A Look Inside the NCSA 89
Peter Kern writes "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the great supercomputing facilities in the world and is home to 'Abe', one of the top 10 supercomputers on the current Top 500 list. TG Daily recently toured the facility and published a stunning report about their computing capabilities (more than 140 teraflops), power requirements (a sustained 1.7 megawatts), enormous 20-ft chillers in four cooling systems and other installations that keep the NCSA online."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
3 and they could be #1 in the world
And you can power 711 of them with one Mr Fusion! [wikipedia.org]
Tm
BlueGene/L (Score:1)
DIY Beowulf (Score:2)
I sometimes toy with the idea of going to the various used computer stores, buying a pallet of used computers and making my very own Beowulf cluster. I've seen pallets of fast P3 and low-end P4 boxes at interesting prices. Boeing Surplus [boeing.com] have large numbers of essentially identical computers almost every time I go there. I remember once looking through a big bin for a particular size wrench and grumbling to the sales person "Surely there is something bolted to a 747 with these size bolts!" They laughed...
T
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
You can run Vista, with most of the features turned off.
Cause of Global Warming (Score:5, Funny)
That's a lot of number crunching (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Job requirements... (Score:3, Interesting)
Really contemplating computing power like they describe is a pretty far out exercise for a small time programmer like me... What sort of people get employed at these places?
Regards.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Job requirements... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and being able to think on your feet, the ability to communicate with engineers and scientists, and being very organized and able to work independently doesn't hurt either.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Printable Link - All in one page (Score:2)
My prediction is that in 10 years the place will be functionally obsolete as a result of processing advancements elsewhere.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In 10 years, this will be on the desktop, everyone will yawn because we have been boiled frogs and it won't impress us then. In 10 years, you'll look at someones tie clasp computer and say, "Wow, I remember when that took up an 8 by 18 block of my desk."
In 10 years, DARPA will announce the shut down of the Quantum Computing Project because it will be discovered that every time Red Hat Mandriva Winux OS/Q green screens, a parallel universe winks out of existance.
In 10 years, they'll slap wheels on your gra
Re: (Score:2)
NCSA has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time more. Your prediction is based on the assumption that the systems at NCSA are static, which is completely untrue. If the government decides to start up a mega-super-quantum-ultra-computing project, NCSA is pretty high on the list of places that are going to get the grant.
Re: (Score:2)
I did actually RTFA and see that they have several generations of hardware in use as they continually upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
Piffle. There will be a new version of Windows by then. That will eat up at least 50% of this new processing power.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you expect this to ever happen? When it comes to modeling the behavior of physical systems, whether it's the weather and climate or molecular structure, I don't think there is a limit to processing "needs". More power just means you can run more models, or more accurate models, or bigger models. I'm not sure why you would expect that to change.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm an undergrad assistant sysadmin and a programmer for a department here at UIUC. As a sysadmin, one of my primary responsibilities is maintaining and running our 41-node Linux cluster and the associated mass storage system. As a programmer, I'm responsible for hacking on a climate model that will be a rather big deal once it works, due to it running a very fine resolution model of the global system.
Something I've noticed is that once a professor has gotten done modeling something, the immediate respo
Fire Protection System (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Uhm, go back and RTFA. No Halon system is used, a standard water sprinkler system is used. However, the one failsafe noted was that a smoke detector also had to activate in addtion to the heat fusible link in the sprinkler heads before torrents of water were released. So, you need both an indication of smoke AND excessive heat for things to start getting wet.
Re: (Score:1)
the water isn't getting pumped all over the motherboards of these computers or something drastic like that. What they mean is that they keep super-chilled water on hand at all times.
Nope, they mean that if there's a fire, they're dumping tonnes of water directly onto the computer cabinets that are burning... Once the computer's on fire, water can't hurt it much further...
This is a pre-action water system and they're becoming more popular in computer rooms now that Halon is falling out of favor. They start out dry (uncharged), then if smoke/heat is detected (or other combinations of pre-action's) they charge with water, but still don't 'go off'. Then, when a fire below a sprinkle
Re: (Score:2)
Both a smoke alarm, and then each individual sprinkler head has a thermal link that must melt before activating.
With a 24/7/365 control room, so yes, they have a chance to shut things down.
The idea that tripping a single sprinkler head will set them all off at once is hollywood fiction. They are set off one by one, when a fusible link burns out at the sprinkler head. Fancier heads can shut off once the hea
Deluge sprinklers (Score:2)
Just to be pedantic, such systems do exist. They're called "deluge sprinkler" systems. Like a pre-action system, the pipes are normally kept dry, until some external event triggers it. However, unlike a pre-action system, every sprinkler head is open, so once the water valve is opened, it immediately starts raining everywhere. Mainly used in places where any sign of fire warrants immediate drastic action,
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
/.ed already (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
UIUC FTW! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The lecture auditorium bites the big one though, purple seats? Nasty. The Seibel Center accross the mini-quad is a much more interesting building th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Check the math (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You might be forgetting the peak demand charge. If you work that into the equation ~$20 - $25 per kW at peak demand, or roughly $36,000 to $45,000 of their monthly bill, you start to get back down to $0.08kW-hr for energy costs. And don't forget this is a large non-interuptible customer, so they will pay premium rates because ComEd (or whoever there in East Central IL) can't take them offline on a hot day.
Re: (Score:2)
*Yawn*. (Score:2, Troll)
*Yawn*. Only impressive to the slashgeek with no real experience with heavy iron (I.E most of them.) When I was in the Navy and serving at a training center - we had also had two UPS's this size. For each trainer/lab. And we had four labs.
Just in the Weapons Training end of the building.
Cooling and power conditioning for the training facility was in a seperate 15k sq ft b
Re: (Score:2)
Articles like TFA always love to point out these systems - and they sound impressive to someone whose only experience is the desktop PC or small datacenter... But the reality is, they aren't anything rare or special. if you have the money you can order one of those huge UPS's just about as casually as you can pick its smaller b
It's not "the NCSA" (Score:1)
Re:It's not "the NCSA" (Score:4, Funny)
IllinoiS eh? (Score:2)
6 hour runs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they already do this, and the reporter didn't catch it. But it'd surprise me if they didn't have better solutions than just hoping nothing bad happens during a run.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Much of the software which is run at the NCSA is home-grown software written by computational scientists, not computer scientists.
I've seen code written by computational guys before. While not really terrible, it's not terribly re-usable or maintainable. Obviously these guys don't study computer science, but I truly think there's gains to be made if they understood the tool they were using better.
For many of these massively parallel codes, written on top of MPI, fault tolerance really isn't all th
Lustre at NCSA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Nerd porn (Score:2)
Thanks,
The Management
A look inside the NCSA? (Score:2)