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Affordable Supercomputers
Brian writes "CNN Online has a story on a company that has introduced supercomputers for under $100,000 and they hope to have four-layer supercomputers for under $4,000 before long. The computers use AMD processors and according to the company's Web site, they come running Linux. I can't wait to add one of these to my collection!" As always, we've heard about Patmos before. Check out an older story here.
What they describe as being "200MHz" is the bus speed, and that is a fairly different matter. If you look at those AMD K6 chips, they're connecting to motherboards that have bus speeds of (in these inflated days!) either 66MHz or 100MHz. That's rather less than 200MHz.
The bus technology getting billed as a "200MHz thing" is the Alpha EV7, which suggests that the CPUs in these systems are either:
- Compaq Alpha, or
- AMD Athlon.
I'd sort of anticipate the latter, but it is surprising that they are not trumpeting their use of whichever CPU they are using.The paucity of solid technical information and the proliferation of TM-this and TM-that is a bit distressing.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
AMD processors with SMp Linux, what a joke. Can you say PowerPC 7400 G4's with OS 10 or another UNIX variant.
If the version of OS X Server I saw last spring is any indication, OS 10 is a total non-competitor. It had serious problems even compiling fairly generic ANSI C code (lmbench, MPICH).
And the G4 is not all it's cracked up to be. There's not enough memory bandwidth on the PC100 bus to sustain anything close to the FP rates Motorola and Apple like to point at. There are also no vectorizing compilers for the PPC 7400; the Metrowerks compiler will do inline AltaVec assembler, but it doesn't recognize vectoizable loops autmoatically and it doesn't support the linga franca of scientific computing (i.e. Fortran).
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Several months ago Slashdot featured a supercomputer-on-a-desktop that used on-the-fly reprogrammable FPGAs (Xilinx chips almost certainly) to gain massive speedup over conventional microprocessors. It featured a dynamic pre-compilation stage that fulfils a function very similar to that of the Code Morphing Software in the Transmeta products. (This general area is called Reconfigurable Computing, RC.)
Has anyone heard any more about the company that was manufacturing the supercomputers? I seem to have lost the URL.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I think linux is going to have to make sure that all its scalability issues are sorted out before this really kicks off. As the Mindcraft survey showed (yes, I know the tests were flawed, but the underlying problems are still there), linux has some scalability problems. Admittedly, these are being fixed, but until such time as they are fixed, Solaris, IRIX and even *BSD are going to be better options for large scale "supercomputers".
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200 Mhz K6-2's arnt in the market anymoe.. a query on pricewatch for K6-2 300mhz's turned up chips for 27 dollars.. He had 11 processors.. that's well under 300 dollars..
I will use 100 processors,
--- which would be 2700 bucks.
Chasis -- 32 * 100 -- 3200
Fiber net cards == 150 * 100 - 15000
RAM - 64 (say 64 mb is 64 bucks) * 100 - 6400
HD/mb& misc - (need not be fast and need not be that much) 100 * 100 = 10000
Total == USD $37300 (37% of what he quoted). And this is with 100 300mhz k6-2's instead of 11 200mhz k6-2's.
All prices quoted from pricewatch's listings (specially CPU & NIC).
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A (true) cautionary tale: company A develops some software for company B. Company B provides several high-end big money machines (multiple pentiums, hot-swappable SCSI raid array, rack mounted, etc).
The development process (which goes through a couple phases) takes more than two years. When the project is done, Company B will probably abandon the servers because (relative to what's available today) the machines are no longer worth the shipping costs it would take to come and get them.
The moral of the story is a corollary to Moore's law: the power of today's high-end super computer will very soon be mached by tomorrow's mid-range workstation (and then low-end home system, and then embedded chips...)
My Palm VII has more RAM in it than the main frame machine I wrote code for as an undergrad < mumble> years ago...
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
The NBoxen in a Perpetua are inter-connected and are part of a network that has a minimum of three layers consisting of an input layer (explicate), a middle layer (implicate) and an output layer (explicate). The middle layer (implicate) is hidden and cannot be directly observed from outside. The input and output nodes (Limbix) shape the specific problem.
The cool phenomena of a PATMOS Perpetua is that its remarkable neural network operates in the hidden or "implicate" NBoxens that are the mathematical forum in which the system inter-relates the "explicate" input and output signals. This is the forum in which the decisive calculations operate by which complex, non-linear relationships are learned and the solutions evolve.
The "implicate" layer is able to deal with the very "noisy" data as it searches for patterns hidden in the noise. Because of the configuration of Perpetua and the presence of Limbix controllers, the system can deal with both the data which responds to hard laws and the end data which is not inimitable to hard laws because the underlying process is unknown.
It is my veiw that there would be no golden world of linux without Richard Stallman(RMS). I and my company support the Free Software Foundation, and belive that RMS should be nominated for the Nobel Prize. To tread on the principles laid down by RMS would in my view be anti-social behavior. In the near future we will be posting our source code under the GPL.
When we pushed the button on the spreadsheet and realized that we could sell super computers for the prices that came up, we had to rush to the side of our Chief Financial Officer, a Harvard MBA, and hold him up.
While we appreciate the exuberance of the press we must tell you they occasionaly make critical errors. One of which goes to the speed of the CPUs of our device. Indeed our choice is Athlon. For those who question the scalibility of linux, we agree with you. Take a look at DSI at Indiana University. While we would like to go into greater detail in this matter, we must abide by certain biological principles regarding gestation. We have a lot more ideas about a co-processer option, which may allow us all to have our cake, and eat it too. Finally, certain statements in the press bring a smile to my face, "Super Computers for the Rest of Us" is one such statement.
Perpetua is a super computer that can act as a high availability server, and they do go past 8 nodes. In fact we can make a Perpetua of any amount of nodes you want. I wait for sledgehammer with baited breath
Sincerely,
James A. Gatzka
CEO Patmos International Corp.
(Disclaimer: I work for Ohio Supercomputer Center but don't speak for them, yada yada yada...)
This seems to be aimed more at the high availability (HA) market than the high performance computing (HPC) market. Comparing with a Compaq Himilaya is *not* a way to win points with HPC centers, because HPC centers don't buy Himilayas -- they buy mostly various breeds of Crays, SGI Origins, and IBM SPs, with a smattering of Beowulf clusters and large Sun configurations as well. The Patmos site also doesn't talk about floating point performance, which the HPC centers consider critical.
The Patmos site never really describes their systems as "supercomputers" (although the phrase "super system is used once or twice), so this seems like bad reporting and/or a misunderstanding of what a supercomputer really is on CNN's part.
(In case you're wondering what I consider a supercomputer, I personally think a super is anything capable of multiple GFLOPS that is used for scientific computations.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
A "supercomputer", by a more professional definition is a computer that runs at least 100 times faster than your "average" computer. Often, its more like 1000. Mainstream news agencies like CNN, CNET, etc. seem to like to use this word for just about anything more than 8 processors. SGI doesn't even consider its Origin line to be a supercomputer until it passes at least 32 processors.
As far as this product goes, I think it's got a good place in the dedicated server business, and possibly some low end batch computation. I do have to admit, using AI concepts for system monitoring was a pretty neat trick!