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Re: [News] [Linux] Sun Microsystems Goes Head-to-head with Linux on Supercomputers

Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> ____/ Mark Kent on Wednesday 27 June 2007 15:09 : \____
> 
>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>> Sun's new supercomputer and switch are bigger than yours
>>> 
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>| Sun has teamed with the Texas Advanced Computing Centre (TACC) in Austin to
>>>| build the first "Constellation" system. The box dubbed "Ranger" is a Linux
>>>| cluster with a peak performance in excess of 420 trillion floating point
>>>| operations per second. The system is packed with 1.7PB of disk storage, and
>>>| when finalised, will have 105TB of memory. The setup will take about 3
>>>| megawatts of power to run.
>>> `----
>>> 
>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/sun_constellation_supercomputer/
>>> 
>>> They give Linux/Solaris choice. They'll need to compete with non-Sun
>>> hardware, which might be hard. Big Blue has just set a possible record.
>>> 
>> 
>> The particular issue I would raise about this would be the power
>> consumption;  is it anything to be shouting about how /much/ power
>> you're using?  I'd like to see a little more consideration of global
>> warming in these kinds of things.  The UK is currently undergoing the
>> worst summer floods on record at the moment, and it looks like getting
>> worse.
> 
> IBM not only claimed this to be the fastest computer, but also the most
> power-efficient one (IIRC). I suppose that with greater power available,
> however, comes greed for more power to be devoured. As Microsoft said (quite
> ironically it was them), human greed known no bounds. They actually talked
> about somebody else -- a bunch of lawyers.
> 
> I can't recall how much datacentres consumption has grown since 2001 (I blogged
> about it a couple of months back), but this was scary. These football
> field-sized datacentres that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google set up have got a lot
> of effort duplicated and their input almost exceeds that of... well, pretty
> much anything that's /vital/. I remember reading about jet 'pollution', which
> overall equates to that of all PCs combined. Makes you rethink long travel
> journeys, doesn't it?
> 

Long-distance travel is a major issue, for sure.  I do a lot of it for
my job, but I do consider very hard every time, and look at all the
different possibilities in order to get the most effective travel
approach.

Our datacentres are being migrated onto the most low-power stuff we can
find, and I'm migrating both home and my school onto low-power stuff,
too.  We haven't got very long to save the ice-cap!

-- 
| Mark Kent   --   mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk          |
| Cola faq:  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/   |
| Cola trolls:  http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/                        |
| My (new) blog:  http://www.thereisnomagic.org                        |

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