NSF Announces Supercomputer Grant Winners

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."

Re:Are these machines actually used?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he uses surprisingly little jargon, considering how much stuff he COULD have thrown in there. (QCD even has its own custom-built supercomputers - see QCDOC) Then there are specific algorithms, approaches, etc. All in all, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about and summed it up pretty well, unsurprisingly since he's a grad student in the field, it seems. ... And he's right, the solution is big fucking computers. :)

A single bulldozer is a serial device.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

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 loan which was used to purchase the bulldozers], while waiting in endlessly long lines until it's time for their turn [finally!] to take a whack at the pile of rocks, and so that

C) The inefficiencies of B) aren't so great that it's actually counterproductive to have introduced the extra bulldozers in the first place.