'Blue Waters' Supercomputer Lucky To Exist 39
Nerval's Lobster writes "One could argue that the University of Illinois' "Blue Waters" supercomputer, scheduled to officially open for business March 28, is lucky to be alive. The 11.6 petaflop supercomputer, commissioned by the University and the National Science Foundation (NSF), will rank in the upper echelon of the world's fastest machines—its compute power would place it third on the current list, just above Japan's K Computer. However, the system will not be submitted to the TOP500 list because of concerns with the way the list is calculated, officials said. University officials and the NSF are lucky to have a machine at all. That's due in part to IBM, which reportedly backed out of the contract when the company determined that it couldn't make a profit. The university then turned to Cray, which would have had to replace what was presumably a POWER or Xeon installation with the current mix of AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPU coprocessors. Allen Blatecky, director of NSF's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, told Fox that pulling the plug was a 'real possibility.' And Cray itself had to work to find the parts necessary for the supercomputer to begin at least trial operations in the fall of 2012."
Re:Alive? Has it achieved sentience? (Score:5, Funny)
Greetings pedant!
You make many logical and valid points as any pedant worth their salt is apt to do, but unfortunately it all falls to pieces when I point out that "lucky to be alive" is actually what we like to call "a figure of speech".
But please don't feel bad, misunderstandings like these happen to pedants of all ages, we are human after all.
In all honesty, we here at Slashdot forgive you.