Wales joins supercomputer club A £40m supercomputer project has been announced by the Welsh Assembly Government, to help Wales join the supercomputer club and increase knowledge-intensive skills in the country. The HPC Wales project was first announced as a £44m project by the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in December last year. The …
As I read it, they're effectively screwing this up before it beings by splitting the processing capability in two because neither Swansea nor Cardiff could agree on a location - This is fairly typical of Welsh initiatives.
Next steps we'll see the usual application comments focused on the processing power required for Weather forecasting and genome mapping and the creation of hundreds of jobs in hi-tech spin-offs. More crapola from over-paid clowns in civil servant suits.
There's some hope for this if they build on the reputation of Alan Cox in Swansea Uni and build a linux-based HPC - it might raise profiles if nothing else.
Since we all know that HPC == Linux (even the BBC knows that, great graphic here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10187248) this will be one to watch.
As for why it's needed, dunno, read this http://www.arcade-eu.org/academicsupercomputing/unitedkingdom.html
@ Agirlfromvenus: great nick
JANET will support distributed computing, I think HPC will require dedicated circuits to ensure good I/O speeds
As a Welshman I have no problem with you criticising the project and the money spent, everyone is entitled to their opinion.
What I do have an issue with is the blatant racist comments and obvious contempt for us Welsh.
You people need to grow up and leave your bigotry driven primary school "jokes" where they belong.
Troll, That would be some of you.
Please calm down, AC. As I'm sure many others are about to point out in less modulated tones, it may be childish and offensive but I'm not sure it qualifies as racism.
And now let's all debate as to the definition of race! Well, you can, I'm going home to pretend none of you exist.
Er, really though, keep it civil.
I agree that the comments are primarily just offensive and childish and predictable and .....
I don't take them as racist, but what else do we call it? It sure as hell does exclude a section of the population from joining in, on the basis of their place of origin, so it is a bit more than the usual juvenile offensiveness you find everywhere on forums. Let the twats carry on, but how about a chorus of boos from the readership?
We've always made jokes about the Irish and the Welsh. It's not racism. It's about jokes, it's humour. Racism is about not liking a race of people for the very fact of their race.
The jokes are nothing more than jokes, there isn't any hatred involved.
The biggest central theme in jokes about the Welsh is sheep. Is it possible to be racist to a sheep? The reason, as we all know, that we make these jokes about the Welsh and sheep is because of the sexual imagery which those jokes conjure up.. that's what it's about, and it definitely isn't racism.
So let's stop playing the race card and victim card too.
I agree mostly. I usually find sheep jokes amusing and don't mind the piss-taking - as long as it is in jest. Some of the comments, unfortunately, are not like that. I was going to leave it at that but I thought I'd look back and find a comment that was offensive rather than funny : damn-me it was your original one that kicked off the complaint! If you think that was humorous I wouldn't go into stand-up any time soon if I were you.
But when they are used in the manner they have been to support criticism of the Welsh and not this project then they stop being jokes and become ethnic slurs and insults.
I’m not surprised that some people fail to see the difference.
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