New computation science centre
Jul. 16th, 2008 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylMonday's press release from DIUS mentions that fifty million pounds is to be spent on a new computational sciences centre at Daresbury, presumably to compensate for the eventual decommissioning of HPCx. And while it looks like a big chunk of the cash is going to go on a new building — the STFC page on the new centre makes this explicit — it seems reasonable to suppose that at least some of the left overs might be spent on some new iron.
And if there is money to be spent on machinery, it might be worth pondering how it might be spent because something like an SX-9 might suit actually suit them rather well. Sure, big vector is a dead technology walking, but it would give them a big shiny USP and make them unique in among the UK scientific centres. But Cray, on the other hand, might well be out of luck because it seems to me unlikely that another centre would want — or would be able, politically at least — to justify the cost of duplicating part of the HECToR facility. IBM, I suppose, are a possibility, although they may suffer because their systems are unlikely to sufficiently different to HPCx to catch the imagination.
The likes of Dell, HP etc might get lucky, but again, I suspect that these putative PC vendors are likely to suffer from their lack of uniqueness. These days, it seems as though every university has some sort of clustered system, which — excellent machines though they may well be — would seem to tarnish their appeal for a national centre that wants to stand out from the crowd.
All of this is, of course, speculation from a position of staggering ignorance, but it's still fun to imagine that vector may still rise again. Who knows, if the new Hartree Centre building takes long enough, they might just find themselves perfectly placed to buy up a glut of reconditioned SX-8s — only one careful lady owner, a full logbook and maintenance history, and, perhaps, GFS v1 thrown in for free...
So perhaps vector might ride out onto the field once again. And perhaps, by the time they've finished building their new building, they might find the market flooded with reconditioned SX-8 nodes — one careful owner, full log book, maintenance history, a nice rust free chassis and GFS v1 thrown in for free...
And if there is money to be spent on machinery, it might be worth pondering how it might be spent because something like an SX-9 might suit actually suit them rather well. Sure, big vector is a dead technology walking, but it would give them a big shiny USP and make them unique in among the UK scientific centres. But Cray, on the other hand, might well be out of luck because it seems to me unlikely that another centre would want — or would be able, politically at least — to justify the cost of duplicating part of the HECToR facility. IBM, I suppose, are a possibility, although they may suffer because their systems are unlikely to sufficiently different to HPCx to catch the imagination.
The likes of Dell, HP etc might get lucky, but again, I suspect that these putative PC vendors are likely to suffer from their lack of uniqueness. These days, it seems as though every university has some sort of clustered system, which — excellent machines though they may well be — would seem to tarnish their appeal for a national centre that wants to stand out from the crowd.
All of this is, of course, speculation from a position of staggering ignorance, but it's still fun to imagine that vector may still rise again. Who knows, if the new Hartree Centre building takes long enough, they might just find themselves perfectly placed to buy up a glut of reconditioned SX-8s — only one careful lady owner, a full logbook and maintenance history, and, perhaps, GFS v1 thrown in for free...
So perhaps vector might ride out onto the field once again. And perhaps, by the time they've finished building their new building, they might find the market flooded with reconditioned SX-8 nodes — one careful owner, full log book, maintenance history, a nice rust free chassis and GFS v1 thrown in for free...
