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I don't get it. If materials modeling, drug discovery, seismology and atmospheric modeling sound "squishy" to you, what on Earth wouldn't be squishy? Most of t

by hugh3 15y ago

I don't get it. If materials modeling, drug discovery, seismology and atmospheric modeling sound "squishy" to you, what on Earth wouldn't be squishy? Most of those machines are shared between a bunch of researchers working on a bunch of different problems. There's some great stuff going on, some semi-great stuff going on, and probably some fairly useless stuff going on, too. I've used many of 'em myself. In terms of science done per dollar spent, big-arse supercomputers are certainly far more efficient than most publicly-funded research.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
Fair enough, non-squishy is the return on investment Amazon gets with AWS from its clusters. I don't really expect a monetary return on pure research (although it does happen) and I don't see a lot of papers rolling by in Science, Nature, or Xarchiv where the work required the use of one of the top 500. Nor do I see announcements from Pfizer or Merck saying "This new simulation allowed us to track down this drug in record time which treats condition X and because we're more efficient we can charge less for it and still make a huge profit." The shuttle CFD work that Ames did, came out with a lot of info on their use of the Cray super to do the modelling, that is an example of something I would expect to see. However, as others have pointed out you can get a machine that is close to that of a Cray 2 today off the shelf. Schlumberge has one doing oil field seismic analysis, I understand the value proposition there. But there are many many machines on the T500 list where I just wonder, "Ok why do they have that?"
- hugh3 15y ago
  I don't see a lot of papers rolling by in Science, Nature, or Xarchiv where the work required the use of one of the top 500 There are many papers in Science and Nature based on work from supercomputers. And if by Xarchiv you mean arXiv, the proportion is bloody huge. Just try searching for "NERSC" for instance and you'll find that NERSC alone leads to a zillion publications per year. there are many many machines on the T500 list where I just wonder, "Ok why do they have that?" And you take the fact that you personally don't know what they're being used for as evidence that they're not doing anything worthwhile? Most of these machines aren't used for one big project, they're used by hundreds of researchers for hundreds of small projects.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    "And you take the fact that you personally don't know what they're being used for as evidence that they're not doing anything worthwhile?" That was not what I said. Clearly some organization ponies up a few hundred million to build one of these systems and signs up to feed it power they think what ever it is doing is "worthwhile." I would love to understand that so I posed the question. I think I mentioned that I understand the NERSC vision, sharing super computers around for science. And yes, there are lots of citations about their facilities, and they have six such machines on their homepage [1]. My question is if you aren't a government or university, what value would you derive from having a supercomputer on the T500 list? (patio11's excellent response not withstanding). Off list someone pointed out that Boeing uses their computer for structural analysis of airplanes made of carbon fiber. That seems like a perfectly reasonable use, one plane like the 787 is probably 5 - 6B$ of sales over its life time. [1] http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/ http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/
    - hugh3 15y ago
      Well, there aren't that many computers on the top500 that aren't owned by a government or university. I'm too lazy to look through the whole 500, but just in the top 100 let me count. Airbus has one at 29. I think it's clear what they use that for. Vestas Windsystems in Denmark has number 53. Presumably they're optimizing their wind turbines. IBM has a couple, which they largely run like shared research facilities. And that's pretty much it for commercial research facilities in the top500.

by hugh3 15y ago

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Fair enough, non-squishy is the return on investment Amazon gets with AWS from its clusters. I don't really expect a monetary return on pure research (although it does happen) and I don't see a lot of papers rolling by in Science, Nature, or Xarchiv where the work required the use of one of the top 500. Nor do I see announcements from Pfizer or Merck saying "This new simulation allowed us to track down this drug in record time which treats condition X and because we're more efficient we can charge less for it and still make a huge profit." The shuttle CFD work that Ames did, came out with a lot of info on their use of the Cray super to do the modelling, that is an example of something I would expect to see. However, as others have pointed out you can get a machine that is close to that of a Cray 2 today off the shelf. Schlumberge has one doing oil field seismic analysis, I understand the value proposition there. But there are many many machines on the T500 list where I just wonder, "Ok why do they have that?"

hugh3 15y ago
I don't see a lot of papers rolling by in Science, Nature, or Xarchiv where the work required the use of one of the top 500 There are many papers in Science and Nature based on work from supercomputers. And if by Xarchiv you mean arXiv, the proportion is bloody huge. Just try searching for "NERSC" for instance and you'll find that NERSC alone leads to a zillion publications per year. there are many many machines on the T500 list where I just wonder, "Ok why do they have that?" And you take the fact that you personally don't know what they're being used for as evidence that they're not doing anything worthwhile? Most of these machines aren't used for one big project, they're used by hundreds of researchers for hundreds of small projects.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  "And you take the fact that you personally don't know what they're being used for as evidence that they're not doing anything worthwhile?" That was not what I said. Clearly some organization ponies up a few hundred million to build one of these systems and signs up to feed it power they think what ever it is doing is "worthwhile." I would love to understand that so I posed the question. I think I mentioned that I understand the NERSC vision, sharing super computers around for science. And yes, there are lots of citations about their facilities, and they have six such machines on their homepage [1]. My question is if you aren't a government or university, what value would you derive from having a supercomputer on the T500 list? (patio11's excellent response not withstanding). Off list someone pointed out that Boeing uses their computer for structural analysis of airplanes made of carbon fiber. That seems like a perfectly reasonable use, one plane like the 787 is probably 5 - 6B$ of sales over its life time. [1] http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/ http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Well, there aren't that many computers on the top500 that aren't owned by a government or university. I'm too lazy to look through the whole 500, but just in the top 100 let me count. Airbus has one at 29. I think it's clear what they use that for. Vestas Windsystems in Denmark has number 53. Presumably they're optimizing their wind turbines. IBM has a couple, which they largely run like shared research facilities. And that's pretty much it for commercial research facilities in the top500.