[Beowulf] Re: vectors vs. loops

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Hello,

I knew someone from the LOFAR project would react.

You guys very specifically were NOT targetted by my posting here. 
You did do a brilliant job, as you can see in all the postings at different
dutch forums from me.

In fact you have built a machine in Netherlands for what was it, 6 million
euro, delivering roughly 27.5 tflop. 

That's more than 2 times cheaper than the 2.2 tflop machine in Amsterdam,
which was serving users at 1 januari 2004. 

btw now i have the chance to ask this:
I read a report somewhere that the total LOFAR budget was 150 million euro,
where do those other 144 million euro go to?

Best regards,
Vincent

At 11:38 PM 5/4/2005 +0200, Toon Moene wrote:
>Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>> If for example a scientist or director writes that a machine must for
>> example have a blue color, then you know they will sign with ibm, whatever
>> they ask, and so does IBM know.
>
>I am sorry for intervening in this Jerry Springer show of HPC, but this 
>is not true.
>
>I am the Dutch Representative on the Technical Advisory Committee of the 
>European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (www.ecmwf.int).  In 
>2002, there was a real threat that IBM would take over the complete 
>array of computational gear at ECMWF - the supercomputer, the 
>workstations of the researchers and the storage stuff (tape robots and 
>such).
>
>Contracts were worded such that it would remain easy to dis-entangle 
>this mess and make ECMWF independent of this single provider.
>
>The IBM staff recognised this danger itself and proposed remedies.
>
>Disclaimer: The Dutch National Weather Service (KNMI) does not use IBM 
>equipment for its own computations to a significant amount.  We don't 
>need to - there's sufficient competition from others.
>
>We *will* use the LOFAR BlueGene/L machine (www.lofar.org) for research, 
>though - it's hard to resist free machine time; we've plenty of things 
>we want to find out given unlimited resources :-)
>
>[ As an aside, GCC vectorises our code nicely - 4.0.0 ]
>
>-- 
>Toon Moene - e-mail: toon at moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phone: +31 346 214290
>Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
>A maintainer of GNU Fortran 95: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/
>News on GNU Fortran 95: http://gfortran.org/
>
>