Indiana University Dedicates Biggest College-Owned Supercomputer 83
Indiana University has replaced their supercomputer, Big Red, with a new system predictably named Big Red II. At the dedication HPC scientist Paul Messina said: "It's important that this is a university-owned resource. ... Here you have the opportunity to have your own faculty, staff and students get access with very little difficulty to this wonderful resource." From the article: "Big Red II is a Cray-built machine, which uses both GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes to deliver a petaflop -- or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second -- of max performance. Each of the 344 CPU nodes uses two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors, while the 676 GPU nodes use one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20."
Re:Dedication ceremony? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or it could be something completely innocent like cutting of tape and speeches and shit. You know the kind of stuff you do when you show your stakeholders what their money went to. Stop your idiotic religious babbling.
Re:Won't be long now... (Score:5, Insightful)
you must be new here.
Re:I have to question the wisdom of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Cloud computing is not appropriate for all types of research computing. Let's say you want to use Amazon's cloud offering, but you have a genomic and geospatial dataset of 60 TB. While not ubiquitous in research computing, it is not unheard of, especially in the fields of bioinformatics. The cost of storage and the cost of transfer will each away at whatever grant that is funding the research. This is a business decision. Does the cost of the computing resource and operation result in [ more grants / better faculty retention ] than not having it?
The cost-benefit analysis has been done, and while cloud computing has its place, there are additional costs that make it problematic. The cloud is not a panacea.
That said, in five years IU could very well be looking for its next big computer. The average lifespan of a supercomputer is 5-8 years. So, five years is on the early side of looking for the next big thing, but not outrageously so.
Disclaimer -- I run high speed data storage for a university. I've written acceptance test measures for high performance computing resources. I've done the cost-benefit analyses.
Re:Biggest? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be nice... (Score:4, Insightful)
...if this got as much attention in the local press as throwing a ball into a basket does.