back to article Bibliotheca Alexandrina buys a Huawei superdupercomputer

Egypt’s national library is buying a 118 teraflop supercomputer from Huawei capable of handling bioinformatics, data mining, physics simulation, weather forecast, drilling for oil and groundwater, and cloud computing – raising questions about what it will be used for. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a grandiose Egyptian state …

  1. Chris G

    Search

    Perhaps they are going to run a search program for the other 10.4 million books.

  2. Simon Lynch

    Internationally funded state oppression

    In a library which doesn't have any money to buy books...

    Well, they can use a desktop to index what they have and then use the new box to do about the only thing it would be good for, filtering and analysing the communications of its citizens. The Chinese should be able to help out with repurposing the kit. Nice to see the internaltional community doing something positive for the country...

  3. Brian Miller

    New levels of WHAT???

    "...a new level of creativity will be inspired and new horizons are arising in the research domain." Yeah right! Like flops upon flops for a flop of a project is going to do anything when the populace is rioting in protest and being shot or jailed for it. Sorry, no.

    Now, what would a country need with 118Tf of computing power? Especially in a country where the bandwidth could be carried in a bucket more efficiently than going down the wire? Weather? Sunny. Physics? Pyramid test, they're still there, not floating off. Data mining? Cloud computing? It just seems to be a series of non-sequiturs.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    Hey! Egypt is going to need this kind of computing power!

    Just to keep track of all the political prisoners and human rights abuses, if nothing else. It might also come in handy for calculating the date in the distant future when Egypt will have an open, pluralistic and honest government.

  5. Trainee grumpy old ****
    Holmes

    How about

    The Nine Billion Names of God

  6. Mark 85

    Hmm... a repository of knowledge in Egypt. Pardon my cynicism but this is country with a fairly large portion of the population holding the same beliefs as a certain group who's made a large mess of historical sites, museums, etc. in the name of their deity. At what point will they decide that this library must be destroyed?

    1. Notas Badoff

      There's form at Alexandria, and the results are the same...

      though the 'cause' might change from time to time. Two 'oopsies' during Roman wars, religious intolerance (or was it really politics?), then religious conquest (or was it politics and booty?).

      Knowledge needs to be as infectious and as easily spread as a virus. Then maybe we'll eventually become immune to plain stupidity.

    2. John H Woods Silver badge

      "this is country with a fairly large portion of the population holding the same beliefs as a certain group" -- Mark 85

      You might want to go to your local library and read about affirming the consequent; it's even sillier than believing in sky fairies.

  7. Mage Silver badge

    maybe they are going to run a copy of the Internet?

    As per title.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    From start to finish

    this library and its various appendages sound like a great way to funnel government funds into private hands. I'd love to see who got paid what in the brokering of this deal.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Probably for nuclear bomb simulations

    It sounds like it is spec'd for nuclear bomb design rather than book cataloguing or dissident management. Likely, the UN prohibits selling super computers for bomb design to Egypt, but will allow a hugely overpowered "file server'/"book catalogue" in a library that will get almost no use except for "research creativity".

  10. John Savard

    Export Restrictions?

    And here I thought China had recently passed a law banning the export of supercomputers from China, to show that their supercomputers were just as good as the Americans'.

    But then, Egypt is a friendly country, I suppose.

  11. Graham Marsden
    Flame

    "The building cost $220m...

    "...has space for eight million books, and has an 11-floor reading room."

    And hopefully a better fire suppression system than the original...

  12. Tromos
    Joke

    With capacity to spare...

    ...after the e-book reader software is installed.

  13. emmanuel goldstein

    I wonder how long the superdupercomputer will last before it succumbs to some well-meaning but inept "engineer". Last time I was in Cairo, not even the traffic lights worked..

    It's a wonderful country with huge charm but a less than stellar record when it comes to looking after stuff.

    King Tut's mask and superglue, anybody?

  14. Nixinkome

    Let's try some suggestions;

    To try to recreate the Lost Knowledge of the first Alexandrian Library;

    To analyze the DNAs of Mummies and Tomb Raiders to decide how many there were of each;

    To work out who spoke, wrote and read what in Ancient Egypt?

    Add your'n.

    N.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does it run Crysis?

  16. Richard Wharram

    Storage

    288TB isn't an awful lot to be honest.

  17. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    Quite honestly...

    ... commodity hardware, attached via Infiniband with some software-defined storage solution is not particularly difficult to build nowadays. It's like Lego, and putting Linux/Lustre/Rocks/Slurm & LSF/Open-MPI on top is very formulaic.

    All you need is the money. Of course, whether it actually does anything useful depends on the detailed design, and the skill of the people using it.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    for increased funding of course

    otherwise titled "climate change". they'll do more flawed, pretty models showing how Egyptian relics of history are going to be surely damaged by AGW and need the system to generate the pretty CGI to "prove" how the world needs to send $billionsUSD to "save" things.

    Because when you need money, the only result your models will produce, are the results you wanted from the beginning.

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