Is talking about our guns a good idea with big surveillance govt?

[Trent]

Is that comparable to a cray (maybe those are obsolete now) supercomputer as big as a city block cubed?

No, that's a standard 42U network rack, would fit in your average home closet. (Although you'd have to have some serious HVAC revisions and deliver 120 amps of power to the closet).

The servers & racks we build (highly available failover clusters) are based on Intel supercomputing hardware (we're an Intel Gold partner), but repurposed for smaller scale high performance clustering and highly available VM hosting for Fortune 500's. We have 64 physical XEON cores in each 2U server, with 512GB of RAM (upgradable to 2TB per 2U). Our limiting factor on rack density is (once again) not physical space but power delivery; I can only fit 4 full size PDU's in a rack, each handling 30 amps (120 total). Factoring in fault tolerance on the PDU's I can only have a maximum of 90 amps delivered to a rack - have to allow for a PDU failure without downtime. Each 2U compute cluster draws 11.93 amps at peak use, so we can only fit 5 of them in a rack and not exceed the power ratings (with assorted switches, etc).

We fill the rest of the rack with SAN's and $15,000 10gbps switches.

If you didn't understand any of that, your vision of a supercomputer (cray) that filled a warehouse 5 years ago can now fit in to a rack that's only about 2x4x6'. Our HPC tests on single racks exceed supercomputer ratings from less than a decade ago. If I had the money, filled a room with them, and could deliver the power, and keep it all cool and dry, we'd give modern supercomputer clusters a run for their money. Same exact technology in play.

EDIT: Although the Chinese are currently kicking our asses in HPC clusters...

 

[X-Rap]

I'm certainly not well versed in computers but I have a terrabite back up drive that isn't much larger than a box of rifle shells and I am willing to bet it could hold most of my lifes data on it. From that perspective it really doesn't take that much room to store the data of population of the US.
Even if it takes twice that space as technology increases it always gets smaller and faster and no one knows when it will stop.

 

[Certaindeaf]

.
If you didn't understand any of that, your vision of a supercomputer (cray) that filled a warehouse 5 years ago can now fit in to a rack that's only about 2x4x6'..

Wow, I had no idea of particulars .. really, then nor now. Very interesting.

 

[rdhood]

If they really want to "go after" 100 million firearms owners?

Yes they do. They just aren't going to do it all at once. They have to do it slowly enough to not incite the remaining gun owners into action.

 

[Certaindeaf]

ribbet

 

[rdhood]

BTW, why doesn't www.thehighroad.org supply an https connection? If the NSA is going to spy, we should at least make it a bit more difficult for them.

 

[brickeyee]

Is that comparable to a cray (maybe those are obsolete now) supercomputer as big as a city block cubed?

No CRAY was ever that large.

The CPU core was surprisingly small on every model.

They would never have achieved the speed they did with large propagation delays.

The entire thing has become sort of ridiculous.

CRAY computers and massive piles of interconnected smaller ones are only effective on problems that can be turned into massive parallel efforts.

Many problems are of this type, but a few remain sequential problems that only brute force speed can help attack.

 

[Certaindeaf]

No CRAY was ever that large..

I was recently made aware of that. I had also conceded that I was using a figure of speech.

 

[Trent]

No CRAY was ever that large.

The CPU core was surprisingly small on every model.

They would never have achieved the speed they did with large propagation delays.

Cray is still in business, they just finished Blue Waters in Champaign, Urbana. They had a live feed of them building it. Was pretty neat. Now it's operational;

https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/blue-waters;jsessionid=56BC2488914B13B44EFBE15B92CD4F21

Cray Inc. supplied the hardware: 22,640 Cray XE6 nodes and 3,072 Cray XK7 nodes that include NVIDIA graphics processor acceleration. The XE6 nodes boast 64 GB of memory per node and the XK7s have 32 GB of memory. Blue Waters' dedicated storage system includes 26 petabytes of useable online storage for quick access while jobs are running and 380 petabytes of usable nearline tape storage for longer term data storage. For complete system details, see the System Summary.

The system fills 200,000 sq. foot of space. A pic of a modern Cray...

The entire thing has become sort of ridiculous.

CRAY computers and massive piles of interconnected smaller ones are only effective on problems that can be turned into massive parallel efforts.

Many problems are of this type, but a few remain sequential problems that only brute force speed can help attack.

Cray computers (in modern form) ARE massive piles of interconnected ones. (See photo above)

The racks I build are, individually, more powerful than the Cray racks. However, they do not have the same interconnect structure and can't be scaled as large. Our racks are built for hosting virtual severs; each of the racks I build can service approx 2,500 Windows or Linux servers. Hosting virtual machines fit the "parallel" side of the equation, so we use the same supercomputer hardware as high performance compute clusters; just with FAR more disk access speed and memory. (My racks each have 4 to 8 times the total memory capacity of an equivalent CRAY rack, and integrated redundant storage specific to that rack).

Back to the point at hand; any one of those Cray racks, or any of the racks I build, could *easily* scan the egress internet traffic of an entire large datacenter or Internet backbone.

One rack.

Storage is obviously the bigger issue. But the storage capacity of the NSA Utah datacenter is rumored to be measured in zetabytes, perhaps even a yottabyte.

EDIT: Term declaration:

1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte. (typical computer workstation)
1,000 terabytes is a petabyte.
1,000 petabytes is an exabyte.
1,000 exabytes is a zettabyte.
1,000 zettabytes is a yottabyte.

Or, roughly translated, the NSA will have enough storage space to securely store the contents of at least 1,000,000,000 (one BILLION) personal computers.

 

[Certaindeaf]

If we didn't talk about guns it would be pretty lame and boring. I once listened to some gals go on about darning socks or whatall that they yammer on about. I just buy new socks.