Supercomputer capable of running entire Internet

Hostile17 said:
Edit: I obviously realize how careful we must be to give our freedoms away though and so the framework of how it could be regulated would have to be set up with lots of thought about possibility of the power being misused.
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All power corrupts and absolute power is actually pretty neat.

As proved in the US and UK recently, giving up freedoms doesn't stop anything, it merely restricts the average law abiding citizen and causes the people with nefarious schemes to find another way of doing what they want.
 
Kittyhawk will have up to 16,384 racks, providing a maximum of 67.1 million cores with 32 petabytes of memory.

Can you not buy this from the OcUk Ultima range already ?????
 
Sinque said:
Very simple question: Why?
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Because they can.

It's just a measure of power, nothing more.

If you said to a non-technical person "look, this computer has sixteen bajillion zigabytes of storage and one zillion flipflops", they'd look at you as if you had leprosy.

If you said "this computer is so awesome it could single-handedly run the entire internet", they'd be considerably more impressed.
 
Lamo said:
Kittyhawk will have up to 16,384 racks, providing a maximum of 67.1 million cores with 32 petabytes of memory.

Can you not buy this from the OcUk Ultima range already ?????
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If you had enough money you could. The definition of computer is actually kinda fuzzy anyway. You could claim that the folding@home computer is one the most powerful in the world, because it is made up thousands of processors all connected up and working together via the Internet. At what point do you say it is no longer a single computer and is actually multiple computers? It's not really a useful distinction.
 
Psyk said:
If you had enough money you could. The definition of computer is actually kinda fuzzy anyway. You could claim that the folding@home computer is one the most powerful in the world, because it is made up thousands of processors all connected up and working together via the Internet. At what point do you say it is no longer a single computer and is actually multiple computers? It's not really a useful distinction.
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It's quite an easy distinction actually. Folding@home is a distributed system which has to use a network to distribute workload across multiple machines. A supercomputer doesn't use an external network for internal processing operations and so is only one machine.

Burnsy
 
Butt said:
It's quite an easy distinction actually. Folding@home is a distributed system which has to use a network to distribute workload across multiple machines. A supercomputer doesn't use an external network for internal processing operations and so is only one machine.

Burnsy
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I don't see the distinction between an external network and an internal communication system, at least not in absolute terms. A supercomputer works by splitting up the workload between processors, that's how all parallel systems work. The only real difference is what it uses to allow the processors to communicate. I remember Ocuk had a "crunching machine" which was a bunch of motherboards connected via Ethernet.
 
Psyk said:
I don't see the distinction between an external network and an internal communication system, at least not in absolute terms. A supercomputer works by splitting up the workload between processors, that's how all parallel systems work. The only real difference is what it uses to allow the processors to communicate. I remember Ocuk had a "crunching machine" which was a bunch of motherboards connected via Ethernet.
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The architecture for an internal bus is a substantial enough distinction in itself. It may not seem much different when you take a high level conceptual view, but when you go down to the technicial implementation, it's very different.

Burnsy
 
Burnsy2026 said:
It's quite an easy distinction actually. Folding@home is a distributed system which has to use a network to distribute workload across multiple machines. A supercomputer doesn't use an external network for internal processing operations and so is only one machine.

Burnsy
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the Kittyhawk suggestion by IBM is also distributed.

You are wrong though anyway, many of the most powerful super computers are beowolf clusters.
 
Am I being thick, but isn't stuff like F@H run on nodes which would connect to Kittyhawk to access data anyway? I'm not big on the hardware side of stuff but that's how I'd see it. I don't see how F@H would really change too much
 
Burnsy2026 said:
The architecture for an internal bus is a substantial enough distinction in itself. It may not seem much different when you take a high level conceptual view, but when you go down to the technicial implementation, it's very different.

Burnsy
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Yes the technical implementations are very different. But when it comes down to it, it's just different ways to do the same thing.
 
The Interweb would go off every first Tuesday of the month, due to Windows Update requiring a reboot :(
 
surely if all the internet was controlled on one computer or controlled by one company or regulatory body or whatever, stuff like terrorist networks could/would get around it by setting up a separate network? and then they'd be completely separate from the governed internet, surely that's a bad thing.
 
I don't really get the point. It just sounds like a whole bunch of disks, and quite a few processors scattered all over the place that you can probably use for certain tasks, but even thats probably limited because with it being distributed everywhere, surely the data transmission rates and latency between the nodes will make it rubbish for proper supercomputer tasks like advance simulations, forcasting weather etc.
 
I don't care what anyone says hosting the all of the internets is impossible when you put into consideration all of the porn (which is like 40% of the interwebs) and file sharing which is like 37% (the rest is like shopping, forums, educational, adverts and pictures of people with sparta faces)

There are like a gazillion requests to porn related material every 10 seconds (movies, pics) I doubt any cpu could handle all of the porn ... ever!!

We could use it to fold or something maybe useful, with all them petahertz? and what about if computers become so powerful and cleaver they make thier own decisions and keep us humans as sex slaves? :(
 
Burnsy2026 said:
It's quite an easy distinction actually. Folding@home is a distributed system which has to use a network to distribute workload across multiple machines. A supercomputer doesn't use an external network for internal processing operations and so is only one machine.

Burnsy
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Define internal and external, plenty of supercomputers use infiniband networking internally to connect processing nodes and storage. Which is a switched fabric with more than a passing similarity to 10Gbit CX4.
 
Hostile17 said:
Pedophilia, Online Fraud, Terrorist networks, Piracy, hate sites etc would this not be worth destroying if we lost a little freedom? Besides who says we can't have an internet based constitution that is built upon interests of individuals rather than governments etc.
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or harmless things like online gambling... or whatever other "evils" the government wants to protect us against. :o

then once the internet is controllable wheres does it end? does it then start pandering to the uninformed cretins who want myspace etc banning because people in one area are committing suicide and so on
 
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