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The UK's Fastest Supercomputer
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jan 02, 2008 09:21 AM
from the hello-computer dept.
from the hello-computer dept.
bmsleight writes "The Guardian has a story on the HECToR, The largest supercomputer in the UK — around five times more powerful than its predecessor, HPCx, which is also at the University of Edinburgh. It measures up well internationally, sitting at 17 in the top500.org list of the most powerful computers in the world."
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UK commitment to science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UK commitment to science (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Darn ! (Score:2)
One can dream...
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Of course, if you ask a Scot, then most of the major technological advances of the 19th century were made north of the border and that proud heritage is alive and well today. Sassenachs may differ.
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And you may say "we here in the US have essentially dropped the ball on education and science funding for the past oh, six or seven years", but as a college graduate in engineering from (early in) that time frame, with younger siblings (my youngest is 11 years my junior) interested in education/scientific fields: one brother a pilot with a BS, one becoming a teacher, my sister studying to be a medical doctor and my youngest bro
Re:UK commitment to science (Score:4, Interesting)
but as a college graduate in engineering from (early in) that time frame,
You might have picked the right field for short term gains.
with younger siblings (my youngest is 11 years my junior) interested in education/scientific fields:
Things may be fixed by the time your siblings are interested, but it will take at least a decade to fix the damage that has been done to science and science funding over the past several years. In the early 90s we spent much effort funding science and education and encouraging students to go into these fields, only to pull the rug out from underneath them when it came time to have them get started becoming independent scientsts. I've been fortunate in terms of funding and worked hard to maintain our position, but many junior (and senior) scientists are very worried about their funding.
one brother a pilot with a BS,
Then both you and he should know what a mess our current domestic airline industry is and unless he is a pilot for Delta, he is not doing nearly as well as he used to before the airlines had to deal with the increased costs of security, delays due to insufficient infrastructure, fuel costs that have tripled, etc...etc...etc...
one becoming a teacher,
God bless them for going into such a low paying career. I briefly attempted teaching junior high school before returning to graduate school when I realized that even as little as a graduate student makes, it was still more than what a teacher makes. If we truly placed a value on our teachers, we would not have the lack of commitment to the profession in terms of requirements for standards and low pay.
my sister studying to be a medical doctor
I am a principal in a medical clinic where we have about a dozen docs, our own MRI and CT scanners and about 100 total employees. On top of that, I teach medical students and am involved in the selection of medical students at my university. I think that I can say with some authority that medicine in this country has changed and not for the better. Even worse, we have not made any progress over the last few years on fixing any of the inherent problems with providing medical services in this country and in fact, have accelerated the damage being done by further limiting our options. Your sister is heading into a profession that is horribly broken in the US and is in need or a dramatic overhaul. Hopefully she can be a part of the solution...
Hey, in fact, we are in such desperate need of physicians if you know a neurologist or a cardiologist that wants to joint our practice, send them my way. If we hire them, I'll cut you a check on the spot for $10,000. I am serious. There are rural places in this country where physicians are simply, almost impossible to find.
and my youngest brother still in high school, but very into science
Cool. As one in science, I would very much like to encourage him. But we need to fix things to enable us to continue to stay a leader.
- I'd have to disagree. I could go on and on
Because we live in a (mostly) free country, that of course is your prerogative. But ask anyone in the trenches of science and education and they would have to be honest with you and say how things are. From this scientists/educators perspective, we need to change our approach.
Parent
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I'm in Aerospace. The industry isn't going anywhere
I've been fortunate in terms of funding and worked hard to maintain our position, but many junior (and senior) scientists are very worried about their funding.
I'll grant you, I work in engineering more than the science fields, but I haven't encountered that. In fact the school I attended is looking to hire 5 more professors in the next 5 years, in the Mechanical Engineering department.
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17th isn't good enough (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK GDP is 5th in the world (nominal) or 6th in the world (purchasing power parity). If our best supercomputer is coming in at 17th, we aren't spending enough on research.
Not to belittle this project, of course, building the worlds 17th fastest supercomputer is an achievement in anyone's book - but it is a sign of where the UK government is weak.
Re:17th isn't good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
I would doubt for example you would have the same complaint if the UK had the 17-100 spots on the list.
It could very well be that the UK is spending a lot more on research, but does not like to spend it on large super computersm or even spends it partnering with facilities in other countries.
Parent
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If I do such, a quick googling finds the UK is 4th worldwide (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guiintl.htm). here [64.233.169.104] (this is a google cache link, to view a PDF as HTML) is a table showing it just above China as a percentage, but about 3/4 of the highest perce
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The metric for 'most powerful' also seems flawed. If you just count operations per second, then a large enough cluster of Linux PCs will appear 'more powerful' than any supercomputer, even if they are connected by UUCP over 2400 baud modems. Yet the supercomputer is much faster at most difficult computational tasks because it has faster connections between the nodes. The Linux cluster would only outperform it for drawin
top500 uses linpack to measure performance. (Score:3, Informative)
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I'm not convinced this is a logical conculsion. 11 of the faster computers are in the US, which is a much bigger, richer nation than the UK and very much a special case. So we're 6th out of the remaining countries, which seems fairly reasonable. Anyhow, a more meaningful measure of whether the UK is punching its weight might be somethin
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Nonsense. You build the computer that is as large as necessary to get the job done. I, for one, am sick of the HPC "mine is bigger" envy. You have N science to do, which requires X amount of computational resources. Buy something close to X. If that means you're 17 on the top500, so be it.
Disclaimer: I work in an HPC shop (which h
17th isn't bad (Score:5, Funny)
The British don't mind being at any number as long as the best French *whatever* is lower ranked - 19 in the case of the latest supercomputer list. Although they might be a little out of sorts that Spain is above them at 13.
Note: if you are British or have any British friends, the above is 'funny' or 'insightful', not 'flamebait' or 'troll'.
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Anyone that needs telling is clearly not British.
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But I'd say that recent rhetoric against France has been far more virulent from across the pond.
BTW, the 'old enemy' was traditionally the Catholic alliance of France AND Scotland. Although Spain and Germany have featured heavily too..
Anyway, we'll see how you gentlemen react when China and/or India builds a bigger one than yours. He who laughs last...
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You might, too, want to note that the University of Edinburgh has a very low percentage of Scots-born students and staff.
It wouldn't hurt you to also note that "Scotland" is a figment of your imagination. It's a collective delusion without any legal status or basis in current fact. While it was 400 years ago, today it's not a country, not a nation, not a state, -- merely a conve
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I keed, I keed, my French chooms.
The Spanish is More Powerful? (Score:2)
But does it know... (Score:3, Funny)
...the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything?
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http://hhgproject.org/entries/hactar.html [hhgproject.org]
Cray XT4 Supercomputer (Score:5, Informative)
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Not that this is a bad thing, nor is it a one-way thing (one of my English colleagues is off to a job in Chicago next week), but it illustrates that so much academic work at the top level is multi-national.
I wa
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But is the machine room it lives in called Hector's House? [davethewave.co.uk] Its instant nostalgia for any Brit kid in his or her late 30s/early 40s I reckon.
Top500 (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't this Top500 contest boil down to a matter of who has more money than the other?
I mean, at this stage, there isn't any real innovation in interconnect or processor or memory technology. It is mostly a matter of who has the money to buy thousands of these chips, cobble them together and supply enough money to keep the whole thing running.
If University of Edinburgh had thrice the money, they could cobble three Hectors together and then they would have had a system at least twice as powerful or may be only 50% more powerful (Whatvever the power gain is). Then they would end up higher on the list.
May be there should be some kind of constraints built in within the Top500 to encourage actual innovation as opposed to measuring the financial resources of an institution or a country.
Gallery link (Score:2, Informative)
But... (Score:2)
Gaaad, I feel so dirty now, I disgust myself.
Sweden's got #5 (Score:3, Interesting)
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Or it's doing calculations and optimizations about folkhemmet: how much money goes there and from where and why. That job does indeed need super computer :) On the more serious note, do you have any link to the site in question? I tried to quickly search for it from Google, but couldn't locate anything.
Thought are you sure that it isn't just used in something else? At-least here in Finland it has been spoken that our government has a software that they use to simulate what effects their financial and polic
The arrangement (Score:2, Interesting)
The CPUs are arranged in a Torus shape, according to here [hector.ac.uk]. I've seen a lot of these parallel computers with this shape. I can't think of how to make Google tell me this, so perhaps someone here could. What is it about the torus that makes it a good shape for this situation? Have other shapes been tried?
I have the feeling that an arrangement where the connectivity of vertices (CPUs) was distributed according to a power law (i.e. a few vertices with lots of edges, most with not many at all) would minimize t
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A torus shape gives you the easiest way to get a short point to point communications path. It's better than a fat tree or a straight mesh type topology.
The Cray XT3 and Xt4 systems us a X Y Z physical connection. So, X is along the rows and modules within a cabinet (width), Y is vertical within a Cabinet (height), and Z is between the rows (depth).
This works fairly well from a maintenance AND a performance view. You can get some other more esoteric structures built, but they have trade offs in performa
first of the gang to die (Score:2)
UK Builds Upon Auto Industry Experience (Score:2)
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Because .. (Score:2)
So they are stuck with taking a model of a bomb out of a virtual silo and seeing if it goes Bang! virtually [2]
[1] Your results may vary with the age, size and design of the weapon
[2] Your results *will* vary with the quality of the model, which is related to how fast you can run it.
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Does anyone know why increasingly powerful supercomputers are needed to ensure the safety of nuclear weapon stockpiles? Given that these are existing weapons which are (presumably) just sitting around in silos?
If the politicians don't like the results. They buy a faster computer and run it again until the get the results they like.
Except .. (Score:2)
So you need to transliterate the name with that damn awful reversal of the western 'R' glyph acting as a replacement the russian '' glyph.
So that would give you a russian transliteration of which is phonetically closer to 'nyes-to-ya'
Of course I am not a native russian speaker
damn Slashdot (Score:2)
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So it won't leak oil. But for all its power, it will perform like a family sedan.
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