Stampede – Texas Advanced Computing Center | Hacker News Reader

Stampede – Texas Advanced Computing Center

tacc.utexas.edu

35 pointsjonbaer22 comments

Kelly Gaither gave a great talk at High Performance Graphics a couple of years ago (http://www.highperformancegraphics.org/previous/www_2012/med...) if anyone is interested in more detail. An interesting tidbit during the Q&A is that Intel donated the Xeon Phi boards (referred to as MIC back then).

I use Stampede regularly via NSF's XSEDE supercomputer access program. It's a fantastic resource, very well designed, easy to use, and the TACC staff are remarkably good at what they do.

what do you feel about the Blue Waters system and do you have access to it?

Looks very nice but I haven't tried it. I have used other NCSA systems in the past and they were also excellent. NSF funding of supercomputers is a godsend for researchers needing a lot of cycles.

The page has conflicting memory statistics. Near the top, each of the 6400 nodes is said to have 250GB of memory, while at the bottom, each node is said to have 32GB of memory.

Thanks, Fixed.

I love reading about supercomputing, it's a completely alien world that has just enough similarity with what I do to be somewhat understandable.

I'm old enough (34) to have seen much of the revolution in computing and it is easy to get somewhat jaded after a while but the sheer power of the petascale systems just makes my jaw drop every time I read about them.

building a petascale system is relatively easy compared to having applications that can actually use all that power. you can count such applications probably on one hand that can scale to post-petascale systems

I would love to get a tour of this. I live in Austin.

I'll be doing a tour of the machine room (not the vis lab) this thursday noon. Drop me a line: eijkhout at tacc utexas edu

... and in 5 years it will be obsolete.

I hate this new info-graphic web page style.

The information is flashy and verbose. When I want to think about what I'm reading, all the pictures, constant scrolling, and animations honestly just gets in the way.

I do realize that this web page style is in vogue right now, but I really hope that simpler pages exist somewhere.

Thanks for your reply. I'm not involved with Stampede at all but as a front end dev I'm always looking towards new interesting ways to present content. I have a project coming up that's going to be timeline based and immediately upon seeing Stampede's website I figured the beginning section (The Power of Stampede) could applied usefully. Without user input and feedback I'm going off of my assumptions and those aren't always the best for the end user.

Thanks for finding my opinion useful!

I'm not necessarily against any particular technique. But what I am against is when a page is so over-designed that the design distracts the user from the text.

I'm here to read the information... or if you've got good graphics... to look at pictures that give me information.

Besides, this style of page is no longer "ahead of the curve". Parodies of this kind of page have already come out, so the "fashion trend" and "flair" of this style of page is going away IMO.

www.kitkat.com/android/

So if you aren't doing as well as _parody_ sites, you honestly aren't going to impress me the slightest. In essence... these sorts of overly designed super-animated pages are "soooo last year". </valley girl accent>

That was one persons opinion. I liked the site itself. Don't just go by one persons opinion. There will always be the people who like to stick with their plain html sites and always go "grr" when the pages are modernizing.

I never said I was going solely off of his opinion, just that it's nice to see feedback about the presentation of the content from a front end developers and end user standpoint.

I'm a firm believer in making things functional and useful and then adding things on top of that to make them pretty, more readable, and if possible exciting. Thanks to you as well.

For what it's worth, I thought the site was very well done.

Thanks digi!

https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/user-guides/stampede

Don't forget that TACC and friends are supported by taxpayers and politicians. Being flashy to the general public keeps the lights on.

>Don't forget that TACC and friends are supported by taxpayers

Dear Lord no. Keep it to yourself please. The less my neighbors know about it, the better. If they find out their tax dollars are being spent on that instead of something to do with the border, or catching drug smugglers, they'll holler from now until the next season of Duck Dynasty distracts them.

Actually I feel like the tax money in Texas is well spent. In Illinois I pay higher taxes and never see how any of it benefits me - every year the roads and other infrastructure gets worse. In Texas, it felt like the Tax money delivered a return in service. That said, governments change and I have no idea what Texas will look like a decade from now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com