Linux And Los Lobos Supercomputer
DocRea writes: "Using Linux, IBM and the University of New Mexico will connect 256 two-processor IBM Intel-based servers with high-speed Myrinet cards to
create a 512-processor machine capable of 375 billion calculations
per second. The computer, called Los Lobos, will primarily be used
for scientific purposes, but will be adapted by IBM to provide the
"cluster" approach to running software for business tasks and e-
commerce. "
We have been building AMD PC clusters for several years now, ever since the K6-2. The Athlons are especially impressive. Our latest cluster, KLAT2 (Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2), should have its 66 Athlons chugging away by April. We demo'd our
;-)
first Athlon cluster at SC99 in November 1999.
Although we have used SMPs as well (e.g., PIII
quads from Dell), modern processors are memory
bandwidth starved, and simple SMPs magnify the
problem. I think a lot of cluster designs try to use SMP nodes to compensate for overspending on the inter-node network. I prefer to do the network carefully and use uniprocessor nodes.
PS: I'm the author of the Parallel processing HOWTO and my first Linux PC cluster predates
Beowulf (it was in Feb. 1994)... being good
and even being first doesn't necessarily give
you the highest visibility. Remember that when
you think of AMD's Athlon.
PPS: I used to be faculty at Purdue, but have
recently moved to the University of Kentucky.
Our new web site is http://aggregate.org/