NSF Announces Supercomputer Grant Winners 82
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."
If anyone makes a Terminator joke (Score:1, Funny)
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Ooh baby!
No i didn't RTFA (Score:2)
I'm curious if that was separate, if it was false or fake information or if they changed their minds afterwards?
universities or IBM? (Score:2, Informative)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08
-WtC
*please insert sig for 2 more minutes*
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Of particular interest: the NSF "Track 2" machine is built to complement the capabilities of TeraGrid, and is also being built in a location (Oak Ridge Laboratory) that the DOE is using to build their own Petascale machine.
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/40250-1.html [gcn.com]
(Both will rely on the readily available, federally admi
TGDaily coverage (Score:5, Informative)
I approve (Score:5, Funny)
Hail Alma Mater! (Score:1)
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So let our motto be
Victory, Illinois! Varsity!
Petascale? (Score:1, Flamebait)
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wow... (Score:5, Informative)
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Why would they want to use a chip known for its bad interconnecting tech (fsb is so last century)
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Oh yah, I lurve Sun Chips! Very tastee!
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A good guess would be POWER7 (Score:2)
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.
Are these machines actually used? (Score:2)
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So I have a feeling that the new machines are going to be humming right along
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In fact, a lattice QCD problem was one of the model problems for the Track 1 proposals. Proposers had to "provide a detailed analysis of the anticipated performance of the proposed system on the following set of model problems...A lattice-gauge QCD calculation in which 50 gauge configurations are generated on an 84^3*144 lattice with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fermi, the strange quark mass m_s set to its physical value, and the light quark mass m_l = 0.05*m_s. The target wall-clock time for this calculation
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There are also real projects from the NSA and other government branches that need fast computers. Why not a specific grant to develop a computer for a specific application rather than just a "make a fast supercomputer"?
Should we have grants for "make a tastier fast-food french fry" next?
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Because specific projects usually have a very finite lifetime, and supercomputing resources are terrifically expensive: that's why the NSF has "Cyberinfrastructure" as a major project. Researchers will apply for computer time as part of the normal grant process: current facilities are al
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In other news, programmer suicides up... (Score:2)
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
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You are attempting to use CPU core 153. Cancel or Allow? Allow.
You are attempting to use CPU core 154. Cancel or Allow? Allow.
...
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But my suggestion is that fundamental advances will only be made on small, cheap systems. See, a machine like this is so expensive that it's very hard to justify doing blue-sky goofball things on it, which will almost certainly turn out to be dumb ideas. You usually have to write a proposal, and the committee usually won't risk massive resources on an idea that is shaky, speculative as heck, or
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A single bulldozer is a serial device. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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First of all, your problem with the rocks what in the business we call trivially parallelizable. You solve it like this:
Secondly, there are plenty of resources to let you program a trivial thing like unrolling a loop wi
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The only justification for a piece of hardware like this is a problem that
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I've written quite enough of this fluff myself to be even a tiny bit impressed.
NSF (Score:1, Funny)
http://www.nsf.org/ [nsf.org]
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Birth of HAL 9000 (Score:2, Funny)
Kind of an Inside Joke (Score:1)
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So, how much (Score:2)
But how much powerful is it than supercomputers in 2011? :)
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Grant Check (Score:2)
Petascale (Score:2)
I'm very interested in their bandwidth numbers and architecture, which the ydo not mention.
.
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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.
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I'm sure we'll be hearing more, and it will be very nice machine.
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one could only hope (Score:1)