Los Alamos Fire Idles NSA Supercomputer

ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing time on Cielo, according to Associated Press." Update: 06/30 14:48 GMT by S : As readers have pointed out, this article refers to the National Nuclear Security Administration, not the National Security Agency. Summary updated to reflect that.

typo

[shentino]

It's Agency, not Administration

Re:

[shentino]

It was a typo, they just fixed it.

Re:

[shentino]

They still misspelled NSA. Whether they got the right agency or not is another issue altogether.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[228e2]

Probably, but they did put a link to NSA in the summary.

Re:typo

[shentino]

Yup.

I just checked on Cielo, and apparently it is the NNSA that operates it, and not the NSA.

So they're wrong on two levels, one for misspelling NSA, and two for using the wrong agency.

Ya I was wondering what was up

[Sycraft-fu]

There's no way the NSA lets their stuff go out to any other supercomputer, even one owned by the DoE. The NSA's institutional paranoia is legendary. Makes sense when you think about it, their mission is to safeguard critical US communications (government, financial and so on hence their participation in AES) and to do electronic intelligence gathering. Give that, one can understand how they get rather paranoid about informational security.

These big supercomputer are DoE (that is the NNSA's parent agency). T

Re:

[ygslash]

You're right. The AP article looks like it's wrong.

I was amazed by that little item they let slip in the middle of the article. It was the whole reason I posted this story - but it turns out to be just confusion of a clueless reporter. Ah, well. Sorry.

Re:

[ygslash]

It's Agency, not Administration

Thanks.

But actually, it's Administration: The National Nuclear Security Administration. It turns out that the author of this AP story was a little confused.

maybe its just me

[papasui]

but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.

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[Lord Lode]

You're not the only one.

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[jhoegl]

Yeah, it is a terrible headline.
I thought someone got fired until I remembered that Los Alamos is surrounded by fire.
Then, IDLE != shut down.
Be less terrible at your shock and Awe titles Slashdot.

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[Thanshin]

Maybe it's just me but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.

Lack of understanding by self amazes, abundant headline perspicuity found!

Re:

[jhoegl]

+ funny

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[ygslash]

maybe its just me, but I had to read that headline about 4x to understand it.

Yeah, sorry about that. Slashdot now has a very tight limit on the number of characters in a title, so it's tough to get in the point of the post. You've really got to pack it in.

We need to come up with a good compressed format for Slashdot titles.

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[RivenAleem]

Says the guy who uses "it would be helpful" instead of "it would help".

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[carpenoctem63141]

Use British Headlinese. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3148 [upenn.edu]

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[ygslash]

Use British Headlinese. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3148 [upenn.edu]

Indeed, that's what I used. And there's a precedent: This article [esperanto.ie] reports that the following headline actually appeared in a newspaper:

TEACHER STRIKES IDLE KIDS

lp0

[Anonymous Coward]

> WARNING: Job halted - lp0 on fire

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[Dunbal]

Get off my lawn! rofl haven't seen that one in a while. For the kids here, this is actually a valid system message...

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[Myrrh]

...says the guy with a six-digit UID. Get off my lawn.

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[Dunbal]

...says the guy with a six-digit UID.

It's not the size that counts...?

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[Myrrh]

Huh. I was fully expecting someone with a four-digit UID (or, perhaps even one of the rarely-seen three-digits) and bitchslap me. C'mon guys...

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[msk]

Get off my lawn, scrub.

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[DMUTPeregrine]

And for the kids who want an explanation, LP0 is line printer 0. When a line printer jams the friction can ignite the paper. This is bad, so a paper jam in a line printer gets a warning of what is probably happening.

SIGFIRE

[sourcerror]

Or SIGFIRE.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

From the BeOS Kernel Kit documentation:

double is_computer_on_fire(void)

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.

Wrong agency

[Anonymous Coward]

Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore all belong to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), _NOT_ the National Security Agency (NSA).

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[DrgnDancer]

Also, isn't Oak Ridge National Lab supposed to be part of that list? Or is it a different section of DOE?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Oak Ridge, and many other labs are part of a different section of the DOE, named the Office of Science.

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[LWATCDR]

Thanks I was going to post that I thought that they where DOE labs and not the NSA.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be fairly surprised, even if the NNSA has any interest in Tor, to see much effect...

Tor involves enough crypto-twiddling that it isn't quite as computationally trivial as static-content webserving; but on anything remotely resembling modern hardware it is still going to be bandwidth constrained, rather than limited by anything else.

A huge supercomputer at a site likely using IPs from a well-known and early allocated government block would be a lousy place to put it. What a hypothetical interested

Re:

[AHuxley]

cheap and annonymous 1Us colo-ed in various random places and/or cheapy VPS instances all being paid for by front companies with PO boxes and horribly forgettable names.
Yes http://cryptogon.com/?p=624 [cryptogon.com] had "High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity" on just that in 2007 :)

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[Net_fiend]

So...further checking reveals: - TFA states: National Security Administration instead of NISA (which was already noted earlier) which is more likely the actual Administration that is being stated in the article. - Still a long leap from /. assigning a new word to an Acronym that is notorious in the public eye. - Seeing as the NSA (National Security Agency) isn't even mentioned in TFA. A simple mistake? Probably.

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[Net_fiend]

Correction: NNSA not NISA.

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[bsDaemon]

Yes, It's the National Nuclear Security Administration that has a presence at those labs. That's not to say that the NSA isn't doing something there, but they're much less likely to make that public. NNSA is under the auspices of the Department of Energy, which one would assume, since those are DOE facilities, which are traditionally associated with nuclear research (especially Los Alamos). However, claiming that the NSA is down gets more page reads, doesn't it?

Link soup

[lancelet]

OK - this is one of those postings where I ask: which of the links is actually TFA?!

Re:

[antifoidulus]

The very last one, but even then it's not obvious as the headline is about airplanes fighting the fires, the computer stuff is mentioned in the 3rd paragraph or so.

Great, who's going to listen to my calls now?

[elrous0]

So now I won't have a witness to the fact that my girlfriend is being TOTALLY FUCKING UNREASONABLE when she calls me in the middle of an important design project meeting to complain about some store clerk being rude to her at the supermarket. Just great.

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[Coisiche]

Aside from the fact that it wasn't really the NSA (or maybe the DOE eavesdrop)...

Wouldn't the other people in the important design project meeting be witnesses so such a call? So which isn't real? The meeting or the girlfriend?

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[elrous0]

Only the NSA could witness, and presumably archive, *both sides* of the conversation. All the people in the meeting hear are "Excuse me, I have to take this" and then some muffled yelling from the hallway. Now there's no one to verify that she's being a total annoying bitch who can't seem to do even the simplest fucking thing without bugging me about it.

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[LWATCDR]

Yea right. Don't worry the NSA has enough recordings of you calling for Pizza delivery to your parents basement. Girlfriend and design product meeting. Now that is funny.

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[elrous0]

My mom *is* my girlfriend, you insensitive clod!

Cielo?

[Chordonblue]

I see a fire down the road
Burnin' out of control and I'm like,
Forget you... /Pity the fool that supercomputes with you...

The Labs are DOE not NSA

[Virtucon]

The Department of Energy operates the labs, not the NSA .

They also need to update their SSL Certificate... I went to go look at the Event Calendar at https://lanleventsext.lanl.gov/ [lanl.gov] off their main page to see if the Fire was a planned event and wouldn't you know, the Cert expired on 6/2/11.. Doh!

echelon down?

[datapharmer]

Is that why my phone calls stopped making that click noise?

Supercomputer left idle?

[black soap]

Keep it busy, or it may get bored, start looking around, and then before you know it we are in a kill all humans scenario.

Cielo means literally "heaven," but is also commonly translated as "sky."

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[cpghost]

An idle supercomputer means running a whole lot of endless loops in under 2 seconds each... in parallel!

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[black soap]

I set you up with a supercomputer called "sky," a Sky-computer if you will, potentially deciding to end human life, and that's what you come up with?

Idle computers should be fired.

[Camel Pilot]

Super or not if they are idle give them the boot... It sends a message to the rest of the computers that they may be next.

I read that as

[BigJClark]

I read that as "NSA fires idle supercomputer"

Too bad stupidcomputer, should have kept busy while the economy was slow!