Has anyone ever had access to a supercomputer?

[aluminumstudios]

I'm sitting here bored at work, and know that when I get home my little core2duo won't be anywhere near finished with the task I gave it to render last night.

I was wondering if anyone here has ever had access to a super-computer (or a beefy computer larger than any consumer system - say 8 cores/cpus or more), and what was the most interesting thing you've done with it?

Also, this may sound a little off the wall and very unlikely, but does anyone know any institutions or companies where someone could potentially get remote access to a fat computer?     Probably without a good research proposal and a fat application for a computer-time grant it would be impossible...  I can daydream though ...

[reesej2]

Wow, I wish I had that kind of access... I have access to some of the servers at the University of Washington, but the best of those isn't noticeably faster than my machine and it automatically stops programs that run for longer than five hours. I know Sage has free servers... Someone suggested to me once that I could set up a network--get all the servers I have access to, give them each a piece of the program, and run it all at once. I figure that'd be a time savings of a factor of 16 or so, assuming it got done under the five-hour limit...

But, apart from that, I'm stuck using my poky little laptop...

[aluminumstudios]

But, apart from that, I'm stuck using my poky little laptop...

I hear you.  I currently live abroad on a fixed budget and a non-permanent basis, so I have to make do with my little laptop too...

[ker2x]

I work with big fat linux computer, i can play with them before they go in production.
I wish i could use them with utlrafractal, but there is no linux client for ultrafractal

[hobold]

The only supercomputer I ever had access to is so outdated today that it could well be beaten by a modern iPhone. It was the size of a respectable fridge, and had hardware accelerated 3D graphics. It was from SGI, of course, and had the flamboyant name "Reality Engine".

We used it for pushing the envelope back then: rendering of volumetric data, hardware accelerated image processing; and we learned a lot about the pitfalls of multithreaded programming.

[cKleinhuis]

i have been working at the numerical simulation department at the university of bonn, germany ( INS )
they used to have a supercomputer in the top 100 list, it were a bit more than 128 celeron processors ( i think 144 )
i worked there from 2004 until 2008, and this information is from that time
http://wissrech.ins.uni-bonn.de/misc/album/

but nowadays, supercomputers work with cluster of gpus, i have seen 16 gpus running side by side, but this could
also be more now ... i am quite happy with my nvidia gts250 ... but looking for an update to enter terraflop areas

[cbuchner1]

Two years ago I built my own. 1.4 TFlops of single precision floating point performance for only 800-900 Euros of investment.   It consisted of 4x nVidia 9600GSO graphics cards, cooled with a large case fan. I used it for Folding@Home and some programming projects of my own. The machine certainly made as much noise as a "real" supercomputer.

10 years before I built it this machine would have been at the top of the supercomputer list.

Christian

[Nahee_Enterprises]

    I was wondering if anyone here has ever had access to a super-computer
    (or a beefy computer larger than any consumer system - say 8 cores/cpus or more),
    and what was the most interesting thing you've done with it?

Does the following count:
   Dell Precision Workstation T7400 - 64bit
   Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor X5482 (3.20GHz,2X6M L2,1600)
   16GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, ECC (4 DIMMS)
   512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX3700, Dual Monitor DVI Capable
   Two 24 inch UltraSharp 2408WFP Widescreen, Adjustable Stand, VGA/DVI Monitors
   C6 All SATA drives, RAID 0, 2 drive total configuration:
      (320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache)

I am afraid it is now a bit on the old side, since I got it back in the latter part of 2008.  But it still handles a few things faster than most PCs.    

Or do you mean the "big iron" machines??  (Which I have used at several companies I have worked for.)

    ....does anyone know any institutions or companies where someone could
    potentially get remote access to a fat computer?

There are "server farm" services available, as long as you can pay for the processing time.
 

[reesej2]

How much do you suppose processing time costs? On the one hand, there are lots of computers, so it should be cheap; on the other hand, I can't imagine many individuals have use for it, so if they want to make money they'd need to charge pretty high.

[aluminumstudios]

How much do you suppose processing time costs? On the one hand, there are lots of computers, so it should be cheap; on the other hand, I can't imagine many individuals have use for it, so if they want to make money they'd need to charge pretty high.

$2.77 per processor core per hour   http://news.softpedia.com/news/Rent-Your-Own-Supercomputer-for-2-77-per-Hour-82166.shtml

I can't find the link again, but I found a site in the U.K. which had a Cray, a BlueGene, and another system and they charged 2 pounds per processor hour (a "processor" being several cores in that case.)

I use my own software written in C++ which uses pthreads, so it shouldn't be too hard to port to a Unix based big system.  I could even learn MPI if I had to     Supercomputer time according to several sites I saw, is sold in batches, often costing hundreds to thousands of dollars.  I doubt they'd sell me $15 of time just to render a difficult project

Nahee, if your system is a "bit on the old side", I'll gladly take it off your hands for you!

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Nahee, if your system is a "bit on the old side", I'll gladly take it off your hands for you!

Based upon what you currently use for a computer, and statements you have made in other topics, I do not believe you can afford to pay me the current value, much less the added shipping and handling charges.

But if you truly believe you can afford that much, then by all means, contact me via email, and we can work out the agreement.  (Just go to Dell's web page and enter in the specifications listed above to get an idea of the price.)
 

[teamfresh]

I work with big fat linux computer, i can play with them before they go in production.
I wish i could use them with utlrafractal, but there is no linux client for ultrafractal

I managed to install it using wine

[aluminumstudios]

Nahee, if your system is a "bit on the old side", I'll gladly take it off your hands for you!

Based upon what you currently use for a computer, and statements you have made in other topics, I do not believe you can afford to pay me the current value, much less the added shipping and handling charges.

But if you truly believe you can afford that much, then by all means, contact me via email, and we can work out the agreement.  (Just go to Dell's web page and enter in the specifications listed above to get an idea of the price.)

My comment was in jest and acknowledgment that you have a nice system (even if it's one you've had for a while.)  But I'm not certain how to interpret your reply.

The reality is that I could afford a nice new machine relatively easily.  While I love computing however, my recent priorities have been about travel.  I live in Japan and travel abroad to other Asian countries several times a year trying to see as much of this side of the planet as possible.  I like to daydream about buying a beefy system, but always wind up buying plane tickets instead