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Cray Linux Beowulf Clusters

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the its-pretty-so-pretty dept.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that Cray has announced that they will be selling their own Linux Beowulf clusters. They're apparently gonna be working with Scyld on the software, and they of course have some crazy hardware (of course the name is SuperCluster, but I guess stupid names are nothing new ;)

10 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Beowulf clusters... by fgodfrey · · Score: 5
    The big difference is service. SGI is not (and I suspect neither are the other vendors you mention) "just doing a wget for the latest beowulf tarball". When you buy a cluster from us, you can get a whole mess of stuff like service contracts. Also, when you take the thing out of the box (or large wooden shipping crate) it will "just work" and have a bunch of software like load balancing and batch scheduling with it. Yeah, this stuff is almost all open source and yeah, you can get it free on the net (probably off our website among other places) and for the majority of the people reading this, that is enough for them to build their own cluster in their spare time. The problem is businesses don't wanna do this. So the point is to add value to Linux/Beowulf/other stuff and resell it and make a proffit. Since one company does it, more follow.

    Cray has an incredible reputation in the HPC business so I suspect that some places will buy clusters from them simply because they are Cray and have provided excellent service in the past.

    --
    Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
  2. If Shaft were running the company... by G-Man · · Score: 5

    ...he could call it the Bad MuthaCluster.

    (insert rimshot here)

  3. -1, Troll by tstorm · · Score: 5

    Come on Taco, what's next, a story about how a set worker for Episode II accidentally spilled hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants? Christ, why not just rename this Trolldot and be done with it?

  4. That's kind of weird. by hexdef6 · · Score: 3

    Cray making beowolf clusters, huh? Does that seem a little strange to anyone else? I mean, if you are going to buy a Cray, buy a Cray! Of course, I guess being able to say that you have a Cray AND a Beowolf cluster is serious bragging rights

    Jaeger
    www.JohnQHacker.com
    GodHatesCalvinists.com

    1. Re:That's kind of weird. by kilgore_47 · · Score: 4

      I hear these can do an infinite loop in 2.3 seconds!

      --
      ___
      The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
  5. Re:Latency by fgodfrey · · Score: 5
    Yes, it is. Which is why it probably won't be connected by ethernet. There are a variety of interconnects such as Myrinet coming on the market now that do something called "OS Bypass". Without too many boring details, basically this allows you to map a page on the local side that "pushes" data to the remote side when you do a write to it. It allows you to send data over the network without doing a call to the OS every time. That is actually what kills you on ethernet, not the fact that ethernet itself is all that slow (especially gigabit).

    That said, at least for the time being, a single memory image system like the Cray T3D/T3E or the Origin line from us (SGI) has better latencies by a lot than Myrinet.

    The interesting thing is that as these "OS Bypass" interconnects develop, they are going to get more and more like a standard memory interconnect in a single memory image system and we'll come full circle. But I digress.....

    --
    Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
  6. I Need Your Help by Fleet+Admiral+Ackbar · · Score: 4
    Well, everyone, I have been trying for a couple of minutes now, and I am ashamed to admit it, but I am completely unable to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.


    I think perhaps my Beoimpotence may have something to do with watching 75% of that Christopher Lambert "Beowulf" movie. Thank G-d the videotape broke. If it had been a DVD, I might have gone insane.

    --
    Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
  7. Re:Which Cray is Weird? by Durinia · · Score: 3
    Good lineage post - I'm going to have to nit-pick, though...

    The Origin (MIPS-based) line was never a Cray product. SGI developed it in conjunction with the DASH project at Stanford.

    Also, interestingly enough, Cray #4 is actually very close to Cray #1...through the sale and un-sale to SGI, a lot of the extra stuff was stripped back off. Tera bought the name, yes, but they also brought their employee total from ~50 to ~950.

  8. Re:Cray is dead. by Durinia · · Score: 3
    Hang on there, cowboy. Perhaps you should look at some data before pronouncing the Cray-ons fit for burial.

    They've won two straight Supercomputing product-of-the-year awards with their SV1 and T3E lines, they have a couple of very highly anticipated (in the HPC community) product releases coming in the next year or two (the MTA-2 and SV2), and, unlike their ex-parent company (SGI), they're actually profitable.

    The "dead for almost a decade" you're thinking of probably is related to the fact that they were sucked into SGI for the last 5 years of the 90s. It's hard to hear anything about "Cray", when nobody calls them "Cray" anymore.

  9. Re:Cray is dead. by Durinia · · Score: 3
    In the early 90s, they got too big. When they started out, HPC was a big GROWING market. Around that time, it started to flatten out, and investors aren't real thrilled when you anticipate growth, and it doesn't show. The market for their machines was (and is) still there, it just wasn't growing nearly as quickly.

    I think the "new" company has much better focus, and knows what its strengths and weaknesses are. Hopefully, with this new Linux/Alpha clustering, they aren't starting to branch out too far again like they did back then.