 PFLOPS.

    • Oh my, 1 PFLOPS... that's not that big anymore. 4 years from now they should be talking 20+ PFLOPS at least.

      There's a huge difference between a distributed system offering 1 PFLOPS and a tightly integrated system offering a fast interconnect and a petaflop of computing power. It's kinda of like saying a semitruck isn't all the impressive because you have a fleet of cars that have the same storage capacity. That's great until you need to move a large container or block of stuff that can't be parceled out.

    • Hrmm, maybe the new Sun chip? since it has the memory controllers and 10gig-E built in already?

      Why would they want to use a chip known for its bad interconnecting tech (fsb is so last century) :P
    • So what kind of processors are in the new one (and the old ones). Are there just tons of basic, high end intel chips in it or is it some that they built not like any other that are unique and diverse to do special jobs? I seriously don't know

      Given that IBM is scheduled to deliver a multi-peta flops supercomputer to DARPA based on the POWER7 in the year 2010, it seems like a good guess that IBM would use the same technology for this one due in 2011, if they are the ones building it.
    • Ahh what the heck - A terminator walks into a bar... barman: Why the mimetic polyalloy face? terminator: I'm a T-1000 terminator from the future sent to kill Sarah Conner.
    • Wrong movie. They're building one of the supercomputers in Urbana, Illinois, which means that the HAL Plant [wikipedia.org] must finally be operational, just a few years behind schedule.

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