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Hardware

Distributed Computing Economics 130

Posted by simoniker from the get-your-flops-cheap dept.
machaut writes "In a ClusterComputing.org article, Jim Gray, director of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Lab, provides an interesting economic analysis for building distributed systems. When do you choose a grid over a cluster or a supercomputer? When does it pay off to move a task to the data vs moving the data to the task? He takes current hardware and networking costs into account to answer those questions."
Games

Building A Homemade Chess Supercomputer 282

Posted by simoniker from the chess-or-gta-dilemma dept.
nado writes "There's a new article on Chessbase.com which has GM John Nunn showing you his chess-orientated PC upgrade to a double Xeon system, with some Fritz benchmarks." Elsewhere in the article, John Nunn discusses the unique computer needs for chess computation: "One of the problems with currently available processors is that they are not particularly well suited to the integer calculations used for chess. A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
Hardware

SAPAC Unveils New Australian Supercomputer 227

Posted by CowboyNeal from the big-iron-from-down-under dept.
Sean Burford writes "The South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) has unveiled its new AU$1.7 Million supercomputer named Hydra. It is an IBM 1350 Linux cluster with 126 compute nodes (xSeries 335), 1 head node (xSeries 335), 1 storage node (xSeries 345) and 1 managment node (xSeries 345). Hydra has a peak theoretical performance of 1.2 Teraflops, and has currently benchmarked at 682 Gigaflops. The current benchmark places it in the fastest three supercomputers in Australia and equivalent to the current number 80 in the world. The cluster has a total of 258 2.4Ghz Intel Xeon processors and 258GB of RAM. SAPAC expects to achieve a benchmark closer to 700 Gigaflops with further tuning. Hydra is hosted at The University Of Adelaide, who already host a 40 node cluster of Sun e420 machines."
Technology

Can Your PC Become Neurotic? 336

Posted by michael from the lobotomy-may-be-required dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "This article starts with a quote from Douglas Adams: 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.' It is true that machines are becoming more complex and 'intelligent' everyday. Does this mean that they can exhibit unpredictable behavior like HAL, the supercomputer in '2001: A Space Odyssey'? Do we have to fear our PCs? A recent book by Thomas M. Georges, 'Digital Soul: Intelligent Machines and Human Values,' explains how our machines can develop neurosis and what kind of therapy exist. Check this column for a summary or read this highly recommended article from Darwin Magazine for more details."
It's funny. Laugh.

Family Tech Support 860

Posted by michael from the blood-is-thicker-than-water-cooling dept.
Donald Scott sends in this short yet resonant tale about doing tech support... for your family.
Wireless Networking

Using Visible Light for Data Transfer 351

Posted by chrisd from the look-at-the-pretty-lights dept.
James Evans writes "Wired has an article about a New Zealand company which has developed a technology to transmit data at speeds up to 400Mbps up to 4km. They are working to have it more resistant to changes in weather, as well as increasing the distance. It has a number of advantages, including lack of federal regulation of the spectrum, as it is of course, visible light."
The Internet

98% of DNS Queries at the Root Level are Unnecessary 435

Posted by michael from the internet-would-be-fine-if-it-weren't-for-users dept.
LEPP writes "Scientists at the San Diego Supercomputer Centerfound that 98% of the DNS queries at the root level are unnecessary. This doesn't even take into account the 99.9% of web pages suck or are unnecessary anyways. This means that the remaining 2% of necessary DNS queries are probably not necessary either."
News

India's Bargain Supercomputer 372

Posted by timothy from the just-weather-predictions dept.
MaximusTheGreat writes "India beat U.S. supercomputer sanctions by building a teraflop $5 million PARAM Padma supercomputer, which is half the price of similar computers being sold in the international market. It can be scaled upto 16 teraflops, on a build-to-order basis For comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. is about 10 Teraflops. Some techical details and more info on CDAC , ITworld, Economic times and Asia Times. Also, India has been exporting older model PARAM 10000s to other countries like Russia, Canada, Germany etc. for some time, and expects to increase exports significantly with the new model PARAM Padma."
Security

SDSC Secure Syslog 100

Posted by michael from the footprints-in-the-snow dept.
Wee writes "I saw this morning that the San Diego Supercomputer Center has released Secure Syslog, a replacement for the standard Linux/UNIX syslog daemon they've been working on for some time. It adds security and performance features (modular design, highly scalable), while retaining backwards compatibility. According to their announcement, it is the first syslog implementation to target "syslog-reliable" (RFC 3195) functionality and it is the first syslog targeted at very high performance and forensically-sound auditing. It's currently under the UC's "free for non-commercial use" license, but they are looking at moving to a completely open license (BSD-style licensing was mentioned). If you have high-traffic systems and you need reliable syslogging, this might be a worth a look. Those needing syslogging over TCP/BEEP, sockets, etc as well as UDP might also want to check it out."
Silicon Graphics

SGI NUMAflex Linux System On Display @ SC2002 149

Posted by Hemos from the creating-the-memory dept.
jarrod.smith writes " According to SGI will unveil its Intel® Itanium® 2 NUMAflex shared-memory supercomputer architecture (which runs Linux as its OS) at Supercomputing 2002 which runs this week in Baltimore, MD. The link at SGI says the system will be on display at the show. The exhibit floor opens this evening. Unfortunately I did not go this year. Can those lucky enough to be at the meeting scope it out and post comments?"
Technology

Supercomputer To Use Optical Router 174

Posted by timothy from the is-the-computer dept.
Izmunuti writes "From a NYTimes article: 'Highlighting a radical departure in the design of the fastest computers, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology plans to announce on Monday that it will use an optical router designed by a Texas company as the heart of a campus-wide supercomputer that will be woven together with optical fibers.'"
Privacy

The Pentagon Wants Your Secrets 540

Posted by timothy from the and-they-want-them-now dept.
Teknogeek was one of the many readers to point out today's New York Times report on what one submitter dubbed "Son of Carnivore." "This should scare you: Vice Admiral John Poindexter wants to create a supercomputer capable of hunting through electronic databases all over the world, looking for suspected terrorists. According to the article, Poindexter outlines a need to '"break down the stovepipes' that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.'" Update: 11/10 16:15 GMT by T : Here's an updated link to the (no-registration) Arizona Star. Update: 11/24 17:42 GMT by T : Thanks to expiring links, here's another updated link to the NYTimes story.
Science

Most Powerful Computer in Canada - for a Day 254

Posted by timothy from the fleeting-fame dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On Nov. 4, 18 Canadian universities and will create the most powerful computer in Canada for a day to solve an important computational chemistry question in one day -- a task that would normally take six years to complete." Here is more information on the temporary supercomputer available at the project's home page and at UofG's News.
IBM

IBM Wants CPU Time To Be A Metered Utility 565

Posted by timothy from the from-my-cold-dead-fingers dept.
kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"
Mandriva

Mandrake Announces Turn-Key Clustering Distribution 187

Posted by timothy from the clic-and-run dept.
joestar writes "According to their website, Mandrake and partners (Bull, INPG/INRIA...) have launched an 'easy-to-deploy easy-to-use Linux Clustering solution,' that has already been tested on a 40-node cluster. Of course, it's published under the GPL, comes with parallel applications, and is available for download as an ISO. It seems the project is financed by French government. It's great because I've always dreamed of having my own supercomputer at home."
News

Canada to Launch Countrywide Virtual SuperComputer 195

Posted by chrisd from the even-quebec-will-be-involved dept.
LadyCatra writes "A serious shortage of world-class computing power in Canada prompted University of Alberta scientists to create the next best thing -- a countrywide, virtual supercomputer. On Nov. 4, thousands of computers from research centres across the country will be strung together by a U of A effort to create the most powerful computer in this country. The full story is here"
Linux

LinuxBIOS, BProc-Based Supercomputer For LANL 189

Posted by timothy from the yeah-but-what-about-the-neon-lights dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LANL will be receiving a 1024 node (2048 processor) LinuxBIOS/BProc based supercomputer late this year. The story is at this location. This system is unique in Linux cluster terms due to no disks on compute nodes, using LinuxBIOS and Beoboot to accomplish booting, and BProc for job startup and management. It is officially known as the Science Appliance, but is affectionately known as Pink to the team that is building much of it."
Space

A Telescope The Size Of The Earth 66

Posted by timothy from the why-not-even-bigger dept.
Neil Blender writes "From this article: "Astronomers have fashioned an Earth-sized virtual radio telescope that can distinguish celestial features 3,000 times smaller than the those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The device, which uses atomic clocks and a custom supercomputer to link together radio dishes on three continents, is the most powerful radio observatory ever, according to scientists." Some parts of the custom supercomputer use linux and IDE RAID."
Hardware

Playstation 3 CPU Almost Finished? 435

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-polys-means-more-grand-theft-auto dept.
dnxthx writes "According to this ZDNet article the design of the Playstation 3 chip is nearly complete. The PS3 chip will have near "supercomputer capabilities" --- including 1 TFLOP. Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."

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