World's Fastest Macintosh Cluster

gabeman-o writes: "The Grupo de Lasers e Plasmas has created the fastest Apple G4 cluster. The cluster runs on 16 Dual PowerPC G4/450, 32 processors, 12GB of RAM, .5TB of space, and Mac OS 9. Apparently, they have utilized the AppleSeed technology developed by UCLA. According to the website, the cluster will be used for simulating plasmas. Not too shabby!"

Comments

.. parent makes good points

[victim]

Sorry, I got ranty on this. To summarize, the parent article makes some good points, the previous replies are too extreme in their criticism. I supply better anecdotal evidence than them. :-)

For CFD the altivec units will be heavily used, it is correct to use them for comparing speed to PIIIs. There may be a case where it matches 50 dual PIIs, but that sounds extreme.

I just bought three lowend Gateway 2U rackmount boxes. They come in at ~$2200 for a single 800MHz PIII which will be slower than the dual 533MHz mac at ~$2500. That certainly meets `almost comparable'.

Neither of these machines are very cheap computers. There definately is a quality problem when you get into very cheap computers. There are applications for them, but if your diagnostic time is worth much, then I believe it pays to buy better hardware. (Plus you don't bleed when you have to open them up and add memory or drives. Once you get above the nasty low end machines they take time to deburr the stampings. My brother runs a metal working factory and their worst injury this year has been an IT guy that stumbled while holding a cheap PC and sliced several fingers to the bone.)

The new Macs do come with gigabit ethernet (although I don't think those old 450s had gigabit) and an OS. That gateway price is a bare machine. I put Linux on `for free', but the 2.4 kernel series (which I needed for iptables) had bugs in the interrupt routing for the chipset and it took me weeks of effort to get it all worked out into a stable configuration (manifested as a AIC-7xxx problem, took a while to find the interrupt controller problem). I knew I should have bought a 4th scratch box.

Gigabit ethernet hubs are still $250/port, but that will come down quickly. I remember when I bought a Powermac and thought it was just plain silly to put a 10/100 adapter in it, only servers could afford to have 100mbit ports. In 12 months all my new hubs where 100mbit.

I've got loads of Apples and loads of PCs. The apple hardware failure rate is less than half our PC hardware failure rate. Depending on the cost of a failure (in terms of ruined work, lost work, diagnosis, and repair) I do lean toward Macs because of their better reliability. (And before we get into a flame war on your reliable PC... I'm sure there are reliable models of PCs, but I need a vendor I can count on to make every model I might buy reliable. I can't look at historical data and say "look, here is a model that was made two years ago that was a good one" because I can't buy that anymore. (And yes, I own a PB5300, I know the counter argument, but Apple fixes it for free whenever it breaks so thats not so bad.))

Re:One day to set up

[marcsiry]

Although Mac OS9 doesn't natively support dual processors, application support for duals can be added via a system extension.

Several Mac OS9 apps are specifically coded to use the second processor... Adobe AfterEffects, Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D, and other graphically intensive apps. Users of those applications appreciate all the cycles they can get.

Since the second processor is dedicated to the single application using it at the time, you usually see pretty high effeciencies for a kludge-- 190% speed increases in those specific apps.

Apple has flirted with duals since 1996's 9600 MP, but it wasn't until OSX that they really made sense.

Not suprising...

[nutty]

When I competed in a sceince fair back in March, amoung other awards I won the "Princeton Plasma Physics Award", an award sponsored by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) here in New Jersey, and as a winner I was given a free tour of the facilities. For those of you who don't know, PPPL is "The hottest place in the Universe", lying at the forefront of Nuclear Power and Plasma research...very cool.

So I was going around the facilites, visiting their $125,000,000 tokamac's and torsotrons and all this crazy equipment (very cool science plamsa physics is, too much to elaborate on here), and I get to the control room, from which they run all their Data Acquisition (DaQ) and such to monitor the expirements, and the room is filled with .... MACS? The engineer giving me the tour explained that it was in the personal interest of most of the researchers. Yes, there were Sun's and other UNIX boxes scattered on the control room floor, but I would look closely, and sure enough, amounst the three or so monitors at each workstation, one of them was hooked up to a mac. There were g4's and g3's scattered all across the floor. Wack.

So yea, Mac's are playing a key role in plasma research, helping achieve effecient fusion, one step at a time.

For another cool plamsa physics project (unrelated to mac's), check out Garrett Young's ISEF project Quasi-Elliptical Torsatron - A Study of Induced Radial Electric Fields and Plasma Turbulence. He is a senior in high school and on the cutting edge of plasma physics research. Quite the talented individual.

Apparently

[evilviper]

It's not that they're trying to set a record, just getting enough power to try and run OS X

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Document Mirror

[evilviper]

Well after 5 hits, the server is barely responsive, so here's the page before the server completely dies:

Researchers at the Grupo de Lasers e Plasmas (GoLP) achieved the first milestone of the GoLP simulation program on Extreme Plasma Physics: the installation of the first Macintosh G4 cluster in Europe, called epp (or ep2), which is based on the AppleSeed paradigm developed at UCLA by Viktor Decyk et al. The epp cluster is capable of delivering over 50 GFlops of peak power, and it is based on 16 Dual PowerPC G4/450, 32 processors, 12 Gigabytes of RAM, 0.5 Terabyte of hard disk space, running Mac OS 9, over 100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet, switched by one Asanté Intracore 8000. This is the fastest Macintosh-based cluster in the World. The installation and set up of this cluster took less than 1 day (including moving the machines to the computer room, unpacking the machines, and making all the cables!), and it did not require previous knowledge of networking: a one-page recipe for Mac OS clusters can be found here (AppleSeed website) (Portuguese translation coming soon). This "supercomputer for the rest of us" will be used for the numerical simulation of plasmas, novel plasma particle acceleration schemes using ultra intense lasers, and relativistic shocks in astrophysics. This work supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. More info available soon (also in Portuguese), as well as science using epp. For more information also contact Luís O.Silva(+351 21 8419 336).

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Re:Some cluck at MacNN

[grammar nazi]

Did you notice the following statement at the bottom:

Note: To build a Beowulf, a Linux-based cluster, we think the following 230-page book is an excellent introduction: T. L. Sterling, J. Salmon, D. J. Becker, and D. F. Savarese,How to Build a Beowulf, [MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1999

I think they are making fun of the difficulty of building a Beowulf cluster since they refer to the 250 page book at the end of their single page OS 9 clustering guide.

Instead of calling it a cluster...

[glebite]

What about calling it an orchard?

Re:I don't understand...

[3G]

The G4s that Apple sells don't come in a rackmount config, but you can put them into one pretty easily.

Re:Some cluck at MacNN

[glenmark]

I am said "cluck" (odd term).

I don't know about old (I'm 33), but I am a bitter VMS system manager. As I've repeated on this forum many times before (just about any time a story about Beowulf or AppleSeed is posted), that bitterness stems from usage of the word "cluster" in contexts which fall far afield from the original usage of the term by the inventors of clustering, DIGITAL's VMS Engineering team, thus diluting the meaning of the term. The casual application of the term to distributed parallel computation arrays, web server farms, or other RAICs (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Computers) incorectly leads many computing neophytes to believe that simply setting up a Beowulf array (much better term for this than cluster) or something similar gives them the same level of technological functionality as that provided by a state-of-the-art OpenVMS cluster. Nothing could be further from the truth!

"What's missing?", one might ask. Here is what I feel constitutes a cluster. (Note -- none of this is meant as flame-bait - just trying to rectify some misinformation which has become pervasive over the last few years. I regard Beowulf and AppleSeed as useful tools. I simply feel that it is inappropriate to refer to them as clusters.)

• A Distributed Lock Manager, critical for much clustering functionality. All file operations, regardless of whether using standard C I/O routines or OS-specific I/O APIs, should automatically and transparently be mediated by the DLM. Without this functionality, one is left with a so-called "share-nothing" cluster, such as that available from Microsoft, thus limiting one to simple failover operation.
• Cluster-wide File System. No file server such as NFS, SMB, or AppleShare involved here. All nodes in the cluster should be able to directly access any disk or tape drive in the cluster. The DLM is critical here for mediating simultaneous accesses.
• Cluster-wide process control, either directly spawing processes on other nodes or through a batch queue system.
• A Connection Manager to ensure that nodes correctly enter or leave the cluster. The CM manages the Quorum mechanism and keeps cluster transition times to a minimum.
• Shared System Disk. Multiple nodes should be able to boot from a common system disk. This greatly simplifies management.
• Single security and management domain. NT almost got that right, except for the dependance upon domain controllers and that domain database replication nonsense. Many flavors of *nix can be configured to get into the ballpark on this with add-on tools. If one can't transparently manage any node in the cluster from any other node, you don't have a cluster (and I'm not talking about something as trivial as spawning a new Telnet session).
• Cluster-wide Process Control API. At least Beowulf and AppleSeed provide this much, which is a step in the right direction, although the API used is a bit primative.
• Mixed Architecture Support. Shouldn't matter what hardware a given node is running on, as long as it is supported by the OS and the applications. All cluster communications protocols should be platform-neutral. Just out of curiosity, can one mix ix86, Alpha, and PPC nodes in a Beowulf array, thereby giving one the ability to divy up processing chores based upon which processor is best suited to a given task (Floating Point vs. Integer speeds for instance) or for gradual migration of the array to a different platform? (This isn't flambait -- I'm honestly curious.)
• Rolling Upgrade Support. It should be possible to configure a cluster such that one can perform OS or application upgrades some number of nodes at a time, thus negating the need to bring down the entire cluster.
• Parallel I/O support. All nodes can issue I/O requests to storage devices at the same time. This ties back in with the DLM and Cluster-wide file system.
• Interconnect failover. All cluster communications traffic should route itself through whatever interconnect pathway has the lowest latency. (Hmmm, FiberChannel is a bit congested right now. Time to route through the 100baseT connection.)
• High-end scaling. This is where I snicker at NT's so-called clustering solution. Two nodes only? Hah? (That is finally improving, but they still have a long way to go.) Beowulf and AppleSeed do okay in this department, although they have nothing that compares to the Galaxy Software Architecture.
• Load Balancing. Generically available to most server operating systems these days, although usually through a separate hardware based unit.
• Cluster Alias. Can be faked for any OS with DNS tricks or by sticking the cluster or array behind a NAT router.