Japan's New Supercomputing Toy 190
deman1985 writes "As reported by UPI, Japan has unveiled their fastest supercomputer yet. Assembled from Hitachi and IBM components, the new system sports total performance around 59 trillion calculations per second and comes at a cool 5-year lease price of $30 million. Pictures of the beast can be found at Mainichi Daily News."
Re:Yes.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Shit. That's my life right now, and trust me...it ain't good times...
Then again, maybe a few years down the road, when I have a shit job, married to a total bitch, living off of ramen, and still play games till the wee hours in the morning, I'll be able to reflect and think, "yeah...good times...good times..."
Wow. That just made me even more depressed.
*SIGH*
Re:What's happened to the moderation system??? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least for this thread, I'd say its not the moderation system failing, there just isn't anyone with anything intelligent to say posting anything.
Slashdot posters seem to be the thing cratering.
Articles on IBM throwing together another giant collection of CPU's for someone with money to burn really aren't very interesting anymore either. If it was an absolute record that would be something but this system is already behind similar IBM systems already in U.S. labs. If it was a revolutionary new architecture that would be something but this isn't.
Governments somehow seem to think they can garner prestige by assembling these white elephants that tend to be obsolete before a 5 year lease is up. Me personally I think they should be focusing more on developing new and interesting software that does useful things on somewhat smaller and more practical systems. Well done and useful software has a lot longer lifespan than thousands of CPU's that will be obsolete in a couple years.
I'm sure climate modelling, molecular modelling, CFD etc. might find a good home on this machine but the machines themselves just really aren't that newsworthy any more except to the IBM marketing department and the governments engaged in the penis size contest.