As part of restructuring American Intelligence the 9/11 commission recommended creating an independent oversight board to help protect our Civil Liberties. We’ve already seen how they can be so easily eroded.
The Bush Administration thinks that this oversight board should not be created. The House version has agreed. However, the bipartisan Senate seems to want the oversight board.
I think it is very important we have an oversight board to help monitor and protect our freedoms. Otherwise, why fight to keep them?
If you like, the ACLU has a site where you can send your representatives a message saying you support the creation of this oversight board. I just thought I’d pass it along:
NASA just announced their newest supercomputer built in collaboration with SGI and Intel – a Linux cluster.
It’s fast. 42.7 teraflops on 16 nodes. If you want to know that that means, “flops” means “floating point operations per second” – it’s a way of encoding numbers with precision. If you can perform 42.7 teraflops, it means this little baby can do
42,700,000,000,000 floating point operations in just 1 second. (over 42 trillion)
And to think, I’m thinking about getting a faster computer so I can play Doom 3…
The system is a combination of 20 systems, each with 512 processors. To make it truly beautiful – this monstrosity of interconnections manifests itself as one single Linux image.
It outperforms Japan’s Earth Simulator which held the record at 37 teraflops.
IBM is currently working on a system called Blue Gene that should be installing a system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory sometime in 2005 – it is supposed to achieve 360 teraflops.
You can check out what it looks like at the NASA site – there are some very nice photos.
Also, read their press release if you like.
SGI also has some images available.
