All Systems Go For Highest Altitude Supercomputer 36
An anonymous reader writes "One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world has now been fully installed and tested at its remote, high altitude site in the Andes of northern Chile. It's a critical part of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most elaborate ground-based astronomical telescope in history. The special-purpose ALMA correlator has over 134 million processors and performs up to 17 quadrillion operations per second, a speed comparable to the fastest general-purpose supercomputer in operation today."
and (Score:2, Funny)
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Better question: Why doesn't it have a touch screen? A computer isn't "modern" without a touch screen
WTF is wrong with you?
Everybody knows touchscreens don't want to be vertical!
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And you've got to be high to want to use one.
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No, because it would be a shame to have a blue screen of death rendered in .00001 ms
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WTF, Ballmer?
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was it running windows 8 ?
"was it running windows 8 ?"
Bad question. You are not allowed to defile people with disabilities, in most countries.
For me, running Wndows 8 equates you have some retardation. This is my understanding of it.
I may be wrong, but no-one has ever contested that with any medical proof.
Put it to use (Score:3)
It's so fast, we could point it at Tau Ceti and count all the Vulcan pointy ears in 8.56 seconds!
Cosmic Rays (Score:3)
How does that bode for cosmic rays?
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ECC memory should address concerns about cosmic rays well enough, and is bog down standard.
Almost (Score:1)
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Almost as good as my Beowulf cluster of raspberry pis.
Much better :)
Name that hardware (Score:3)
Re:Name that hardware (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.haystack.mit.edu/ast/uvlbi/mm/talks/RLacasse_NRAO-ALMA2.pdf
Bit of details about it. The comment that this is as fast as a general purpose supercomputer is totally out of context. This is doing fast sums and correlations (DSP) using FPGA technology. When a general purpose system is measured in the PetaFlops (ie: Linpack) it is doing much more sophisticated calculations and this really isn't comparing apples to apples at all. A lot of hyperbole in the comment about "performance." No question this is a spectacular piece of engineering and the custom board & FPGA work is very cool, but the LHC has filters and realtime compute facilities that are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than this. (I'm not putting this down, just trying to relate it to something else out there).
Supplementary O2 (Score:3)
I noticed in the pictures that the techs have to wear O2 backpacks with nasal cannulas because the air is so thin at that altitude. I wonder how that affects hardware cooling, since the air is less dense and thus cannot remove as much heat from the hardware.
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
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They could try to take advantage of these mini tornadoes [slashdot.org] for both the airflow and the energy that it creates. Talk about serendipity!
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Ray Kurzweil was right... (Score:3)
Re:Ray Kurzweil was right... (Score:4, Funny)
Why did you climb the mountain oh Super Computer?
Because I can, man... Well, that and latency is a bitch, or I'd have telecommuted to work.
cosmic rays (Score:1)
It could be interesting, as a side benefit, if this helps provide more data on single event upsets due to the higher influx of cosmic rays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset
How about sky or space? (Score:2)
Do any space probes carry what qualifies as a supercomputer? Those are rather higher in altitude than any mountaintop.
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Computers on space probes barely qualify as computers, by modern standards. They're limited to slow old hardware that has been proven against radiation, and can run at achingly low power levels. Raspberry-Pi is probably faster.
If someone could come up with a modern-speed chip that was equally radiation proof, it would revolutionise space-probes and rovers.
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"barely qualify". nonsense, the definition of a computer hasn't changed. Computers of 70 years ago are still computers. The four bit microprocessor Intel made that showed up in the first generation of electronic calculators is still a computer. In fact, the analog computer circuits of 80 years ago are still computers, taking information input, transforming it, and giving an information output.
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Yes, well done you for missing the point.
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9 billion names of god. (Score:2)
The supercomputer is intended to calculate all the possible names of God. After which the purpose of the universe is ended, and God can sort of wind things up.
As the Mayans predicted.