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