What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M? 158
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy said today it will spend $32 million on a project that will deploy a large cloud computing test bed with thousands of Intel Nehalem CPU cores and explore commercial offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Ultimately, the project, known as Magellan, will look at cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient way for scientists to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines, including analysis of scientific data sets in biology, climate change and physics, the DOE stated. Magellan will explore whether cloud computing can help meet the overwhelming demand for scientific computing. Although computation is an increasingly important tool for scientific discovery, and DOE operates some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, not all research applications require such massive computing power. The number of scientists who would benefit from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources, the DEO stated."
I assume this doesn't just include the cloud . . . (Score:2, Funny)
Large Magellanic Cloud (Score:5, Funny)
Just call it the Large Magellanic Cloud
oh oh (Score:2, Funny)
"The number of scientists who would benefit from mid-range computing far exceeds the amount of available resources, the DEO stated."
This sounds like one of those far-fetched statements that more realistically would be answered as "eleventy-billion."
Wrong question. (Score:2)
As with many multi-million research grants, it looks less like valuable research and more like a handout.
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Frankly I`m just suprised that the US government has a whole department dedicated to wasting energy.
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I don't follow. Handouts are good. We are in a liquidity trap. We have massive unemployment and a 0% interest rate. Perhaps cloud computing isn't what we should spend money on. However, the $32 million those people get for building cloud computing will very likely be spent on what those people should spend money on. Until we can raise interest rates (due to improved employment), you are either pro-government spending on crap like this, or you are a gold bug. And if you are a gold bug, you should *still* be
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I don't follow. Handouts are good. We are in a liquidity trap.
I've never heard the term "liquidity trap" before, but yes, we do need the government to pump more money into the economy.
However, there are much more effective ways, such as improving infrastructure (see 1930s and the building projects). More jobs are created for the same amount of cash (although lower salaries as they are blue color; still means less people filing unemployment). Less money is spent on products made overseas (you make your concrete locally, but those server parts are coming from Asia)
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Clearly we should do those things first. However, those things being a better expenditure do not make this thing a bad expenditure.
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Pretty much right. Although there doesn't really need to be an ordering in time: dump money in infrastructure, public beautification projects, scientific research, social services, education.
It all is net positive while inflation remains low. Some people (mostly the rich) will always complain that "their" tax dollars are being wasted, but the real waste is that skilled workers deskill (e.g. accountants cooking their own meals, or plumbers darning their socks.) The economy is not a zero sum game.
Re:Wrong question. (Score:4, Insightful)
The right question is who cares when the NSA is spending $2 billion [nybooks.com] just on the structure for a building (1 million square feet big) to house computers which will do who knows what for signals intelligence. Not to mention another facility in San Antonio being built which will be the size of the Alomodome.
Let's not care about that but nitpick over something ~1% the size and far less destructive to our liberties.
Re:Wrong question. (Score:5, Funny)
They have to have somewhere to park the black helicopters
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It's a question that from my interpretation of the article is valid but off-base.
They are not spending 32M on *using* a cloud. They are spending 32M to *build* a cloud. That is why they specified "thousands of nehalem processors" ... they would have no knowledge of the underlying hardware if they were just talking about buying time on an existing cloud.
I could easily spend 32M on building my own cloud. Actually that wouldn't even build a very big cloud... at consumer prices (which we all know they wouldn
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This is the DoE - how about Mushroom Cloud computing?
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Re:It's Mushroom Cloud Research, not computer clou (Score:2)
Here's a DOE Lab site [sandia.gov]. Fargin' Iceholes!
Government Spending (Score:5, Informative)
You know, usually I'm against most government spending programs. They tend to be a huge waste.
But this... It sounds interesting and could actually benefit basic research- something this country sorely needs to support. My (perhaps incorrect) observation is that some groups like the DOE and DARPA tend to allocate funds to valuable research projects rather than pissing money away on terrible administrative database implementations. I guess I should keep in mind that the majority of DOE funding is used to build and maintain our nuclear weapons fleet.
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Actually this is very reasonable. They are building their own cloud instead of maintaining many departmental clusters.
The cost is to build their own cloud that can managed and probably secured.
That is why it costs so much.
Re:Government Spending (Score:4, Insightful)
The DOE and DARPA (and others) are huge users of HPC (high performance computing) applications. The have a vested interest in having the state of the art advance in parallel computing and so they tend to provide lots of research grants to fund that. They also routinely let outsiders use some of their computing facilities for the same reason (not all of their labs do classified work). There are many computing facilities that need enormous computing power as shown on the Top 500 list. [top500.org] But they are seeing that there are times where researchers need computational power, but not at such a large scale and not for long periods of time. If medium powered computational facilities could be made available to researchers cheaply and quickly, they would be widely used.
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Your right on being against government spending programs. In fact, everything outside of maintaining national defense, diplomacy, and a few other well defined functions of federal (not national) government, are done so poorly that continuing to dump money into them is the definition of insanity. In fact, our Federal government is so bad at doing things its not suppose to do... that it cannot even do them within the frame of directly collected tax revenue (see deficit spending). For example, if we cut Social
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And when will everyone wake up and realize that the government isn't granted authority by the constitution it is RESTRICTED by the constitution. I.e People are not granted free speech, the government is not supposed to make a law restricting speech etc. Thus the government is allowed to do everything except what the constitution prevents it from doing.
I will now take this time to promote my agenda. Every gun law is unconstitutional. Thanks.
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You are definitely in the minority w/ that interpretation of intent. If your interpretation was indeed correct, they could have saved a lot of ink by just leaving out all clauses but 3 and 18 in Article 1, Section 8.
Sadly in practice you're correct.
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And when will everyone wake up and realize that the government isn't granted authority by the constitution it is RESTRICTED by the constitution.
Actually, the constitution both grants and restricts the government. Congress has the authority to pass laws because the constitution grants it. The President is the commander-in-chief because the constitution grants him that authority. The constitution also restricts the scope of these powers by drawing (often vague) boundaries around those powers.
Whether individuals are granted freedoms by the constitution is often a controversial statement. When people get nominated by the Supreme Court, they are oft
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I'm not complaining about the vagueness. I think it is necessary to keep up with the times. But there are many people who are very concerned about the extent to which the Commerce Clause, for example, has been stretched in the past. I suspect that our current Federal Government is much larger than most of our founding fathers would have imagined. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but Libertarians and the Ron Paul branch of the Republican party certainly do. The vagueness in the constitution
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When people get nominated by the Supreme Court, they are often asked if they believe there is a "right to privacy". If you think rights are granted by the constitution, then you kind of have to say no because it clearly does not say that.
By the same logic, this hypothetical justice nominee would have to say "no" to the question "is there a right to free speech?" Because the Constitution does not say that.
However "right to free speech" is just the affirmative way of saying "Congress shall make no law abrid
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funny, you were SO close.
The 2nd amendment is about the federal government can, and in the case can not do.
Meaning no where in the constitution is their a provision forcing the states to allow a right to bear arms. (amendment 10)
When taken i historical context, the 2nd admendment is even relevant anymore sice we are no longer afraid of standing armies, and have a nation guard.
That said I believe in gun ownership,and I also think a waiting period is a good thing.
If they simulate nuclear reactions... (Score:5, Funny)
...would that be mushroom cloud computing?
$32 million? (Score:5, Insightful)
With that much money they could get a quarter of an F-22 fighter jet! How dare they spend it on research?
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correction:
documented somewhere
should be:
documented no where.
"The $700 billion it is going to cost to reform health care is "not important" according to the democrats."
no democrat has said that. they have said it will pay for itself. And from reading the bills, it looks like it will.
"I really wish people would pick apart all of government spending as critically as this tiny drop in the bucket."
I have, and do. it's not nearly as basd as people think, in act it's a hell of a lot better then private industry.
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I find it amusing that your solution to peace is to have bigger weapons and to fire them first, regardless of whether the "combatant" is perceived or actually there.
"What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M?" (Score:3, Insightful)
The kind where the company who receives the contract is located in a particular Representative's district.
Salary (Score:2)
I imagine a large portion of that cost are salaries.
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Obviously you don't work for the U.S. Government or one of its contractors...
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The trouble with supercomputing (Score:2)
The trouble with supercomputing is that, if you have to share the thing, you don't need it.
Supercomputers are worth the trouble if there are applications that need hours or days of time. But if you have many users sharing the thing, it's a waste. Price/performance tends to be maximized towards the upper end of mainstream machines. Supercomputers, with their custom hardware, tend to have lower price/performance than commodity machines. That's why web farms are made of commodity hardware.
Depends on the problem (Score:2)
There are problems which really need high memory bandwidth and don't fit on smaller-than-super computers, so a time slice on a supercomputer can be worth far more than full-time access to dedicated fast conventional computers. But those problems become less and less common as regular computers get bigger and faster - your laptop probably has a graphics processor that's faster than a Cray-2 by now...
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You are misinformed.
Most computer use, whether at a single workstation or a supercomputer cluster, is extremely bursty. A given user wants rapid turnaround for any particular computation, but otherwise leaves the system completely idle.
This condition explains the success of consortia like TeraGrid and WestGrid which make vast computational resources available to a large user population. Those users could no
Cloud Computing Joke (Score:2, Funny)
What's the bright side of cloud computing?
When the cloud goes down, it's a bright and sunny day.
$32,000,000... (Score:3, Insightful)
... sounds like a walk in the park compared to their other spending. I think that number is off by a factor of 100 or so.
In contrast, my small city (~40,000 people) in central Canada is spending ~$56,000,000 on a new Multiplex/Sports center. Supposed to have a new hockey rink, curling rinks, soccer area's with artificial turf.
I'd my city council spend it on a Cloud Computing Centre.
Re:$32,000,000... (Score:4, Funny)
I'd my city council spend it on a Cloud Computing Centre.
And schools to [intentionally left blank] how to use verbs in sentences.
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Hey, be nice... I'd my city, and accidentally all over the how to what too!
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Not that basic research isn't a great thing, but a sports center, properly funded and located, generates income and doesn't need to be recycled every 3-4 years.
But I bet you'll find cheaper hot dogs at the Cloud Computing Center. Or centre.
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How much will the small city get from the center?
That's the question. It's not how much money they spend it's what value does it have compared to the money.
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How much will the small city get from the center?
That's the question. It's not how much money they spend it's what value does it have compared to the money.
Virtually nothing.
There is a much larger city 65km (40 miles) away that has much more to offer in terms of facilities and services.
Our new facility will not be able to accommodate any type of concerts, so they'll go to the other city... that also has the airport (next closest is 225km away).
Just seems like a waste of money. We do need a new Hockey and Curling facility (but have many outdoor soccer facilities). I think our council could trim some bulk off that $56 million and put it towards other things.
Oh,
Imagine (Score:2)
Beowulf cluster of....
Oh, wait...
Never mind.
Extra cost of materials (Score:2)
Is not cloud (Score:2)
How about Air Traffic Control? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Thanks for inventing distributed computing.
BOINC? (Score:2)
What cloud project costs 32 M$? (Score:2)
Easy: the one where you are building the cloud.
Makes sense to me!
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Exactly.
cloudy? (Score:2)
As the saying goes: keep your feet on the ground instead of your head in the clouds.
Every cloud has a silver lining... (Score:2)
What Kind of Cloud Computing Project Costs $32M? (Score:2)
One that includes Microsoft
Costs (Score:2)
What kind? The kind that requires a building that sits on land and is full of hardware.
$32 million isn't that much when you consider that.
Here is an estimate for an empty 80000 square foot office building with no contents and no land. ~$12 million.
http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/rsmeans/models/offices3/ [reedconstructiondata.com]
Not that much, actually... (Score:2)
32M sounds like a giant chunk of change, but, its not even what gets spent on FireFox each year.
You figure a 50 man team of senior devs for a year, and I think that would pretty much do it.
What a stupid post title. (Score:2)
'what kind of cloud computing project costs $32 mil' it says.
hell. even the bare costs of the number of servers that would be required to run a cloud of that size would amount to a goodly portion of that $32 mil. EVEN if you buy them in bulk. thats leaving out everything else including the datacenter setup, software, administrators, engineers, the team to create the project.
doh. i suppose cloud computing comes free, in the universe the article poster lives in.
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You mean, what kind of [random project variable needing the levels of accountability and ass-covering that only $32m can provide] project costs less than $32m?
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Perhaps DOE thinks this their private stimulus package.
Still, when all the screaming and whining is over and Microsoft has fired promoted the guilty at Danger, can it still be said that 32Million would have been too costly?
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The DOE stated.
Re:In socialist America (Score:5, Insightful)
and remember, kids: this thread was brought to you by a 40-year-old DARPA project.
Re:In socialist America (Score:5, Insightful)
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send the check to 1 Lenin rd., Stalingrad, RU 82317.
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Disturbingly, as I read this right now, it's marked "(Score: 2, Informative)"
Where's the "+1: Too Much Informative" mod when you need it?
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No, socialism does not make the military industrial complex weaker.
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not resorting to violence => inability to do so => weakness
i suppose this is a logical conclusion from the following way of thinking:
strength => ability to blow to smithereens anyone, anywhere => desire to do so incessantly
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i like the way you think:
not resorting to violence => inability to do so => weakness
You clearly have no idea how I think.
I am against American militarism. What I just said was that socialism doesn't fix that problem. The Nazi's were of course also socialists. I didn't even argue against socialism, which may be a good idea in other regards, I just said that it doesn't fix the militarism/fascism problem.
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Maybe I read your first post backwards too, sorry.
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The Nazis were nationalist, corporatists and social darwinists - fascists. They called themselves socialists - national socialist - but their chief ideological enemy was communist socialism. The Nazis were much closer to fascists than socialists.
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You all still think the earth is less than 10,000 years old though, right?
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Plus the thousands of other reasonable-sounding government funded projects that cost less than a dollar per taxpayer...
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The difference is those projects usually cost less than a dollar year after year, forever. This one would cost less than a dollar once. Then it would be funded privately.
I'd imagine it'll take 3 to 5 centuries to match 6 months of just of one's personal vice habits, ala Starbucks, Cigs, Booze, etc.
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Can I have $.21 from you? Just once, I promise. And no-one else is going to want the same, I assure you.
This is the same reasoning that allows $x.99 to be such a successful marketing ploy. Have you ever heard the phrase nickel and dimed to death? [reference.com]
Re:In socialist America (Score:5, Insightful)
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I (and the many generations after me) get something useful in return.
That's the real caveat, isn't it? Things like Social Security were great for a few generations, but before long you'll have to be above the average lifespan to collect because it is going broke. Never mind the fact that that single program alone accounts for about 1/3 of the US deficit. Think about that for a minute - you have to be 65 to collect, and the average life span is in the upper 70's. It's 1/3 of our national debt, yet it will only cover a little more than 1/10th the average citizen's lifetime
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Re:In socialist America (Score:5, Informative)
It is NOT going broke. That's a myth thats been perpetrated since it's inception.
I remember when I was a teen, it was supposed to ahve been completly over whelmed by 85, then 2000, now it's 2015.
Read up nio the works of the peple that actually study it. It need MINOR adjustment from time to time but it
s not going to collapse.
Well over 99% of all federal project succeed, on time and within budget, and with less waste.
Failed projects do not equal waste.
"the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million,"
for a project this size? you clearly have no experience building out systems.
We are tlaking about thousands of systems, and good ones not POS bottom of the line Dell's.
You need to pay for the infrastructure. Back bone, racks buildings and other sunk costs.
(Are you lumping this into administrative?)
Now we need people. They are using linux, so probably 1 fte per 200 machines.
Then system design.
Quite frankly, this is a good price for what they nede to do.
Maybe there will be 'cost over runs'. Over runs are often do to provider cost changes. Contract where something is delivered years after the beginning often have a clause to allow more money to cover those costs. I am talking about hard costs, cabling, concrete, etc . . .
The bidest example is rock. The price of rock can be volatile, so it's not uncommon to see bids where they amount paid in the contract is adjusted to cover the providers cost. If you don't do this, bids would be nearly impossible.
"It happens all the time."
no, but the bias is that it does because the 10,000 times it doesn't happen no one says anything.
I was in the private sector for a great many years, in the few years I've been in the public sector o have been constantly amazed at the tight book keeping, the amount of knowledge people have, the accountability, the incredibly high skill set.
Turns out there are very smart, dedicated and qualified people who take a government job becasue they are tired of not having a life.
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This is the best summary of project costs I've read. It applies, as the author said, to private as well as public projects.
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Actually if you understood why SSA is going broke it isn't because of a funding it is because politicaians can't let money sit for time until it's needed.
Basically every up until recently the SSA had been making massive amounts of profits compared to what is paid out. However at the end of the year instead of putting that money safely into a bank account for the next generation to actually use the USA government claimed the money and wrote an IOU to the SSA for said money. our politicians then spent said
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"Never mind the fact that that single program alone accounts for about 1/3 of the US deficit."
Not true. in 2010, SS will add $10B to the deficit. The deficit is projected to be above $1T, resulting in SS being 1%, not 33% as you claim, of the US deficit.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h6BfoloJOnV0TeI7eIHC1ZWuBxygD9AVLTVO0
"Think about that for a minute - you have to be 65 to collect, and the average life span is in the upper 70's"
Average life span is a tricky measure. Many people die as
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As far as this particular project, the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million, it will probably cost $5-10 million to design the system, which is justifiable, and then the other $21 million are all administrative costs. Then the project will over-run when the people running the project change their minds halfway through (and then again change their minds back, or just to something completely different), causing the engineering costs to skyrocket, which in turn causes the administrative costs to skyrocket. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this $32 million project ends up costing $70 million. It happens all the time.
The article was pretty weak in info, but $32mil should get you more than $1mil in equipment. Actually, if this is truly could computing you are buying X number of cpu years and Y number of petabytes worth of diskspace with a guarantee of that X will be delivered and that Y will be of some assurance against failure.
Cloud computing is just a segue to computing as a service. Think of it in terms of power, phone, etc. You pay by the use in some manner or another and billed accordingly.
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Except that they are building their own cloud, not buying cloud infrastructure from a supplier like Amazon. They can then offer scientists time and space (arf) on their own cloud in the same way that Amazon do with the public but without any of the issues of releasing their data onto the internet.
Besides, there are multiple definitions of "cloud computing", and your example is just one of them. Another popular one at the moment is massively parallel data processing systems with huge amounts of storage (i.e.
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Think about that for a minute - you have to be 65 to collect, and the average life span is in the upper 70's.
Average life span has been increasing for a while now, and society will adapt. The idea of social security was never to enable people to spend the last 15 years of their life living on benefits. When the 65 years age limit was introduced, the average life span for a man was only a couple of years above that. What will happen now is that the retirement age will gradually increase, and we are probably going to see a unified male and female age of 70 years old by 2025.
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The question to ask then would be "Does the average lifespan increase, have a corresponding increase in span a person is capable of working?" If people live til 90 on average, but are decrepit at 65, what then?
At least I'm curious if the able to work span increases the same as the life span.
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The average life span in the US is likely to actually start dropping soon because obesity has been steadily increasing and there are many obesity-related or obesity-aggravated diseases (heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.) that will work to kill off people early. Life expectancy is climbing partly based on health improvements due to lower smoking rates. Fewer unwanted babies due to legalization of abortion is probably also a factor (they would be more likely to be poorly cared for, often lead
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The solution to Social Security is actually very simple. A number of other countries have already done it, including the one I live in. It's just not an idea which would be tremendously popular in the US, and especially not with Libertarians.
Here in Australia, we have mandatory superannuation(that is to say your employer is required to contribute a certain percentage of your wage to a retirement fund of your choice) and the old aged pension(our equivalent of Social Security) is means tested. Rich enough tha
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Not really. Pretty much all the big cloud computing companies build on open source, not just because it is cheaper, but because it is also better suited for the task / more adaptable.
The application software for big science related calculations isn't exactly off the shelf either, most of it is custom made.
Once you put together this kind of project, you can also hire some developers to build a software that runs on it, and are no longer restricted by home / small business development / deployment barriers.
SETI vs. Top500 supercomputing (Score:2, Redundant)
SETI works on what gets described in the trade as "embarrassingly parallel" problems - supercomputers deal with stuff that's harder to get good parallel speedup without throwing fancy hardware at it. DOE problems are often somewhere in between, and unfortunately the boinc/seti/screensaver approach to ad-hoc supercomputing isn't always good for applications like LINPAK, so it's hard to compare the real computing power. However, if you ignore that (:-), most of the top computers in the Top500 list are doing
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BOINC doesn't work so well if the tasks need to download 10-20 GB of data and the actual applications running the job take up another 10GB of space and the jobs run full out on a system for 2-3 days while consuming 2GB of memory.
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Wow! you totally nailed the joke!
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