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Iran Makes Mideast’s Best Supercomputer (and it runs on Linux!)Check this out! This is bad news for the Empire. Such computers can, of course, be used for weather research and forecasting, but more to the point, they are, among many other uses, exactly the kind of capability ones needs for air defense integration and (wink, wink) nuclear research (including, possible, explosion simulations). This also goes to show that, just had been the case with South African, the US embargo no Iran just made the country more self-sufficient (according to official Iranian reports they just produced their SECOND jet fighter) If this news is correct, I just can hear the sound of hair been torn out of their heads in various quarters in the USA and Israel :-)) Bookmark/Search this post with: 
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Will they use this for the betterment of mankind?
This is good news for mankind.
Along with the nuclear blast simulations, the Iranians will be able to calculate the length of winter. They will have the knowledge available to calculate Cormac McCarthy's time on "The Road".
Will they decide to join McCarthy?
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
I hope they give some source code back.
It's a start - although it must be one of the world's smallest supercomputers - even "small" supercomputers I've seen have >56GB DRAM and my colleagues use over 30TB of storage per year for data (compared to this supercomputer's 5.8TB total storage capacity). Then again, that computer's more than Australia's ever built (fortunately there's NEC, IBM, and Fujitsu to make up for that).
They have a long way to go yet before they can export their computers. I don't think anyone would be worried at this stage. As for bomb simulations - that really doesn't require much compute power at all by today's standards. Remember the Russians built and detonated the largest bomb ever (a fission-fusion-fission 'dirty bomb', but they disabled the final fission stage) at the time that their best computers wouldn't have been much better than a 1980's pocket calculator.
As for jet fighters - do they fly? They're certainly not easy to build; use the wrong alloys and you not only have bits breaking, you've got bits melting then failing. I've seen enough products from China to see that a lot of people think everything is in making a product look the same...
I just hope they use the machine for sensible things - we don't need anymore crappy "climate models" - the attack of this neo-astrology on science is bad enough as is.
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
its one thing to explode a device, its quite another to *simulate* such an explosion and that is what I was referring to. Also, do not underestimate Russian computers. For example, the Russian space shuttle Buran (which has been shelved due to money issues) did its first landing purely on computers without any human on board, something which NASA had rejected for its space shuttle as "impossible" due to IT limitations.
Motto: chown -R linux:GNU world
Distros: Debian, gNewSense
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
(quote)
... the Russian space shuttle Buran (which has been shelved due to money issues) did its first landing purely on computers without any human on board, something which NASA had rejected for its space shuttle as "impossible" due to IT limitations.
(end quote)
That just isn't true - by the late 1980s DoD/McDonnel-Douglas etc had successfully completed a complete autonomous takeoff-flight-landing of a large jet aircraft and the technology has only improved from there - so much so that there is currently talk in the aviation world about autonomous commercial jetliners. No need for a licensed pilot - redundant control systems will ensure that you don't even need an onboard geek to swap modules that failed in flight. Aircraft fitted with ILS-3 can land autonomously at airports that support ILS-3. All the fun is being taken out of piloting - now you just sit back, press a button, and the system can land you on a runway which you couldn't possibly perform a manual landing on because of poor visibility due to fog.
As for the US space shuttles - their electronics is late 1960s/early 1970s technology - it's not as if they can be refitted every year with the latest technology. Despite that, the flight is controlled by computers - the crew simply load the appropriate tape and press a button. Some control is given to the crew when docking in space. On landing the procedure is entirely automated again - but the astronauts get to flip a switch that puts out the landing gear. So the Buran system, assuming no assistance from the ground control segment, was pretty much the same as the US system except that the soviets decided the US system was pretty stupid in letting a human get involved at all in the control chain.
Where the US did fail was in the development of robotic supply ships - for whatever bizarre reason no work was done on this (or at least I don't know of any, but I don't even try to keep track of the space industry). The MIR was provisioned by autonomous spacecraft. The European Space Agency is nearing completion of the test and certification of the European autonomous supply vehicle which will supply the International Space Station. In the USA people are whining about the soviets and now the EU having this equipment and we've done nothing of the sort. The biggest conceptual advantage of the Buran over the US shuttle was that it did not have any main thrusters on the shuttle. Even US engineers widely acknowledged that having main thrusters on the shuttle was a dumb idea but that idea pushed ahead anyway. The (strange) reasoning was that the motor could be repaired and reused and this would save money. The tradeoff was that the shuttle comes in for a deadstick landing with the main rocket motors providing an awful lot of dead weight - but the numerous successful missions have shown that you can land safely with this dead weight anyway.
The Buran was earning a little money touring the globe as a curiosity piece until a hangar collapsed and destroyed the shuttle. Ironically it made more money on the ground than in space. The EU is likely to build a shuttle more similar to Buran than to the US shuttles.
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
An ILS-3 landing is indeed something quite common and I have seen my share of them sitting (as an observer) in a cockpit of a 747, but the kind of software challenge involved in landing the "gliding brick" (which a space shuttle in essence is) is something else. besides, on ILS-3 you do have a pilot sitting there and monitoring the three systems doing the actual job and he can decide what to do when one of them goes out of sync with the other two. that option is not there in the empty cockpit of a shuttle.
I fully agree that the shuttle design, or even the shuttle concept, are bizarre and that Buran can hardly be seen as a shining example of Russian engineering. all I am saying is that at the time the Buran had an IT feature which the Americans had deemed not doable. I could have used another example of that, such as the Shkvall torpedo which was based on a principle (supercavitation) which was well-known to the Americans but which the latter could not model and was thus deemed "impossible" or even the use of a passive electronically scanned phased array radar fighter jets.
Motto: chown -R linux:GNU world
Distros: Debian, gNewSense
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
But automation of the shuttle is NOT impossible. It was all automated - the crew pressing a button to lower the landing gear was a "feel-good" thing. The loading of tapes was also unnecessary; there were already mechanisms for doing that (just not built into the shuttle) - once again it is a matter of making the crew feel like they're of some importance in the flight. The pilots are fly-boys with low IQs and egos bigger than a Saturn-V, but the reality is that they don't pilot this thing on takeoff and landing - all they do is operate the longer burns on the attitude motors.
The Shkvall was/is a self-fuelled rocket. The "point and shoot" variety was devastating because nothing could stop it. Ironically the "upgrade" was an electronic guidance system meant to improve the hit rate but in reality lowered the hit rate because electronic countermeasures were developed. The original is still a huge and unstoppable threat to mariners and submariners.
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
in reference to the shkvall I was talking about the IT needed to develop the unit, not the one needed to propel/guide it. the supercavitation modeling is what took IT. as for the shuttle landing, I was told that it was a challenge which NASA did not want. but maybe that was not the case.
Motto: chown -R linux:GNU world
Distros: Debian, gNewSense
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
The shuttle automation is definitely not a case of NASA not wanting to do something. I don't know why that urban legend about it not being automated keeps going around. During design there was the decision to let the pilot(s) load tapes and lower the landing gear but this was a psychological decision and not a technical one - it was the wrong technical decision and I'm sure the (ex)soviet scientists still have a good laugh about it. So aside from pulling a tape out of a cabinet and plugging it into the reader, and flipping a switch to lower the landing gear, the US shuttles are in fact fully automated. Some minor retrofitting would allow NASA to perform a completely autonomous launch like the Buran flight - but what's the point. The crew don't feel comfortable if they know the pilot doesn't really have control and pilots don't like it when you tell them the computer knows better. Aside from that the humans are needed to run the experiments and so on, so an autonomous flight would really just be a waste of money.
Iran Makes Mideast’s Best
urban legend? maybe so, but it was told to me by some (American) guys who I have reasons to believe were quite well-informed of these matters and at a time when this was not discussed anywhere, at least to my, admittedly limited, knowledge. again, maybe they were wrong, but I have no reasons to believe so.
Motto: chown -R linux:GNU world
Distros: Debian, gNewSense
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/
Iranian impress Vees...
Let's sort things out.
I checked the on-line computer stores - you get motherboards accepting 8GB RAM each with 2GB modules already offered. These are not special order parts, but what you get off the shelf (your identity not beeing asked). One needs 8 motherborads like this with their RAM slots fully pupulated to have a cluster of such capacity. So what Iranians have built is the computing power of just a modest in size and up to date computer classroom...
By every judgment it is not a supercomputer nowdays.
Yet I imagine that for Vees's limited mental capacity (as established in former discussions) that seems like a SUPERCOMPUTER. Anyway, it would be nice to use such machines in computer classrooms at high schools, and since Vees's educational level does not exceed that after high school graduation (or hardly?) it would be nice for him to master this kind of SUPERCOMPUTER. And Vees would certainly be impressed. But not US or Israel. Forget US, I think Israel must have had computer classrooms far in excess of these capabilities long time before... Forget US, I am sure that even a microscopic Israel have what is nowdays called supercomputers. They just don't bother to announce that in the media - what the hack? a supercomputer - how many have those ones nowdays? As it was said NEC, IBM, bla bla do it.
So, I guess no hair was torn out in US or Israel! Vees, now you can try to tear out your hair from some other place...
And some detail to correct. Pinniped, please remember that the SOVIET scientists (not only russian, although they of course participated massively) have calculated the yield of the most powerfull bomb ever. Given the design of the bomb and using only their brains and paper and pencil - they have been able to predict the power of explosion with unprecedented precision. But the iranians will not be able to do the trick. The strong predicitive power of the soviet scientists was based on the data obtained during previous and numerous tests of smaller warheads. That's an asset iranians don't and will not have - computers will not help to fill this gap!
Iranian impress Vees...
Hey Andriusha!
You did the right thing by checking with the local computer store - I am an idiot and my mental capacity is getting worse by the day. I stand corrected :-)
Still, that 860 gigaflops in Israeli high school classrooms is really good. Kudos for those lucky Israelis. I am sure that their armed forces envy their luck. Heck - the entire country must be blue with envy! LOL!
Cheers!
VS
Motto: chown -R linux:GNU world
Distros: Debian, gNewSense
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/