J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Faustine wrote:
232.6 billion operations a second still looks fairly impressive to me.
~Faustine.
Cryptographically speaking, *yawn*.
Fairly impressive in that it's better than what I've got in my basement
right now. And for me, part of the appeal lies in the satisfaction of
putting something like that together entirely yourself out of components
other people considered worthless and discarded. Not to mention being able
to use it for whatever you want, whenever you want, without depending on
anyone else's machine: a wonderful blend of self-sufficiency, ingenuity and
megalomania, ha. Personally, I'd like to run problems through some
optimization and simulation software, do a little code-based qualitative
analysis, etc. without hogging resources somewhere else with all the old
wizards looking over my shoulder, tapping their feet. Tim made a lot of
great points about the drawbacks. Still, it's a nice toy, as someone here
characterized it.
Here's something you might find a little more interesting:
Linux supercomputing grid unveiled for science use
By TODD R. WEISS
The National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday announced a $53 million
project to connect a series of remotely located powerful computers into a
high-speed Linux supercomputer grid that could open vast new opportunities
for scientific and medical breakthroughs.
The project, to be funded by a three-year grant from the NSF, will be built
by the middle of next year, giving scientists and researchers access to
massive combined supercomputer power they have until now only dreamed
about.
Called the Distributed Terascale Facility, the project will link powerful
servers running Linux into a high-speed grid that will allow researchers to
use all the computing resources they need, regardless of where the servers
are located. At their disposal will be computing power of huge proportions,
with a total of 8.1 TFLOPS and the ability to perform 13.6-trillion
calculations per second. The grid will have storage of more than 450TB of
data through a high-speed optical network called a TeraGrid, which will
link computers and data at four academic research facilities in the U.S.
Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM will provide more than 1,000 IBM eServer Linux
clusters that will be running more than 3,300 of Intel Corp.'s upcoming
McKinley Itanium processors for the system, as well as IBM data storage
products and support services. Qwest Communications International Inc. in
Denver will provide a 40-gigabit high-speed network for the grid system,
which will be 16 times faster than what is available today.
The supercomputer grid will link the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications in Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center in California,
the Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago and the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena into a cohesive group of computers with
tremendous research potential, according to project organizers.
This is the first salvo in transforming how science and engineering
research is done in the world, said Dan Reed, the director of the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications.
The facility is expected to reach peak performance of 13.6 TFLOPS by April
2003, and will be used for a wide range of projects, including research
related to storm, climate and earthquake predictions; development of more-
efficient combustion engines; chemical and molecular factors in biology;
and physical, chemical and electrical properties of materials.
This facility will stretch the boundaries of high-performance computing
and give U.S. computer scientists and other researchers in all science and
engineering disciplines access to a critical new resource, said National
Science Board Chairman Eamon Kelly.
Eventually, similar grid computing systems are seen as having many uses for
business computing, according to proponents.
The announcement is the second related to grid computing this week. On
Monday, IBM announced that it's building a worldwide grid computing network
to tie together systems at its various data centers to combine their
computing power for customers. Users would pay for processing time on an as-
needed basis, similar to any other utility. IBM also said it's been chosen
by the British government to build a national grid for various universities
for collaborative scientific research.
The grid will be run using middleware being built under the open-source
Globus Project, a research initiative funded by various U.S. government
agencies. Globus software will allow servers and computers to be connected
into seamless networks that can be used together to conduct research and
other work.
Also involved in the project are cluster computing vendor Myricom Inc.,
software vendor Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
