CycleCloud BigScience Challenge to Award Time on 30,000-Core Cluster

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Jason Stowe at Cycle Computing is offering the equivalent of 8 hours on a ~30,000-core cluster ($10,000 in free CycleCloud time) to help researchers answer questions that will help humanity.

The problem is, today, researchers are in the long-term habit of sizing their questions to the compute cluster they have, rather than the other way around. This isn’t the way we should work. We should provision compute at the scale the questions need. We’re talking about taking questions that require a million hours of computation, and answering them in a day. Securely. At reasonable cost.

I call this “utility supercomputing”, that is, provisioning resources at a scale of the Top 500 supercomputing list, for researchers to use for a few hours, then turn off. For example, take the 5 years of back data that you never were able to re-analyze with a new, innovative algorithm because it would take 2 years on your internal compute cluster, and instead get results back in 9 hours. For $12000. Wow…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiwRS_E-uhg

Proposals are due Nov 7th, 2011, and they will announce the Finalists at Booth #443 at SC11. Read the Full Story.