Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial 114
An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."
Blue Gene/P (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21
Re:The DOE bit (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously you've never worked for a government contractor. A stage example:
1: CONTRACTOR, pacing in an untidy OFFICE filled with EQUIPMENT: "We need to order, configure and install this thing at 12/10s speed to meet deadline! Where the f*ck is the chimp from the CDW ads????"
(CRICKETS sing
2: CHIEF SCIENTIST, inside raised floor lab filled with immaculate, slab-sided computing machines: "Hey, can we use this thing to run some Mandelbrot sets?"
PHYSICAL PLANT GUY: "Not until we upgrade the chillers."
UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: "I'm not sure we can afford that!"
3: TOUSLED-HAIRED SCIENTIST, in grimy, pizza and book-strewn home: "If only I could get enough cycles to build my next great open source project...we could save the world from the impending unnamed crisis! Crap!"
SCIENTIST'S CAT:(forbiddingly) "Meow-rarwerews"
4: BUSH SCIENCE ADVISOR in a rather spare-looking OFFICE without a COMPUTER: "Let's shut this (supercomputer) thing down. We can shunt the money off to a lobbyist, and rake in 200% on the backend for our downstream contractors. What, Lockheed is on the phone? Hang on..." FADE OUT
5: VIEW OF EARTH FROM ORBIT. EARTH BLOWS UP. (Maybe use coal dust as per George Lucas)
6: FIN