[Beowulf] A little Data News

[John Hearns]

Bit of an old war story, and I've probably told this one before.
In 1986 I was a graduate student at CERN. CERN was set up in the wake
of the Second World War, to foster cooperations between nations in the
aftermath of war. CERN has never done military related research and
never will.
The CERN Computer Centre had never been locked and guarded, and there
was free access.
At that time CERN purchased a CRAY XMP-24 from the USA. The export
conditions from the USA were that the computer centre was to be
locked, with access card validation. Anyone who was given an account,
including me, had to sign that they would not give access to any
Russian colleagues, or rn programs on behalf of Russian colleagues.
Remember that at this time the USA was not a member of CERN - ti was
an associate member if I'm not wrong.
I remember going to the viewing gallery to look at the hall, dont
think I ever got closer than that to the CRAY.

As an aside, High Energy Physics Monte Carlo codes are notoriously not
amenable to vectorisation. As the CRAY had a whacking load of RAM
ended up principally used .. errr.. as an NFS server.










On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 at 07:14, Jonathan Engwall
<engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The first one is a little scary, in other parts of the world-just run and don't look back.
>
> https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/houston/news/press-releases/fbi-warns-texas-leaders-of-foreign-threats-to-research-and-academic-institutions?utm_medium=email&utm_source=houston-press-releases&utm_source=houston&utm_source=texas-1
>
> This article gives a couple ideas about security that might not be obvious. For one, search for information on the internet that should not be there. It is definitely a serious recommendation meant to keep children safe.
>
> https://www.ic3.gov/media/2018/180913.aspx
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