Renting a Supercomputer

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by aphexcoil, Nov 14, 2002.

  1. I am curious if it is possible to rent time on a supercomputer. My needs would require around 500 gigabytes of RAM and a machine capable of processing information at around 5 teraflops.

    How much does it cost to rent a supercomputer, where can it be done (university, etc) and what language would I need to write my program in?

    I am looking to run studies on 5 years worth of ES tick data, 100 years worth of DOW index data and a few select sectors.

    Thanks in advance.
     
  2. BKuerbs

    BKuerbs

    Maybe there is no need to rent a supercomputer. There are some projects that couple lots of ordinary PCs (e.g. under Linux) to emulate a supercomputer. Some 486s will do the job.

    There are some other projects going on, where the internet is used for such highly demanding computations: people willing to help in such projects download a programme, which will work as screensaver, that is whenever their computer is idle, the program downloads some data and crunches them.

    Two of these projects: SETI (Search for extraterrestrial Intelligence) and GIMPS (Search for prime numbers).

    Maybe they can give you some ideas.

    Regards

    Bernd Kuerbs
     
  3. jaan

    jaan

    sounds like you are planning to break the guinness record for curve-fitting... :)

    - jaan
     
  4. You can rent mine if you want. It's super doopa!

    Runningbear
     
  5. Ninja

    Ninja

    The recipe for losing in today's markets...
     
  6. DT-waw

    DT-waw

    Not only aphie wants to do it. JJX Capital also.
    http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=1715
    www.jjxcapital.com

    Commisso/Publias/J Commisso/Te'/ what do you think about it?

    ChrisM wrote: "This is big business brother, which means it needs a lot of fresh meat". Without fresh meat, this business will die.
     
  7. Aphie,

    As you once told Gordon, " JUST TRADE"
     
  8. My first shot is to call up the University of Maryland and ask them if they have any open time-sharing slots on their system.

    Unfortunately, even a couple linked Pentiums won't be able to work for me. I want to do various types of number crunching on a few billion ticks worth of data.

    My computer at work is a 2.0 Gigahertz Pentium and it just grinds to a halt when I ask it to start calculating just a week's work of tick data -- not to mention 5 years worth.
     
  9. Ninja

    Ninja

    Yeah but Sterling says it will only have a performance of 2 Teraflops so "the largest commercial supercomputer in the world for securities trading using AMD Athlon microprocessors" seems to be way to slow for Aphie...
    :p
     
  10. I just checked the Top 500 for supercomputers and I was mistaken. I thought they had gotten up to 100 teraflops, but the highest ranked one is 35 teraflops and that was designed by NEC and is in Japan.

    Frankly, I'll settle for what I can get -- if I can get half a teraflop of number crunching, that will be a lot better than what I have to work with right now.
     
    #10     Nov 14, 2002