Saudi Arabia Begins To Realize Supercomputer Ambitions 191
An anonymous reader writes "Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system."
from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.
Re:from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Not odd if you've ever been to a Saudi university. They'll spend millions on this so they can say they have it, then it'll just sit there using electricity and being used to play Tetris.
Re:from TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Al-Ghaslan said the system will be used by researchers for a wide range of computational work in life and physical sciences, as well as in high performance-computing research, to improve the performance of code on systems of this type.
And all scientists but us computer geeks want tons of computational power - talk to any biologist or physicist and they always moan about how long their projects take. Every research institution should have access to a high-performance computing lab, so this is possibly a good thing.
;-)
Although, bomb simulations also come under the heading of "research"
Too bad they didn't address the basics first (Score:2, Insightful)
Like letting women drive and hold jobs, or letting men listen to music. The only purpose of a country is to treat its citizens right, and technological achievements do not mean zip if they are not applied for that purpose.
Re:Supercomputing's Top Systems (Score:2, Insightful)
There is, if you like windows.
Re:from TFA (Score:1, Insightful)
Computer geeks know how to code and don't need big computers.
Biologist and physicist don't know how to code and need big computers.
Coincidence? I think not.
Re:from TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Except many computational physicists do in fact know how to code, and their stuff still requires big computers.
What do you think they're doing, running COBOL on them? The lattice QCD code that I've seen is all in C. (Maybe you can teach them how to code? It's GPL, after all...)
There are legitimate scientific uses of that many cycles.
Re:I once sold software to Saudi Arabia (Score:1, Insightful)
At one of the conferences I attended here in Beirut, the chair of the department of pathology at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Riyadh (I think his name was Fouad Al Dayel) one of the top SA hospitals was asked about their hospital system and how much it costs. He answered without a blink, Cerner for $ 50 Mil.
I then noticed that these people would never accept to fund research for any software development in SA or other universities; if they pay a couple a mil per yr, they may have something at least for the smaller hospitals few yrs later.
Almost all Arab countries (especially the oil rich ones) are only consumers. They even refuse to invest in anything other than their luxury and BIGGER stuff...
Off this topic, what worries me is that with this oil price surge the money donated by the gov and by individuals for religious stuff- Zakat (religious i.e. including "fundamentalists = terrorism") will increase exponentially.
Re:Simulating... (Score:4, Insightful)
But this is their typical reaction. They buy something expensive, that looks good. Then they let it rot.
A fool and his money ...
Amazed! (Score:1, Insightful)
I am amazed to see this coming out from Saudi Arabia...
I am also amazed to see slashdot to put a terrorism tag with an academic endeavour...
On one side we put blame on saudis, about not having simple human rights. (like women can't drive cars etc).}
But are we any better than saudi govt. by labeling an educational activity as terrorism?
Re:Simulating... (Score:3, Insightful)
What would Muslims need a supercomputer to simulate?
Lol! Shows what you know.
Those bomb simulations you linked to are not about making bombs - they are about being able to avoid live tests of current stocks. [wikipedia.org] I.E. they don't really simulate explosions of different bomb desings, they simulate the effect of time passing on the stockpiles of bombs that the US already has.
Without the big computers they would need to explode a bomb or two every couple of years in order to verify that the remaining warheads are still functional and within specifications, which is not only nasty business in general, but would be a violation of international treaties. These supercomputers were actually a key part of the passage of those treaties back in 1992.
Besides, you don't need a supercomputer to design a bomb, the first few were done with pencil and paper after all.
Re:from TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't you think you are reading too much into this statement? It surely does not mean that they did not study previous research, only that since previous research has not been carried in a particular institution they do not have psychological inhibitions of overcoming bad legacy.
The fact that Newton who said famously Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident did not stand on the shoulders of his biological father, does not mean he did not stand on the shoulders of his scientific fathers.
Re:Simulating... (Score:1, Insightful)
The "House of Saud" are *NOT* real Muslims. Have you not been paying attention?
Re:Search for the hidden peace message (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:from TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, I'm not a muslim (to paraphrase George Carlin, I used to be a christian until I reached the age of reason;), but I haven't found that much war-mongering in the Quran. Or at least in the translated copy of it that I still own. It seemed not much better or worse than the Bible, to be honest. I wish more people would actually read the damned thing before going on a mindless bashing spree based on rumours they heard from some idiot on TV... and which also hasn't actually read it.
Yes, it contains a few things which can be taken out of context and used as justification for blowing shit up. Same as our Bible does too. You can find inciting to slavery, war crimes, rape, murder, and almost anything else if you want to take certain verses from the Bible literally as God's commandment as to what you should do.
I mean, just as a random example, in Numbers, the Lord through Moses commands no less than complete genocide (including killing the women and children of the Midianites), with the exception being the virgin women... to be taken basically as slaves and distributed to the jewish men. I.e., way I understand it, nice way to add rape to slavery. You know, 'cause if you started the list with mass-murdering civillians, killing children and slavery, it would be a shame to not add rape to it too. They go well together, ya know?
That's the kind of punishment a loving and kind Lord wishes upon those of another religion, who end up spreading their religion to the Lord's flock. The "sin" of the Midianites was merely that some Jews married their women, and some of those Jews ended up converting to their wives' religion. And for causing that "corruption", every single man and non-virgin woman, even "among the little ones" had to be put to the sword. In fact, Moses is annoyed that the soldiers didn't kill the midian women and chidren in the first place. I mean, duh, it should have been obvious.
I could go on and give more examples, but let's just say: that's the kind of thing that's right there in the Bible. So if you want to split hairs and go "see, religion X incites to violence", you have equally good verses in the Bible. That's your kernel of truth.
But do christians or christianity as a whole actually act that way? No, I don't think I've seen any people who think we should, say, go mass-murder India because some Christians joined a new-age Guru and converted to some eastern tantric stuff. I mean, it'd the direct equivalent of what the people of Midian did in the Bible, no? We don't actually do what those verses say. Most people don't even think about them.
Same with the Quran, way I see it. Yes, it contains _some_ verses which can be considered an incitation to violence. And a few groups of nutters actually do. Most of the Muslims don't.