Domain: lanl.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to lanl.gov.
Stories · 77
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NuTeV result disagrees with Standard Model
Trevor Johnson writes "New Scientist reports that physicists from the NuTev collaboration at Fermilab have announced a result on their Web page. Bombarding iron nuclei with high-energy neutrinos, they found a 99.75% chance that neutrinos interact slightly differently from the way the Standard Model (the reigning theory which describes the strong, electromagnetic, and weak forces, but not gravity) says they should. Even though the discrepancy is small, it is likely to be significant. There is no theory to explain the difference, but it could indicate a hitherto unknown force. NuTev has submitted a "Physical Review Letter" paper. There is a press release from Fermilab and a plain English version." -
Quantum Computing: A view from the enemy camp
SIGFPE writes "There seems to be an unthinking acceptance by many people that quantum computers are now on their unstoppable way up and before too long we'll be cracking RSA and simulating protein folding on complex quantum computers. However there is another point of view that considers quantum computers to be as difficult to make as perpetual motion machines - and for much the same reason: entropy. As an antidote to all the successes that have been reported on /. here is a just published and highly readable preprint by a sceptical mathematical physicist." -
Gravitational Repulsion Effect Claimed
TekPolitik writes: "Eugene Podkletnov, the physicist who claimed to have discovered an anomalous gravitational "shielding" effect in the 90s, but withdrew his original paper prior to publication, has finally published a new paper on the topic. The paper describes a new experiment that is related to the original experiment, but the nature of the new experiment is more suggestive of an inverse gravitational effect (that is, the device creates a gravitational push away from it), or in Trekkie terms, a repulsor beam. Aside from claiming to have pushed things around at a distance, Podkletnov claims that the results directly contradict general relativity." Let's see if I can summarize: the author claims that with a certain very cold superconductor transmitting a large quantity of electricity in an intense magnetic field, he has observed a "new" force which repulses objects. -
Losing Track of Nuclear Materials
pdavew writes: "An editorial in the Washington Post by Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information says that Russian Experts at the Kurchatov Institute have warned the US that software lent to them by the Los Alamos National Labs has a bug that over time loses track of bomb-grade nuclear materials even though their location is still in the database, and that this feature can be used to divert the materials for profit unbeknownst to the nuclear accountants. Apparently, this has been going on for about 10 years." The editorial says "Microsoft software," but it almost certainly isn't. See below for more.As it so happens, I know a bit about accounting for nuclear materials at DOE facilities, since I've written a system to do just that (not the one in question, fortunately for me). There's a good basic description of the flawed inventory system available from a Russian site. It's a custom application built on Windows NT and SQL Server, and the application itself was almost certainly not written by Microsoft but by some consulting firm hired by the Department of Energy. (I don't know that it wasn't Microsoft who did the consulting, but it would surprise me.)
So rather than being a "risks of Microsoft software" story, this is a story in general about the risks of highly complex, closed-source code.
About ten minutes after Little Boy turned Hiroshima into an ex-city, the U.S. realized the importance of tracking the raw materials for nuclear weaponry. Enriched uranium and plutonium, primarily, but also many other materials that are fissionable or can be used in nuclear weapons. (Incidentally, you can possess uranium ore in its natural state without a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license - only if you try to enrich it do you run into problems. :)
Accounting of U.S. nuclear materials is handled through a system/organization called NMMSS, the Nuclear Materials Management and Safeguards System. This database was started in the Days of Yore, when men were men and computers were room-sized with lots of blinkenlights. This database was originally designed to accept 80-column punch-cards - lots and lots of punch-cards. Each punch-card could be part of an inventory received from some U.S. facility that handled nuclear materials, or part of a transaction indicating the transfer of nuclear materials from one facility to another, or any other data that needed to be entered into the database.
At the end of the day, the system would grind over the data entered, looking for problems. For instance, facility X says they sent 10 kilos of plutonium to facility Y, and facility Y says they received 9 kilos of plutonium from facility X - red flags go up, alarms ring, troops are dispatched.
The system has been modernized once or twice, and modified many, many times to take account of changing developments in nuclear science ("hey, this isotope can be used in making super-bombs - better track it too!"), changing regulations, and changing technology. But no one wants to screw it up, so modifications are always the minimum needed. So today, DOE facilities don't send punch-cards anymore - they can send their information via encrypted email or secure dial-up connections. But the data transmitted is still in 80-column formats, a legacy of the punch-cards. Each facility runs some sort of inventory system which tracks things at their facility, and submits various reports up the chain to NMMSS. It's all computerized - but there are massive legacies of the predecessor systems.
After the end of the Cold War and Soviet break-up, the U.S. DOE starting sweating about poor Russian control of nuclear materials. The U.S. has sent significant assistance to the former Soviet Union to aid them in accounting for and tracking materials that could be used in building nuclear weapons. The U.S. has also purchased a large amount of "excess" nuclear material from the former U.S.S.R., and the U.S. and Soviet inventory systems are at least partially merged now - at least some Soviet facilities submit inventory reports to NMMSS now, and so transactions of materials between U.S. and Russian facilities can be handled much the same way as transactions between two U.S. facilities. Naturally the U.S. donated their custom facility inventory software, which was probably developed at extraordinary expense, running on NT and SQL Server.... and now we're back to the original article.
At this point you know as much as I do. I don't know what flaw caused the loss in inventories that was described in the article, whether it was a flaw in SQL Server or the custom application written on top of it. I do know that any significant inventory loss would almost certainly be detected elsewhere in the chain -- NMMSS would note that the inventory was X kilograms one month, (X-Y) kilograms the next month, and wonder what happened, even if no one at the actual facility did. So my suggestion is to take the $1 billion estimate in the article with a grain of salt. Probably the flaw isn't that bad, probably it occurred in a repeatable manner and the data can be found or reconstructed (there are many checks and safeguards built-in to all of these systems to detect errors or attempted fraud). The most probable "attack" against the inventory system was a bad employee, attempting to divert nuclear material for financial gain. But the safeguards should suffice to detect systemic errors as well.
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The Ultimate Limits Of Computers
Qui-Gon writes: "Found an interesting article about the 'The Ultimate Limits of Computers' over at Ars Technica. This article is very heavy on the physics of computing, not for the faint-hearted." Somewhere between practical reality and sheer Gedankenexperiment, the exploration here keeps getting more relevant as shrinking die sizes and improving nanotech wear away at previously impassable barriers. The article is based on a paper discussing the absolute limits of computational power. -
NASA Plays Well With Comets
jmichaelg writes "Taking a page from Hollywood, NASA approved a Deep Impact mission to poke a seven story hole into Comet Tempel 1. It's a little tough to get past the grandstanding on NASA's part - the collision is scheduled for July 4, 2005. OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros. Clearly, they need a bit of practice. Last year, Los Alamos Labs detected two meteors impacting the earth. The bigger of the two explosions was estimated at between 6000-8000 tons of TNT which is 1/2 to 2/3'rds of the bomb's yield that was dropped on Hiroshima. The Tunguska comet/asteroid explosion in 1908 was the equivalent of a 15-40 megaton bomb. The Near Earth Asteroid Tracking observatory keeps turning up previously unknown near earth asteroids all the time so it's just a matter of time before NASA will have to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid lest it destroy some part of us." We ran another story about this earlier this year. -
Electronic Access to Scientific Journals
LMCBoy writes: "Nature is hosting an online debate on Future e-Access to the Primary Literature. There are points of view from scientists, librarians and publishers (both for-profit and not). It's a good place to get all sides of the issues." It's interesting, because extremely expensive and restricted journals are now competing with services like xxx.lanl.gov, and it isn't clear how peer review will work with more open systems, how they will be funded, etc. -
Booting Linux In Three Seconds
cramhead writes: "Some very cool technology that motherboard manufacturers should consider adopting. Using Linux to boot a system allows flexibility and speed. Thought the world deserved a look at [the LinuxBIOS homepage]" This project sounds similar to the OpenBios project which has mentioned before on Slashdot, but a lot has happened since then, and even since CmdrTaco last posted about LinuxBIOS. The news page indeed reveals that (with certain motherboards), adventurous flashers-of-RAM can have Linux up in three seconds, and they promise improvements even on that. They also note that LinuxBIOS is working with an Alpha DS10 and with an Athlon / SiS730S combination. (This may also remind you of the etherboot project). -
Booting Linux In Three Seconds
cramhead writes: "Some very cool technology that motherboard manufacturers should consider adopting. Using Linux to boot a system allows flexibility and speed. Thought the world deserved a look at [the LinuxBIOS homepage]" This project sounds similar to the OpenBios project which has mentioned before on Slashdot, but a lot has happened since then, and even since CmdrTaco last posted about LinuxBIOS. The news page indeed reveals that (with certain motherboards), adventurous flashers-of-RAM can have Linux up in three seconds, and they promise improvements even on that. They also note that LinuxBIOS is working with an Alpha DS10 and with an Athlon / SiS730S combination. (This may also remind you of the etherboot project). -
A !Tangled Web
nick_patt writes "It looks like the zany scientists in Los Alamos have been up to no good again. According to this article, they claim to have figured out the mystery of some simple knots. Anyways, the thing I'd like to know is how close the computer simultations and mathematical models (mentioned in the third paragraph) came to the observed behavior." An interesting approach to science - macro experiments to gain insight into micro behavior. -
Slashback: Plexion, Kernelism, Salaryness
The list grows of how many OSes Plex86 can boot. Soon you may have an easier time of installing a new kernel (besides turning to page 207 of Running Linux). SAGE wants to know the intimate, personal, steamy details of how much you earn as a SysAdmin. Also, not everyone trusts the proposed data-escrow deal involving Celera and Science. All below, in this episode of Slashback.Plex those muscles, yeah, and one and two and three ... dhunley expressed himself thusly: "A handful of days after getting Dos, Win95, and Linux to boot, Plex86 does it again! Initial support for booting QNX now works! Screenshot is here!" And shortly thereafter, the very same dhunley wrote: "Plex86 boots NT 4.0! Well, at least to the login dialog box. This is an old bochs disk image file. The mods will be uploaded to CVS soon."
Thanks, d. Watch out soon for an interview with bochs and plex86 lead Kevin Lawton, who promises to take time out from his busy schedule to tell you what's up in the worlds of emulation and virtualization.
While you're here, why not take a tour of the whinery? Apropros the wacky things that people have decided to put in the kernel lately (like GNOME ORBit), Booker writes: "Every time there's a major new kernel release, there's whining on Slashdot about killing uptime, and how much it sucks to have to reboot to get a new kernel. Well, whine no more.
Erik Hendriks at scyld.com brings us Two Kernel Monte, a 'kernel module which allows Linux to load another kernel image into RAM and restart the machine from that kernel.' The only major limitation appears to be that it will not work with SMP machines. Apparently Erik got the idea from the Linux Bios Project."
Now if some smart distribution maker (anyone, anyone) were to integrate that into their updates system, would that be so wrong?
We join this survey already in progress: Marketing Manager writes: "Anyone who's been in the job market knows how tough it is to find information about salaries and compensation. For system administrators, the search is compounded by the varieties of tasks, talents and responsibilities required to get the job done. Now there's something you can do to fix this.
SAGE invites you to participate in the 2000 System Administrator Salary Survey starting December 1, 2000. This annual survey is part of SAGE's ongoing effort to advance Systems Administration as a profession through information and advocacy. By participating in this survey, you join thousands of system administrators in examining the market and defining compensation according to your talents, your location, and your technical prowess."
So now you can find out where you stand in comparison to others with similar positions, perhaps a valuable bargaining chip come contract renewal (or incentive to check out a new city). The results will be available early next year -- automatically sent to SAGE members, available by request to everyone else.
Number One, can't you do anything about that rabble? bluets writes: "Some leading scientists and open-source advocates are attempting to raise awareness that the Celera/Science Magazine deal is a 'Big Mistake.' More details [here]."
And if you didn't know about this, it's only because you're not opening the barrel-of-monkeys Slashdot Science Section often enough. We're considering an experiment where everyone who opens it gets a food pellet, and everyone who doesn't ... well, do we have to bring out the Punishment Stick?
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Further Advances In Quantum Computing
Porfiry writes: "Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory have taken another step forward in the quest for a quantum-based computer by demonstrating the existence of a physical state immune to certain types of information-corrupting "noise," which could otherwise disrupt computations based on quantum states. The essential phenomenon that the Los Alamos team demonstrated is a state in what is called a "decoherence-free subspace." The researchers showed this state's existence using entangled photons, paired particles of light whose conditions are intimately linked." -
Recommendations On Supercomputing Hardware?
dameon asks: "I have been asked by my supervisor to select a replacement for our current SGI Onyx2 space heater. The current setup contains 24-195 Mhz IP27 processors, 12GB main memory, and around 140 GB of total storage space. We use it to run a bunch of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) code. Currently the demand on our system is so much that the jobs are backing up. So, they came to me with two quotes and said: "Which one is better?" I have had limited experience in the field of powerhouse number-crunchers. The two quotes I have received are from HP and SGI. SGI's quote is for: an Origin 3400 with 12 GB Memory, 24-400MHz/8MB R12K's, and 1/2 TB of storage space. HP is offering 3 9000 series N-4000's adding up to about the same specs in total, with the exception of the processors. Hp is offering 550 MHz PA8600's (1.5MB) processors in their setup (it also has more storage space setup with a hyperfabric configuration). All of the software we use will run on both platforms. So, I would like to put this to the Slashdot community: Which one is better?""The HP system is freaky expensive, but is the extra 150 MHz/processor worth the extra money? What else do I need to take into consideration? SGI's processors (while slower) have more cache. Overall, what do I need to look out for when spending this much money? What is the best deal? Am I missing another possible solution altogether? And yes, I already suggested a cluster of linux boxes similar to the one at Los Alamos, but the apps we use have no Linux support."
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Simulation of Nuclear Weapon Secondary Explosion
Anonymous Coward writes "Here is what all those DOE supercomputers have been crunching: On April 30, the Crestone project team at the Laboratory successfully completed the first three-dimensional simulation of a nuclear weapon secondary explosion. The total processor time was 2.01 million hours... The details are at Los Alamos National Laboratory." The secondary explosion in today's modern weapons occurs when a fission device explodes and compresses a light isotope (often tritium) until it creates a fusion reaction. This increases the total yield by a factor of perhaps 100-1000. -
First Physics From RHIC
QuarkHead writes: "Early Wednesday morning, Wit Buzsa from the PHOBOS collaboration presented the first physics to come from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Apparently the universe as we know it will not be destroyed, and unfortunately Long Island will not be sucked into a black hole. See the talk here and the consequent paper here." -
Linux BIOS
An anonymous reader pointed us to the Linux Bios Project which (surprise) is aiming to make a Linux Kernel BIOS. Its got numerous bugs, but some boards are booting. Interesting stuff, and has the potential to dramatically reduce boot time. -
Big Computions Made Faster by Slower Computer Buying?
newfmike writes "A recent paper appeared on xxx.lanl.gov that uses Moore's Law to prove that "slacking off" before buying a new computer for a large calculation actually will *save* time! I knew I chose computational astrophysics for something..." -
Evidence for a Flat Universe?
mattorb writes "The New York Times [free reg.req.] has an interesting article about a recent cosmological experiment whose results rather strongly imply a flat (omega equals 1) universe. Basically, the authors measured the scale of small variations in the cosmic microwave background, which yields strong constraints on allowed cosmologies. The abstract from the preprint (off LANL astro-ph) is here. Caveats: this is a preprint -- meaning that it hasn't been refereed yet. Also, questions are always raised about the precision of such "angular power spectrum" measurements -- who knows if this result will hold up. But it's an interesting thing to talk about." -
Manyfold Universe Theory
Geek-from-parallel-Universe writes "In the HEP preprints database a preprint ">appeared in which the authors propose that a world is a brane folded many times in extra sub-millimiter spatial dimensions. We see other folds only through gravity as a dark matter because light must go around the folds. If this is true then I am waiting for Star Trek-like devices: 'portable submillimeter wormhole generator' and 'personal parallel universe transmitter' to appear on the market. :-)" -
Manyfold Universe Theory
Geek-from-parallel-Universe writes "In the HEP preprints database a preprint ">appeared in which the authors propose that a world is a brane folded many times in extra sub-millimiter spatial dimensions. We see other folds only through gravity as a dark matter because light must go around the folds. If this is true then I am waiting for Star Trek-like devices: 'portable submillimeter wormhole generator' and 'personal parallel universe transmitter' to appear on the market. :-)" -
Top 500 Fastest Computers
epaulson writes "The Top500 list has been released for the first half of 1999. The number one machine remains ASCI Red. The biggest Linux machine is cplant at 129, and Avalon is number 160. The list is a ranking of results from the LINPACK benchmark, which is a Linear Algebra code, so things like distributed.net and SETI@home don't count. " -
Warp Drive Breakthrough
NIck Porcino writes "Warp drive one step closer to reality! From the abstract: A spacetime is presented for which the total negative mass needed is only the order of grams, accompanied by a negligible amoung of positive energy. This constitutes a reduction of the absolute value of the energy by 65 orders of magnitude. The new geometry satisfies the quantum inequality concerning WEC [Weak Energy Condition] violations and exhibits the same advantages as the original Alcubierre spacetime. Read it here. The two big problems to be resolved are 1) how do you get an object inside a warp bubble? 2) What happens to the object when the warp bubble collapses? " -
Linux at Supercomputing '98
John A. Turner writes "Haven't seen anything on /. about how much Linux-related stuff there was at Supercomputing '98 so thought I'd mention it. One of the best things was a panel discussion titled "Clusters, Extreme Linux, and NT". There's a nice summary of the Linux-related events at SC '98 at the Extreme Linux site " Note that reactions to Red Hat's support options announcements included One area in which Linux is far ahead of the pack is clustering . Has any participant written up a summary we could post? Update Rahul Dave has written a report for us. I operate a beowulf cluster at Univ of Pennsylvania. I went to SC98 to attend the tutorials and see the exhibits, and learn more stuff. It was a good experience. I'll have picures soon(Wednesday). (see http://reno.cis.upenn.edu/~rahul/linuxatsc98.txt)My cluster is here and here, if you are interested)
Linux at SC98
Beowulf BOF
The BOF had more than 30 people there. Some had to stand.
There was a Beowulf BOF, in which a emotional speech was given by Thomas Sterling, one of the original pioneers, in which he claimed that we have already won the battle as we have forced a change in the mindset of people doing computing today, as to the benefits of open source. He said it is amazing today the interest in Beowulf at SC98, and that now the Supercomputing community can harness the same distributed creative energy thats driven Linux.
The point came up--whats a beowulf? The answer, at 0th level was: COTS technology cluster using Open Source Software for scientific computation. Most Beowulves use commodity interconnects, and have one point of entry, with each branch of a job having a processor to itself. People do use it for databasing(we do) and web serving and so on.
With the advent of SMP's and the cheapness of Intel based machines, bigger installations with multiple departmental users, utilization is important, and job scheduling was one of the talked about topics. Some kind of scheduler will probably be on the next extreme Linux CD, to be burnt around end Feb or so. There was a paper on scaling in Beowulves, concluding that software routing had some scalability problems but a tree of switches provided good scalability at greater cost. They have made available a synthetic load generator.
The most wanted thing is Rollout and System management tools. The idea is to give as much of a single system image notion as useful. Job Migration was pinpointed as being particularly important as a bridge to full-fledged parallel programming. Unfortunately no open-source implementation exists (Job Migration source is not available from Mosix).
If you have Rollout, cluster administration, round robin web serving, etc prepackaged for beowulves, contact me (rdave@central.cis.upenn.edu). Currently all of us use our own rollout and administration mechanism's, and the Extreme Linux CD folks would like to have some offering on the CD so that there is a everything at one place solution.
Robert Hart from Red Hat made the point that the extreme linux CD was thought off by a lot of the press as a high availability clustering solution, and that we need to make it clear that its a scientic computing solution.
Lots of discussion was there about the next edition of the CD, to be based on RedHat 5.2. Someone is planning to provide debs of the add-on software too. Only open-source and non-export-controlled(write your idiotic govt!) software will be on the CD.
There was some discussion on what happened in the "loss of web site" crisis. The upshot of it was consult on your organizations software release policies before releasing. Export reviews will probably happen in the future.
Products
Paralogic was demoing bert
The Legion folks were showing of their object based "metasystem" for authentication, seamless filesystem access, scheduling, etc. Essentially in the words of Greg Lindahl, it allows you to concentrate for example on your plugin scheduler while taking care of the authentication, filesystem transparency, etc, instead of spreading yourself thin and doing a lousy job on all of these which are not your forte. Go and download it if you are interested.
Some company was demoing parallel Linda for Linux.
Objectivity was plugging their databases, LSF their cluster management software, and the portland group their compilers.
Totalview is considering porting their parallel debugger to Linux. Its a nice product. If you want it, holler to them. They are looking for consumers. They were there at the BOF and there was considerable demand.
Other groups
Ameslab had a booth with posters on a new network layer called Bobnet which provides 97MBps on Fast Ethernet ping pong, with lower latencies than TCP IP. They also have a lite version of MPI which provides a large amount of MPI's functionality with way more bandwidth than MPICH. It runs both on TCP and BobNet, which has a VIA compatibility layer.
Legion(see up) Fermilab--posters about their analysis farms.
The High Performance Debugging Forum of the Ptools consortium was interested in gdb's thread support for their parallel debugger. Whats the status of kernel thread debugging on Linux? I believe one has to use SmartGDB for user level thread support. Their reference implementations are going to be on SP-2 and SGI Origin2000. I believe there will be source. They will be using the debugging infrastructure in Nasa's p2d2 debugger which uses dbx and gdb to do the real work.
Clusters
Compaq demonstrated a 4-way alpha Beowulf cluster at their booth, running Xaos. This in itself, I thought was pretty important. They said that there was active consideration on porting the D-Unix compilers to Linux, and that we ought to watch for Fibre-Channel drivers from them.
Dell was trying to convince folks to use NT with Interix--SC98 being a unix-vendor dominated conference. I walked up to them and said that we'd like pre-installed Linux machines. They arent doing that for servers on a per server basis as yet, but I think they want feedback on this issue. So if you use Dell's in any measure, write to them.
Parlalogic and Alta were demonstrating commercial Beowulves. Parlalogic has a nice fortran based parallelizing tool called Bert. Douglas Eadline was there from Paralogic, and they hosted Robert Hart from Red Hat, who made the prediction that robust fail-over(wolfpack style) clustering is a year away.
Real World Computing Partnership(from Japan) had multiple Linux clusters, and were giving away there MPICH-PM and S-CoreD clustering software. Its not redistributible, but source is available. The S-CoreD cluster operating system layer implements monitoring and other such stuff, and provides gang- scheduling using SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals. The cluster uses a Myrinet interconnect, and boasts upto 100MegaByte's per second bandwidth using their Active messages layer(PM).They had a gorgeous 3D loadmeter on their monitors. Very slick booth and stuff.
SPADE is a industry-academia partnership from Brazil making commercial Beowulves. They use myrinet and fast ethernet interfaces, and a PAPERS network(see next para) for synchronization. They are writing weather forecasting software and selling the machines commercially to weather stations. They expect to make some of their tools available open-source. They had a beautiful Java console for their network, involving SNMP, ping, and proprietary monitoring backends.
PAPERS from purdue demonstrated their parallel port low latency interconnect (you can construct one from Radio Shack Parts!). They have a API which does shared memory barrier synchrinization in 1.5microsec as opposed to overhead for a OS lock(4 microsecs). This API is extended to their low latency interconnect. They were using their interconnect for a video-wall--a set of projectors displaying different parts of a image computed in parallel. You could use mice to move little Tux's around on the background image and the positions would be recomputed in parallel with the edge communications over there interconnect. Cool stuff.
Panel
I left before the panel
Other
There was Cray, IBM, Sun, HP, Compaq, Fujitsu and others. The only interesting booth was Tera's. Their machine is $1million a processor, with No cache. Very good parallelizing compilers, and very good programming tools. Since there is no cache, the compilers are very important, as each processor can spawn 128 threads each thread with its own registers and counters. Whilst one is out fetching from memory, the other thread will compute, thus masking \ latency--and thats why each thread needs its own registers. A very interesting architecture.
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Avalon Upgraded to 140 Processors
Kevin Postlewaite writes "Everybody's favorite Beowulf Class computer Avalon has been upgraded to 140 processors (from 70). It now runs the parallel Linpack benchmark at 47.7 Gflops (up from 19.7). " -
Beowulf Cluster in top 500 SuperComputers
Several people sent me a press release about the Avalon super computer. $150,000 worth of off the shelf parts, and it scored #315 on the top 500 Supercomputers list. Alpha chips and a Linux OS managed 19.2 billion floating point ops/sec. Very cool. Can santa fit these things down my chimney? -
19.2 Gflops Linux/Alpha Beowulf Cluster
Shane McLaughlin writes in with this link and says "19.2 GigaFlops, distributed supercomputer? The ultimate linux dream machine, 40 nodes with a rated performance of 19.2GFlops. NT peaks out at 4 processors, Wolfpack, eat yer heart out. Just new, so not much tech info up yet Take a look at their 1996 effort, x86s for $27,000 for 1.2 Gigaflops at this link" -
19.2 Gflops Linux/Alpha Beowulf Cluster
Shane McLaughlin writes in with this link and says "19.2 GigaFlops, distributed supercomputer? The ultimate linux dream machine, 40 nodes with a rated performance of 19.2GFlops. NT peaks out at 4 processors, Wolfpack, eat yer heart out. Just new, so not much tech info up yet Take a look at their 1996 effort, x86s for $27,000 for 1.2 Gigaflops at this link"