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SGI Installs First Itanium Cluster At OSC
Troy Baer writes: "SGI and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) have announced the installation of the first cluster using Itanium processors. The system consists of 73 SGI 750 nodes, each with two Itanium 733MHz procs and 4GB of memory, connected by Myrinet 2000 and Ethernet. Software includes Linux/ia64, SGI's ia64 compiler suite, MPICH/ch_gm, OpenPBS, and Maui Scheduler."
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The story has been out for months and people obviously haven't been paying attention or at least have failed to see just how concerted this effort is. This technology isn't new, but it's just a small part of the whole if you know where to look.
...
The new systems sound great, but they're tiny compared to what it's going to be like when the GRID is up and running.
What the story fails to mention is that this system is likely to be connected to the other GRID environments in the States and the new ones in Europe at which stage you wont be talking about just 4 super computer centres but nearly a hundred, each with several Tflops of processing power and a few petabytes (10**15) of storage.
I would suggest that to put this in the proper perspective you also look at IBM's contract to do the same to 4 sites in the Netherlands, the UK GRID which has 9 sites, the German one which I dont know much about but is fairly advanced and the CERN DataGrid. These are all interconnected with the same people working on several at a time.
Or you could have a look at the top500, find all the supercomputers in Europe & the US which aren't classified or commercial and then figure out what their combined processing power is. You should then have a fair idea just how much processing power there will be in a couple of years time 8)
Now back to the Particle Physics experiments
He gets to play with Linux/SGI clusters now, I'm stuck with Alphas & an O2000 in a back room somewhere.
You can come admin these clusters and I'll go work with your Alphas and Origin 2000.
Of course Intel has the big advantage that if person X doesn't go for 733 Mhz Itanium or even y * 733 Mhz Itaniums, they'll still go for 1.8 GHz Intel P4. I.e. they don't have to sell the Itanium to consumers yet, whereas Apple has to sell the PowerPC. I.e. Intel, like Microsoft, can win by stagnation.
--- What?
IRIX is no longer a first tier operating system. New versions of Oracle (just for example) come out for Solaris and (shudder) HP long before (if ever) they come out for IRIX. IRIX is even starting to lose focus on GNU projects. I don't think they'll ever recover that status. It is a shame. The only bright spot (for me) is that I can pick up an O2 on EBAY pretty cheap.
Hmm. Doesn't say WHICH company.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Sure, they have a great product: The P4! It has a huge memory bandwidth, better than the Itanium, and with a good compiler it can easily do 1.5 flop per clockcycle in double precision arithmetic (3.0 for single precision). This will give you 2.7 gflops in double precision for a 1.8 ghz P4.
Intel has a fantastic product, but compiler support is currently lacking bit.
The P4 is actually faster than the Athlon for scientific computing, except for the compiler fact, and this IS very important. The P4 looses to the Athlon simply by the reason that the compilers can not use the vector instructions properly. The chip itself is faster.
Why anyone would be an Itanium instead of a dual P4/Athlon beats me, it is supposed to only be a research chip and not really a production chip. It has less on-chip cache than a Celeron (128kb total)!! Sure it's packaged with a lot of sram, but still.
Intel tells everyone to wait for the McKinley, but just look where the P4 and Athlon will be at the time that chip rolls out in full production. It will loose out just as the Itanium is doing now.
http://planetcluster.org/article.php?sid=41&mode=t hread&order=0 :Information about the cluster itself and the nodes
Make It Secret . Free JavaScript implementation of AES for your browser
That would be M$... =]
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Hey everybody,
I've had exactly two epiphanies in my life. One was the first time I saw an Amiga, back in 1985. I knew I would have one.
The other time, it was 1993 or 1994. I was installing a video projection system into a hotel meeting room. The computer to which I had to connect the video projector was a funky little purplish pizza-box with the name "Indy".
I fell in love.
I still don't have an old Indy or Indigo - or even any UNIX workstations - so far, I've kept my cravings in check with Solaris 8 x86, FreeBSD and Linux.
There was something running on that Indigo that day. I don't remember it very well, but I remember the name: Music Box. In the window, there was a picture of a woman, and cartoon musical notes would fall out of her mouth as eerie but beautiful music played in the background. For several hours while I aligned the video projectors in the room, it was on the screens, 10.5x17 foot image of an IRIX X session, with that eerie and hypnotic image and sound. It freaked out my boss, too. :)
It looked like something you'd just leave on the screen of your computer to amuse passers-by. Anyone have any idea what it was, or whether it's available for anything but MIPS/IRIX? A Google search didn't prove too helpful.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Sorry, but there's nothing overpriced about the Origin 3000 family. I saw a quote for a 16-processor O3400 with 16 GB of RAM; the bottom line at list price was around $500,000.
That seems totally competitive to me.
And since I'm posting anonymously anyway, you might be interested to know that SGI is planning to release a new product any minute now. (It was announced to the developer and integrator channels this week). It's a four-processor (MIPS, natch) server in a 2 RU package. They're calling it the Origin 300.
But the cool part is going to be an interconnect product codenamed Sprouter. It lets you take 2 to 8 Origin 300 systems with 4 procs each and connect them using NumaLink (formerly CrayLink) into a single system image of up to 32 processors.
At, it's projected, half the price of a 32-processor Origin 3000 system. And for my kind of programming anyway, single-system-image beats the pants off that Myrinet stuff.
The O300 has 2 66/64 PCI slots, so that's enough expansion to let you attach your basic I/O devices like fibre channel RAIDs and high-speed networking and stuff. Each server comes with USCSI3 built-in, if anybody still uses that stuff. ;-)
Not everybody needs a medium-scale single-system-image IRIX machine, but I personally do a lot of ImageVision library programming. And ImageVision, being multithreaded at the core, loves big CPU counts. So for me, and people with needs like mine, it's going to be a very cool fall.
oh yeah, that would be fucking great wouldn't it? why not just appoint Bill G as King of the whole fucking USA and rename MS "Computer Inc.". American's are supposed to be in favour of freedom aren't they? where's the freedom in a monopoly?
I bet they only want to beat the sith out of the top10 seti@home users by sending in packages every 10 minutes.... ;-)
.sigh
AMD's-x86 64Bit.... ... Need I say more?
imprecise exceptions
IA64 has pretty clean and easy asm, but debugging is a complete nightmare. It's certainly better than x86, but give me MIPS64 or MIPS R1X000 any day.
One only wonders if this would be posted on Slashdot if the OS was Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter. :) Just a thought...
SGI can not be judged on Oracle support or other database support (although from personal experience Red Brick (a data warehouse database) kicks ass on an Origin 3000)). SGI is specifically targeting the scientific, creative, analytical and technical users. These users use floating point, or need very large single system image (NOT clusters) or need the graphics that SGI provides. V6/8/10/12 graphics provides 12 bits per component with 10bit D-A's in an Octane. This is VERY unusual in the graphics industry. This has enabled human vision research not possible on any other machine. SGI workstations (Octane2), servers and Onyxes have HDIO (Hidefinition TV I/O cards). You need a LOT of bandwidth to handle uncompressed 1020p I/O. Onyxes have at the moment 256MB of texture memory per pipe. This enable volume visualisation impossible on any other graphics card. This is very important for some forms of medical imaging and for Oil/Gas exploration (BUT NOT ALASKA PLEASE!) SGI has a 1024 processor single system image (NOT a cluster) running at NASA AMES and has shipped multiple 256/128/512 proc SINGLE SYSTEM IMAGE Origin 3000s. Scientists like single system image machines. The quote from one of the nasa guys is it is just like using a desktop workstation, only a bit faster :-)
These are not ordinary machines and are not targeted at people running Oracle.
A guy asks a question, and all a f'n dork like yourself can do is nitpick about blue vs. purple? Get a f'n life you loser
hahah that's too funny... He didn't increase SGI's profits, but he sure as hell increased those of the place he now works at ;)
Are you new to computers? The memory you get from malloc isn't actually allocated until you access it. There is no translation for the pages at first, so the first access gets a page fault at which point the OS maps a PTE to it. And, no, you could not achieve that with your first 5GB hard drive because most likely you were running IA-32 which supports only 32 bit linear addresses. On Linux a process has a maximum of 3GB of memory so that's the maximum you would be able to allocate (subtracting the tiny overhead from malloc, as well as the other code and data the process has).
http://www.overclockershideout.com/customer/MTP/
Overclocker kiddies will do anything for an extra 8 frames-per-second.
Now here's a scary thought... how about the overclockers team up with cluster builders??
There's not much you need XIO for these days. GSN is only available in an XIO card right now, but the PCI-64 is supposedly coming soon. SGI's digial video options are only available in XIO, but you wouldn't use those with an O300 anyway. Hell, even OC-12 is available in a PCI card now.
Wonder which version of IRIX it'll run? 6.5.13 + patches? 6.5.14?
Given the September release timeframe, I'd guess 6.5.13. O300 has basically the same guts that O3000 has-- R14000 processors, Bedrock memory controller, and so on. I'd be willing to bet money that it'll run the same binary kernel that boots the O3000s.
Patches are an absolute no-no these days. Unless you've got a support issue that has to be resolved before the next maintenance release, general-release patches to the OS are expressly forbidden.
Troy, How much power and A/C is required to run this 146 Itanium processor cluster? I have heard that 1 itanium node uses two 800 Watt power supplies and generates 6174 BTUs/Hr. I am guessing that you required 116.8 KiloWatts of power and 37.5 Tons of A/C. Please correct me if I am wrong. What did you have to do at your site to support this cluster?
The difference is that pro64 is a modern compiler using very advanced compiler techniques, put together by some top notch compiler gurus. gcc on the other hand is an archaic piece of shit that couldn't optimize its way out of a paper bag.
actually, he IS the guy in charge of those definitions.
I haven't done work on the IA64 yet, but I have done work with a software pipelined DSP, the TI TMS320C6701. I found out the following things about compilers for such beasts:
1) The compilers are MUCH more complex and therefore have complex bugs when compiling complex loops
2) C/C++ are not good enough languages to express enough hints to the compiler to allow it to optimize properly.
3) Therefore, C/C++ require non-portable language extensions for these hints.
4) Advanced usage of C++ inline templates CAN help, but are still not as flexible as you want in terms of allowing the best re-ordering of code possible.
For example, you HAVE to use the new 'restrict' keyword to give the compiler hints about un-aliased pointers. pragmas or similiar hacks are required to give the compiler hints about how many times a loop will be executed - for example, telling the compiler that although a loop is repeated based on a separate run-time variable or parameter, it is guaranteed to never be 0 and will always be a multiple of 8 loops. That kind of thing allows the compiler to really do a good job on the loops - but is not part of the C/C++ standards.
In my opinion, C and C++ are too 'low level' and restrictive in terms of allowing the compiler to re-order the code to be really effective on non-typical architectures like these. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any other options. I would expect that a functional language like OCaml would allow the compiler much more freedom to do a better job - Once there is real support in OCaml for the ia64....
Also, I highly doubt that GCC is going to be the best or even a very good compiler for ia64 for some time. I'll be happy if i'm wrong though!
My opinion is that you did the right thing by diving into the assembly.
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
the nsf are on our side, let unatco suffer some ultimate hacking from them.
This was one example of low level optimizations, another one is giving hints to different branches (both target and outcome of branch conditions). This is also best done by the compiler (at least the branch target hints), and works even better if you can supply the compiler with profiling information. You can also give data prefetch hints and specify which cache level different prefetch data should go into.
Another example of when you might need to do asm is when you do SMP. The reason being that different load and store instructions are given semantics of how the are to behave in a multiprocessor environment: you want acuire semantics on this load, release semantics on this store, fence semantics here, undefined semantics there, etc. I can't see how the compiler would be able to generate correct assembly in this case (unless it is modified so that you can attach some new attributes to your variables and types).
Then there is this whole plethora of floating point stuff that I won't mention because I don't know shit about it.
Hmm, reading your post again I see that I didn't really answer your question, and most of my ranting about doing asm coding ended up with the conclusion that having the compiler do all the nasty stuff is probably better anyway. I guess I'd better shut up now.
give me a 4D/35, IRIX 4.05 on tape, and leave me alone
"Were they bought, and has their line continued??" Yes, they were bought by..... SGI (huh?) and their line continued in the form of the "SGI" ZX10. Insane, isn't it?
How the heck do you close-source public television?
Why is the parameter to malloc only 32 bit? This is a 64 bit architecture, you should be able to allocate more than 4GB.
i like the mindless trolling and the moronic comments
The Arkie Libertarian
Slashdot is *still* using the old cube logo, rather than the new "sgi" logo. Sure the new logo sucks and the old logo is quite cool, but it's time to move on. The old days are long gone. Like the rest of the 'new' SGI, there is nothing special about the SGI 750 Itanium box, it's the same box with the same Intel reference board that HP, Dell, and others are selling.
SiliconGraphics has left the building. The "hip new" SGI is here. Quit using the old logo, it reflects a much cooler company that no longer exists.
Great comment!
Now that SGI is about to be lost would *someone* please contact Dr. James H. Clark?!? I would hate to see this company going down just like Symbolics and Thinking Machines before.
Unfortunately, this seems to mark Intel's latest attempt to push an overpriced, substandard product at us. The P4 was crippled from the begining and is only just now begining to show any promise. The PIII at 1.13 and 1.2 Ghz is finally available 8 months after the recall of their failed 1.13 processor. Even their purchase of Alpha from compaq seems to be just stock propping because the original creators of the alpha are now working for AMD. The reason Compaq was willing to sell in the first place is the second generation alpha has been subjected to over three years of delays because they simply did not have the engineering talent to improve a ten year old design.
The talented engineeers are working for AMD, built the athlon and are working on the sledgehammer.
Before anyone jumps to Intel's defence, like they need defending as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla, keep this in mind:
Craig Barret warned "This was a year of record annual revenue and earnings; yet, slowing economic conditions impacted fourth quarter growth and are causing near-termuncertainty,". He was faced with AMD going from 10% market share to 34% market share in a year. Wall street took barret's word as gospel that the entire market was in decline and not just Intel's market share. Intel is a market bellwether so we all got laid off. Just so Intel would not have to admit that AMD had a better product. Nasty business. Intel does not have a great product and they are reckless with their power.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
On an anonymous, cowardly, note :
SGI was not the first to have an Itanium cluster.
HP has (internally) a cluster of 16 4-cpu Itanum servers hooked up with gigabit ethernet.
When did Intergraph go under? My video editor friend just got one last year. Were they bought, and has their line continued??
True HPC Coder:
Myrinet interfaced via PCI? Argh! SN-IA won't be here soon enough!
l33t d00d with an overclocked athlon:
SCHWEEEET, a BEOWULF CLUSTER! With an IDE RAID on each node I could have years of DiVX movies on that!!!
Can anyone imagine a Beowulf cluster of "Where is the old SGI " laments ?
c'mon. It took MS that long to get some competent OS engineers working for them. Hopefully this time the process will be faster. 64-bit VMS!! Go, Cutler, go!!
About three weeks ago, I got one of those SGI Insider newsletters in my email, with an unbeatable offer for one of their 1600SW monitors. I really wanted an Apple Cinema Display, of course, but for $550 plus tax and shipping, it sure was tough to beat; they're still about $900 on eBay.
I placed my order straight away, and it still has not arrived. The reason? During this crisis period for the company, where everything is falling apart, they are apparently changing their sales systems to use the latest version of Oracle. During this transfer, their ordering system is entirely manual. They haven't lost my order (yet), but they did take many more orders than they had available machines for, and they claim to still be straightening out the mess.
I lost even more faith in SGI when I noticed their "configure your SGI system" web page was Windows-based. For shame, SGI!
Part of this is, of course, the kind of weird degradation that occurs at any big company. But I can't say I have any faith in the company that makes that kind of blunder. Changing your ordering systems to the extent that operations are severely impacted is just plain stupid; I've never managed a major business, but if I were, the minute I had problems of that severity, I'd go straight back to the old system and send developers of the new one back to the drawing board. Elementary, surely?
Oh, and even though I am surely a beneficiary of a great monitor deal because of this, they should have dumped all the monitors on eBay, ten or so at a time. They would have made, maybe $ 800 per monitor instead of $600. That's a pretty respectable chunk of change right there.
D
Look inside the o2000 Or even to a certain extent the o200 (haven't looked at teh o3000 series). THes have bandwidth in abundance for shunting data around. 5 GB/s bus rates. The problem is that todays $50000 SGI is outclassed by a desktop machine at best buy inside of three years. You need a hell of a lot of ROI to justify that price tag. They do make some nice stuff though. XFS has been world class, and the boxes teh stuff comes in are amazing (remember the SGI fridge?) ..d
OK, I was not aware of that, but tell me where I can actually buy them. I looked at Dell's site before I posted. If Dell doesn't have them, nobody else does.
The NAS Parallel Benchmarks would seem to indicate you are wrong.
You pointed to the single (type of) benchmark that makes P4 look good, though not because of P4's virtues. P4 has two channels of RDRAM giving it 1600 * 2 = 3200 MB/s of memory bandwidth. The Athlon machine in the benchmark you pointed to had a single channel of DDR DRAM, giving it 2128MB/s of memory bandwidth. Fluid Dynamic simulation is one of the _few_ things that can really take advantage of greater memory bandwidth. Therefore P4 wins this round by riding on Rambus's coat-tails. Prove me wrong. Point me to the same benchmark where both P4 and Athlon have the same type of memory (both support SDRAM now, you know).
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Hm, I don't think ia64 was ever designed to be programed in plain asm. Isn't it very painful to care about that epic stuff by hand?
I want one !!!
I know this is a rhetorical question, but having once spent a lot of time thinking about how to advise them before and during their fall, I'll give you my analysis. Some of this I saw at the time, some aspects I only saw too late. Learn from their mistakes.
Here's what went wrong:
- SGI succumbed to the Innovator's Dilemna. Unwilling to canibalize their high-end graphics, they refused to enter the PC 3D graphics space and left it open for 40+ hungry competitors. Many of their engineers left for said competitors when it was clear SGI was going nowhere. (Jim Clark recognized the dilemna in 1992-1994 by the way and jumped ship himself, a harbinger of things to come.) In fairness, its hard to canabalize a 1-2 billion dollar workstation graphics market in hopes of winning a 50-200 million dollar 3D PC graphics one.
- SGI refused to go to NT early on when they would have had leverage in making the move that could have forced/encouraged MS to adopt OpenGL exclusively for 3D. Instead, they said no to NT for too long, and when they said yes, it was a me-too decision that was later partially reversed in favor of Linux. Rather than recognizing and admitting they'd lost the war and pursuing the best possible terms, they chose, either conciously or through inaction, the "go down fighting, maybe we can still win" route.
- SGI's bread and butter midrange workstation 3D graphics was prone to "good enough" copying by competitors, Sun and HP. SGI's engineers spent a lot of time focusing on developing unique high-performance texture mapping serving 2% of their market (the entertainment sector) rather than on improving geometry engine performance further for the benefit of the biggest 40+% market (CAD).
- SGI's choice of a strategic response to PCs was poor: "We'll have highly differentiated systems" (the O2). Unfortunately, the differentiation (UMA, texture mapping, imaging, system bus architecture) was largely in areas that didn't add much value to their largest segments of customers. They built not what most of their customers wanted, but what the "cool" customers wanted. What most of their customers wanted was lower prices- that's what most of them ended up going to when dumping SGI.
- SGI engineers were late. Whether through lack of focus/discipline, resistance to "impossible" marketing schedules (that turned out to be necessary), choice of agressive cutting-edge/bleeding-edge component technologies that proved hard to debug, whatever. Your pick. Key products in the timeframe you mentioned were late, late, late. The midrange IMPACT graphics were announced June 95 as shipping but in reality didn't really ship for another 6 months, more or less. (In the meantime, Wall Street lost faith in the company as a momentum stock and SGI stock price dropped from its alltime high of 45 down to mid-20s.) Subsequent products also had a tendency of being late (O2, a year later than needed, Visual PC was late, etc.) SGI engineering exhibited a lack of discipline when instead they needed increased focus to adjust from product design cycles of 4 years (traditional workstation graphics) to 6 months (90s PC graphics). In their defense, this wouldn't have been easy. But at least some there knew about this. Which brings us to the last problem I'll go into.
- Arrogance. SGI was arrogant. No PC could beat us. We'll always stay ahead. Sun? HP? Ha! Yeah, we can do low-price graphics, look at Nintendo-64; see a PC beat that! etc, etc. Not everyone at SGI there was, but a heck of a lot were.
--LPP.S. I didn't even get into their server strategy, Cray, and later events. Another time perhaps.
Figure out how much their saving by using gpl-ware. Well gee... Win2K data centre is for large SMP's, and clusters thereof. I would think that each node here would run Adv. Server Instead. So... take your advanced server license cost, multiply by number of nodes, then add a license for a development environment for each user (probably a few thousand of those) and Platform's LSF. Wow! cool! now the software costs more than the hardware. OK we'll have to get a system only half as big. That'll make the economy run real GOOD....
It seems the ones who have been faithful to their commitment to Linux are SGI and IBM. The others have tried it and then decided it was not worth the effort to reach such a small segment of the population.
I'm glad there are still big players in the Linux field, though, it helps forward the cause and the OS and lets people know there IS an alternative. By all means, SUN and other, keep your propriatary stuff available and have that as the default, but allow people the option to choose another OS if they so desire.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
And this is different from SGI or Intel maketing data how?
Actually, better G4 benchmarks are at Black Lab Linux.
Lies about crimes
Correct me if I am wrong...
But hasn't there been a 64 bit version of Linux for a VERY long time - ie, for the Alpha?
What I find interesting (and it is just a personal conspiracy theory of mine, and probably holds zero water) is that it took "this much" time for Intel to release their 64 bit chip - how long have we been hearing about it now? At least 2 years...
Is it just a coincidence that Microsoft finally has a running platform for it just at the time this chip comes to market?
???
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
OSC's Itanium cluster is physically located at the State of Ohio Computing Center (SOCC), which provides all the power and cooling. The power for the cluster is nineteen 30A/220V circuits, which go to a set of Sentry power controllers. The total heat load is about 195k BTU/hr, but the SOCC building is (over-)engineered such that this much of a heat load did not require additional AC capacity.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
This story:
h _s upercomputer_dc_1.html
/. anymore.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010809/tc/tec
Has been out for all most *five* hours. The story talks about how Linux is going to be used as the OS for the *biggest* *cluster* *of* *super* *computers* *in* *history*
It is the greatest news I have heard in months and it "matters" if you ask me. The Super computer(s) will be funded by the National Science Foundation(NSF) and it is reported that the super computer(s) will be able to calculate in one second, what it would take a hand calculator ten millions years to calculate. In addition the total disk space will be enough to hold all most one and a half million full-length novels.
In other words, the Linux OS is going to be used for the largest computing grid in the history of the world.
This story has been availavle on Yahoo!(TM) LinuxToday, Newsforge etc for hours. I submitted the story 3 hours ago and nothing...
I used to read slashdot for the news and told myself I could ignore the mindless trolling and moronic comments, now I realize the news service is garbage and I have no reason to read
Looks like it is newsforge or LinuxToday for me
:-)
thats gotta make one seriously fast game of quake 3...
Pirst Fosting is sooo like 30 seconds ago....
I had an opportunity to work on them about a year ago (the first one we received was a doorstop, literally... The sucker weighed 73 pounds in it's shipping package (I'm NOT KIDDING... They reeled the box in on a trolly, and I laughed at the guy cuz it looked small enough to carry, but then I tried to pick it up...) and didn't even boot, but intel shiped them with 2GB of ram and a kickass SCSI system, so let's just say that my desktop became a SWEEEEEET machine.), but once we got ones that did work, they were sweet machines. I was porting bigint libraries for encryption that I had hand-coded in assembly for the x86 platform, and going from 8 general purpose registers with 1 predicate register (i.e. only 1 carry flag) to having 128 general purpose registers, and 63 predicate registers was a GODSENT.. AMAZING... For anyone who's coded math routines in assembly, you know how much of a PITA it is having only one carry register. This was simply amazing. I could do 1024-bit RSA purely in registers, no memory access outside of the initial read of the data and the final write. Needless to say it flew. It was interesting because literally you wouldn't need a hardware crypto card if you have an Itanium system. So basically Intel really put in a lot of good effort into designing this new platform to avoid the pitfalls of the problems that they experienced with their x86 architechture.
The machines also had 4GB of ram, so it was fun to do:
char * myStr = (char *)malloc(-1);
and have it succeed! (that's a 4GB memory allocation)
If God gave us curiosity
he said no imagining... from now on, all beowulf clusters must be fathomed.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Intel... you're painting yourself into a corner with this mhz battle against AMD, Moto, and IBM.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
there is a much larger cluster of linux machines going to be created care of the NSF. press release here. good day for linux!
this reminds me of the cluster here at my university.
a team of about 4-5 guys trying to keep the network up and running because of stupid users.
let's just hope this megacluster will be put to good use and not be the target of some bored hacker who installs a counter-strike server or whatever.
*believes in the good of humanity*
Wow... apparently these things are real. I thought it was just marketing, but...
:P
:)
they're real!
Wow. After all this time, i've never heard of one being used. Even within Intel.
Someone hook all this shit up to dnetc! Talk about a kickass keyrate..
We can ask it for the answer to the great question of the universe?
Slashdotter: I wish to complain about
:)
this company what I read about not half an
hour ago on this very website.
Me: Oh yes, the, uh, the Workstation manufacturer...What's,uh...What's
wrong with it?
S: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. it's dead,
that's what's wrong with it!
M: No, no, it's uh,...it's resting.
S: Look, matey, I know a dead company when I see one, and
I'm looking at one right now.
M: No no it's not dead, it's, it's restin'! Remarkable company,
the SGI, idn'it, ay? Powerfull CPUs!
S: The CPUs don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
M: Nononono, no, no! It's resting!
S: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up!
(shouting)
'Ello, Mister Bob Bishop! I've got a lovely fresh government
contract for you if you show...
M: There, it moved!
S: No, it didn't, that was you faking a press release!
M: I never!!
S: Yes, you did!
M: I never, never did anything...
S: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) 'ELLO SGI!!!!!
Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine
o'clock alarm call!
See, guys, I told you they still had life left!
-Chris
..a beowulf made of these pouring hot gritz down Natalie Portman pants.
But you cannot use your benchmarks to claim that P4 is faster than Athlon. Your benchmarks show that P4 with RDRAM is faster than Athlon with DDR DRAM. This does not imply that P4 is faster than Athlon, which is what you were trying to claim.
Actually, I was providing a counter-example to a specific comment of yours:
I can get Athlon-specific optimizations if I use the Portland Group compilers (-tp athlon -Mvect=prefetch), so claiming that "AMD has never had software optimized for their CPUs" is not entirely true. Certainly they're not well developed as the P4 optimizations in Intel's compilers, but they do exist.Also, you cannot make such a claim based on only one benchmark.
I have a hard time viewing the seven different codes in the NAS Parallel Benchmarks as "one benchmark"; the algorithms in the CG (conjugate gradient) benchmark for instance are very different from those in FT (Fourier transform) or IS (integer sort), and they stress different parts of the architecture. They do all favor high memory bandwidth systems, but that's the nature of the beast in HPC -- almost all scientific applications are memory bandwidth hungry.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
The person who submitted the story (Troy Baer) is also the admin of the beast. Troy had an interesting article on the current (previous?) cluster setup at OSC in one of the recent Linux mags (Linux Journal, 2001 July). To call Troy a proud father of this setup might not be too far off. ;)
;) Overall, a pretty damn sharp guy. He gets to play with Linux/SGI clusters now, I'm stuck with Alphas & an O2000 in a back room somewhere.
I knew Troy from school, admin-ed with him in the Ohio State engineering labs. Ask him what he's doing with that Aero Eng. diploma nowadays..
-'fester
-'fester
"... The old system will be divided into smaller clusters and cascaded to faculty ...
"Damn. I asked for an iMac, but got this stupid Linux cluster instead!"
;^)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Hrm.... Malcolm X or Mac OS X?? Kinda messes with your head doesn't it?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I was hoping to avoid this pissing match, but these claims are too ridiculous to let pass.
If software was optimized for P4 and Athlon, P4 would still be pathetic.
The NAS Parallel Benchmarks would seem to indicate you are wrong.
A Xeon is based on P3 core. Xeon is just an overpriced P3 with a larger L2 cache. My claim stands: there is no such thing as dual P4. If and when Xeons with P4 core are relased, then we'll talk.
P4 Xeons have been available for several weeks now; we've had a dual P4 machine on site for about a month. Here's the /proc/cpuinfo from it:
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 0
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 1700MHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1695.874
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm
bogomips : 3381.65
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 0
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 1700MHz
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 1695.874
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm
bogomips : 3381.65
You really ought to check your facts...
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
...& just Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THEM!!!
What's the difference between SGI's ia64 compiler suite (Pro64) and the gcc compiler for ia64? I know the Pro64 is GPL, so why are there two different compilers?
Thanks.
http://www.talknerdy.org
Remember ppl, Linus only wanted an operating system for 386s ;-)
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
They do all favor high memory bandwidth systems, but that's the nature of the beast in HPC -- almost all scientific applications are memory bandwidth hungry.
Who cares if the benchmarks use different algorithms? They all test exactly the same thing: memory bandwidth. This statement of yours actually makes my point above stronger. You admit that all of these benchmarks are highly dependent on memory bandwidth. It appears that you agree with my supposition that these benchmarks depend more on the memory bandwidth than the CPU speed (integer sort for example would be 100% memory I/O). Yet you are still trying to claim that P4 is faster than Athlon. These benchmarks do not prove that. They prove that the bandwidth of two channels of RDRAM is greater than that of one channel of DDR DRAM, but we kind of knew that already, didn't we?
So, your counterexample is invalid and my claim stands. I really think that we are starting to go around in circles.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
sgi sold their MIPS division, I believe.
"Uhhh, perhaps because there is no such thing as dual P4?" what the fuck do you think a Xeon IS you stupid stupid cunt
and we have a similar situation in the UK with Quantel. The root cause of both of these miseries was actually Intergraph. Intergraph spent a ton of cash creating the first really powerful NY boxes, sold them at a loss to tempt people away from Octanes and Henrys, and then folded leaving their primary market (TV and film post production) in a total dilemma. Lack of sales having stalled R&D at SGI and Quantel both, and the myth of NT performance having been widely accepted, suddenly there weren't any powerful NT boxes that would run the apps that the clients needed, and SGI and Quantel were both busy doing crazy things to try and hold on to their stockholders. Java on Quantel? NT on SGI? both ridiculous and insane. So we now have IBM intellistations and other such feeble hardware substituting for Intergraph kit, the only ray of hope is Apple's adoption of a professional OS core that might allow scalability into the SGI domain. But Apple may decide not to do that, rather expend all their energy trying to fight with box shfters at the consumer end. :-[
"A Xeon is based on P3 core. Xeon is just an overpriced P3 with a larger L2 cache."
Are you a retard? Xeon is a P4 core!!!
What?!! The NSF builds a supercluster?
They must be up to something!
Somebody inform UNATCO now!
If I remember correctly, in about 1996/97 this guy went to work for SGI. He'd already had similar high-up jobs at two other companies that lasted nearly 6 months, just like his stay at SGI was going to. What he did was to go around all of these companies saying that they needed a "Windows NT strategy"
The strategy was to go NT4.0 on commodity (intel) hardware. So, SGI announced that it was reducing Irix development, halting development of the MIPS processors (which were an order of magnitude faster than the Pentium of the day and 64-bit to boot).
Very quickly, he was looking for a new job, SGI had penium machines that no-one wanted running NT (and Linux for the better informed customer), had restarted MIPS development and continued with Irix. However, by that time they had lost their lead.
I hope he lost all his money in the dot com mania.
Hmm, PCI and no XIO? Would be nice to at least have a couple of each. Though 2 rack units isn't much room to work with. Wonder which version of IRIX it'll run? 6.5.13 + patches? 6.5.14?
Pentium 4 has an absolutely pathetic floating point performance. Even Pentium 3 at 1000MHz outperforms Pentium 4 at 1500MHz on floating point. See here for example. Your claim that Pentium 4 can do 3 floating point operations per clock cycle is nothing more than pulling numbers out of your ass. (unless you can somehow substantiate your ridiculous claim).
The P4 looses to the Athlon simply by the reason that the compilers can not use the vector instructions properly.
AMD has never had code optimized for their CPUs. They have always fought an uphill battle. Yet they managed to beat the crap out of intel in absolute performance (price/performance they had for a long time). The whole compiler crap is a strawman's argument. AMD has 3Dnow instructions which nobody uses. If current software was optimized for AMD, P4 would look even more pathetic.
Why anyone would be an Itanium instead of a dual P4/Athlon beats me.
Uhhh, perhaps because there is no such thing as dual P4?
It has less on-chip cache than a Celeron (128kb total)!! Sure it's packaged with a lot of sram, but still.
I don't know how to break it to you, but 1) Celeron has exactly 128KB L2 cache, and 2) SRAM stands for Static RAM, which is used for cache (as opposed to Dynamic RAM, which is used for the main memory).
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Want innovation? Who do you think has it? Also, one company uses a UNIX based OS; the other at least tried to fix the mistakes of the past, although they did make more in the process of doing so.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
The MIPS architecture has run out of gas. All it has left in it is a few more speed bumps. SGI has no money to invest in something that would succeed the MIPS chip. Another note: Why did Compaq dump the Alpha chip ? Because it can't run lock-step, so it cannot be used for Compaq NonStop (formerly Tandem) processors. McKinley chips apparently can be run lock-step, so they will be used for the new NonStop systems.
The person who submitted the story (Troy Baer) is also the admin of the beast.
To give credit where credit is due, the admin of that system is Doug Johnson, who has done an enormous amount of work to get this thing working. I'm just a user support guy who writes lots of documentation and happens to dabble in systems stuff like Maui and PVFS in my Copious Spare Time[tm].
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
That's just plain not true. The P4 memory bus is 32 bit wide (16 bits for each RDRAM channel). Athlon memory bus is 64 bit wide (one DDR DRAM channel). You are probably thinking of the width of the L2 cache datapath, which is 256 bit for P3 and P4 (I don't recall what it is for Athlon).
Or that I can't get an optimizing compiler for the Athlon that's comparable to the Intel Fortran compiler?
I think I said it 3 times already, but I'll repeat it again for posterity. AMD has never had software optimized for their CPUs. They always fought an uphill battle. Yet they still managed to beat the shit out of intel.
Look, I don't have the luxury of caring which processor is better in a "fair" test with the same memory, etc. -- my job is to figure out which system (processor/memory/IO/etc.) is fastest for our users' applications
That's fine and that's a reasonable thing to do. But you cannot use your benchmarks to claim that P4 is faster than Athlon. You benchmarks show that P4 with RDRAM is faster than Athlon with DDR DRAM. This does not imply that P4 is faster than Athlon, which is what you were trying to claim. Also, you cannot make such a claim based on only one benchmark.
Once again, I have no problem with people trying to find the best system for their needs. I have a problem with unsubstantiated claims.
BTW, I suspect that for your particular application, memory bandwidth matters more than the CPU speed. So you may actually be benchmarking memory instead of CPU.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
oops I screed up html. pressed post too soon.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
OSC had beta Itanium hardware last year as well. The difference is that this machine doesn't require signing a bunch of NDAs to use it.
NCSA has a slightly larger system of (more or less) the same design on order from IBM, and I think the installation is ongoing right now.
--Troy
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
Well sadly enough i can only agree with you.
I actually do not have any hope left for SGI. Here is why:
-Their workstations do not cover enough markets to sustain themseves let alone generate enough revenue to set them back ahead of the pack.
-Their single image clusters are not cost effective enough for the scientific comunity and their use for Visualisation, where people would be willing to pay the insane price, isn't large enough.
-Anybody can build UNIX servers.
-Anybody can build MPI clusters.
So I think they are reduced to niche markets which will not cover their cost in R&D which means they will have to license technology or buy components from others (CPUs, bussystems etc.). However they might run out of breath in the time they redesign their gear to take advantage of the new tech, and reduce the production cost.
So my guess is they will be consumed slowly by their competitors - lets only hope some of their tech remains.
--Ulrich
On no accounts allow a Vogon to read poetry at you
You may want to look up the word "Literally" in the dictionary.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
IBM has a story about this, the second cluster "to be installed this summer" already exists.
Also read The story at NCSA if that's not enough for you.
Prepare to lose all karma...
SGI sucks.
Most of their hardware is great, as is most of their software. But their head is completely up their ass these days.
Stagnant desktop machines. Impressive but overpriced big iron. OEM PCs. And a terrible logo. What went wrong? Where to begin??
Once upon a time there was a company called Silicon Graphics. They got their start by making wickedly powerful terminals to provide 2D and 3D graphical front end to massive minicomputers and supercomputers. Mind you this was two years before Apple introduced the Macintosh and Xerox was still playing with the underpowered Star. Shortly there after they began selling a line of large rackmount, standalone graphical computers that used multiple large boards covered with cpus, fast ram, and other goodies to churn out decent primitive 3D in real time using the GL framework (later called IRISgl, which eventually became OpenGL). This was about the time your dad upgraded from a C64 to a IBM XT.
Fast forward to 1995. You and I were probably playing with a Pentium 100 and looking forward to the rumored 3Dfx Voodoo card. In that same year, SGI upgraded their Onxy graphical supercomputers to InfinteReality graphics... providing performance on par with a Geforce 256. Except the IR could handle 64 MB of dedicated texture ram and 320 MB of frame buffer. Three IR "pipes" could be installed in a single system, and each pipe could even be broken down to multiple channels. IR allowed the world of graphical simulation to finally approach photorealistic quality with multiple projectors / monitors providing a wrap-around display (keep in mind that much of this was available on a limited scale 1991 with SGI's RealityEngine pipes). Both the Onyx and SGI's non graphical server, the Challenge, received a CPU upgrade. Up to 24 MIPS R10000 CPUs running at 195 MHz (each providing 390 MFLOPS + 390 MIPS) could be installed in the Onyx. The Challenge could take up to 36. SGI's flagship desktop machine, the Indigo2, received upgrades as well. The top of the line model had an R10K/195 CPU, up to 640 MB of interleaved ram, two channels of SCSI, and Maximum Impact graphics (4 MB of dedicated texture ram, 27 MB of framebuffer, and performance somewhere around that of the TNT2).
SGI's machines continued to get better. Indigo2 was replaced with the Octane. Onyx and Challenge were replaced with the Onyx2 and Origin, and later with the Onyx 3000 and Origin 3000.
Here we are in the middle of 2001. SiliconGraphics has become "sgi" with a NYSE stock price below $1. Their O2 desktop machine hasn't changed much since 1996, and aside from the new gfx card and faster CPUs, the Octane2 isn't a whole lot different than the original Octane in 1997. Onyx 3000 uses updated graphics based on the original IR from 1995. Perhaps the only noteworthy change has been the architecture of the new Onyx and Origin. Both can scale as a single machine to 512 CPUs with 1 Terabyte of RAM. Many of these massive machines can be clustered together for even more power... at an insane cost.
The company that brought us 3D on the desktop has pretty much come to a halt. Their desktop machines haven't change much in almost 5 years. Their big iron is impressive, but expensive as all hell. And their PCs... where to begin on the PCs... They tried making what could have been the coolest pair of PCs of all time. But due to delays and driver issues, the machines ended up being overpriced, nonupgradable ho-hum boxes. Pretty soon they hit the other end of the spectrum with generic OEM PCs. And now this, the "SGI 750" Itanium. A box that is identical to that which is being sold by HP and Dell. The only thing SGI about it is the logo. We're not even dealing with the same SGI. This new "sgi" couldn't have possibly come from the same roots as the old, grand, SiliconGraphics.
I can't help but wonder what the old SiliconGraphics would be doing today. Like another poster pointed out, the Octane would probably have an ever faster architecture, better graphics, and probably 4x the CPU power. This new linux cluster would probably be based on much better machines and using something better than Myrinet (which is limited by the 66MHz/64bit PCI bus the card sits in). The old SGI would have made a complete fire breather, not some OEM stack that anyone could build themselves. The old SGI would have the cube logo *and* rightfully wear it.
When I look inside my old, used Indigo2 from 1995 what do I see? I see its 750 watt power supply. I see not a graphics card, but *three* massive cards working together and connected to the power supply via a thick jumper cable. I see engineering at its best. I see a product that pushed the limits of silicon and interconnects. I see something that was worth its $50,000 pricetag. I see something that was indeed an order of magnitude more powerful than anything else on the desktop.
When I look at the current SGI desktop machines, I see something I can buy for less at Best Buy.
I recently saw a demonstration of the Onyx 3000. One of the demos was a visualization app used by an automobile maker. The app showed a few different cars in full detail across three screens (each 1280x1024) in a panoramic configuration at a sustained, locked 75 Hz + 75 FPS. The cars had complete reflection features that interacted right down to the metallic flecks in the paint. The detail was right down to the 3D textures that made up the subtle surface of the dash plastics and the seat leather. It was truly photorealistic. I've seen the Geforce 3 demos, they were nowhere near as impressive as the car demo.
Another demonstration showed the Onyx's power at loading textures. The machine they had was connected to several RAIDs containing over 500 GB of satellite and aerial photos. On the same three screens and in the same 75 Hz + 75 FPS were able to zoom down to a national park, pan across to another state, and zoom back out to planet Earth floating in space. All in real time. The RAIDs were clattering so loud I could hardly hear the man giving the demonstration. The Onyx never missed a beat.
If the old SGI was here today, we'd have that kind of power on the desktop. And it would cost $50,000 and consume 750 watts. Not $500,000 and 9,000 watts.
And we wouldn't have a Myrinet connected stack of Itanium PCs. We'd have something a whole hellofa lot better.
[end rant]
You're thinking of "Rocket" Rick Belluzzo, former CEO of SGI. He was responsible for putting MIPS/IRIX on hold, courting the Wintel crowd, and the "sgi" logo. He successfully put SGI in a steep nosedive they'll probably never recover from.
d efault.asp
Where is Mr. Belluzzo today?
Hold on to your hat...
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/belluzzo/
It took MS 15 years to have a full 32-bit OS
after those chips came out. Hope they are faster
this time. 32 bit NT on an Itanium would be a waste.
SGI and SUN have had full 64 bit OS for 7 & 5
years. Yes, there are bugs to shake out in the
beginning. OF course Bill & Steve will announce
they are "just about to ship" for years until
they do.
Sorry, folks, NCSA had an Itanium cluster last year. Saw a demo of it at supercomputing 2000 in November.
best to test these things yourself. Apple's data is what's called "marketing", it's when some person or company tries persuade you to buy their product or service. A better place to find out about G4 GIGAFLOPS is at www.barefeats.com
The 330 is an OEM board based around the VIA Apollo Pro133A. The 550 is an OEM i840 board. Both have been slightly customized with the SGI logo and whatnot. Aside from some slight diferences with the monitor port configurations and ram used, the graphics boards used in SGI's x86 PCs are pretty much stock nVidia reference designs. If you read the developer docs, the "tweaks" are nothing more than a few performance features enabled by default when used with an SGI PC (as SGI has been able to test the combination).
OK, I was not aware of that, but tell me where I can actually buy them. I looked at Dell's site before I posted. If Dell doesn't have them, nobody else does.
Had you looked a little further at the URL I posted, it had a link to the company we bought both systems from, Ace Computers. Dell is dragging their feet on dual P4s for some reason; we tried to buy a dual P4 system from them, but they wouldn't ship us one until October and couldn't explain the delay. Smaller vendors like Ace were much more helpful.
You pointed to the single (type of) benchmark that makes P4 look good, though not because of P4's virtues. P4 has two channels of RDRAM giving it 1600 * 2 = 3200 MB/s of memory bandwidth. The Athlon machine in the benchmark you pointed to had a single channel of DDR DRAM, giving it 2128MB/s of memory bandwidth. Fluid Dynamic simulation is one of the _few_ things that can really take advantage of greater memory bandwidth. Therefore P4 wins this round by riding on Rambus's coat-tails.
And I suppose the fact that width of the P4's memory bus interface (256 bits wide) is twice as wide as that of the Athlon (128 bits wide) has no influence on the memory bandwidth available? Or that I can't get an optimizing compiler for the Athlon that's comparable to the Intel Fortran compiler?
Prove me wrong. Point me to the same benchmark where both P4 and Athlon have the same type of memory (both support SDRAM now, you know).
Look, I don't have the luxury of caring which processor is better in a "fair" test with the same memory, etc. -- my job is to figure out which system (processor/memory/IO/etc.) is fastest for our users' applications, which happen to look a lot like NPB. We got one each of the "current best of breed" in dual P4s and dual Athlons, ran the same codes on each, and assembled the results. For single-processor stuff, the P4 wins, sometimes by a lot. For I/O bound stuff, the Athlon wins right now, mainly because Intel couldn't design a decent PCI bridge to save their lives. (This is a matter of the sorta-broken [Athlon] beating the completely-broken [P4]; I fully expect a dual P4 board with a ServerWorks chipset to hand the Athlon its butt.)
I'll be the first to admit that my benchmarks comparison page needs work -- I haven't had time to run Gaussian or GAMESS (computational chemistry codes) yet, or BLAST (a bioinformatics code) for that matter. I know of a similar study that had completely different results, I think largely because they couldn't use the Intel compilers due to some language extensions used by their codes (eg. Cray-style pointers) that the Intel compilers don't support.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
What's the point of running a P4 or and Athlon with SDRAM when you can use DDR or RDRAM? Are you stupid or what?
Also of note, IBM has stated that current plans for the G5's SIMD/AltiVec engine specify a 256-bit system, rather than a 128-bit one in the G4. This will be one kickass CPU.
Actually that's not quite correct. Both the sgi 330 and 550 x86 workstations are custom designs with among other things nVidia Quatro Pro graphics cards that have been tweaked and improved by sgi. The 330 and 550 are actually some of the nicest x86 boxes I've seen.
Although you're right that the sgi 750 is the same ref. design that HP, Dell and everybody else sells.
huh my pocket palm has a better spec and runs a custom kernel BSD with 128 bits!
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - ONLY HARDER!
If CSAR had it before June of this year, it was prerelease, NDA-ridden, not-ready-for-prime-time hardware that was not supposed to be available for public use. (OSC has had a few Itanium boxes in house since September as well, but we didn't publicly advertise that fact since they were test systems.) OSC's machine is the first cluster of Itaniums that you don't have to sign a ton of NDAs with Intel to use.
I did read the PDF in that URL, BTW, and I'd love to know how you got SGI and Intel to extend the NDAs to CSAR's entire userbase -- we asked SGI about this at one point, and they just about had kittens.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
The only thing that gets me is why they are using the Itanium instead of the excellent MIPS chip? Given that Linux has been compiled for so many different archectures, I am sure the MIPS chip is on the list. Maybe this is the case of SGI doing a Motorola, ie using a competitors chip, instead of realising that they too have a CPU division.
;-)
Oh well, I'll go back to smoking my joint, at least that way I can start seeing stuff from the marketing perspective
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Dr. Adams: "Welcome to the Silicon Graphics Tantalus V Itanium research campus."
Stan: "Why did you call it 'Itanium'?"
Dr. Adams: "I have a rare marketing disease that prevents me from pronouncing the first 'T' in 'itanium.'"
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
My friend works for SGI, and they are a company you definatley don't want to work for.
He says that they're working hours are so long that their impossible - you have to work from 6 in the morning right through to 6 at night, sometimes longer, or else your pay will be docked.
They also have really nasty contracts where the small print states you're notice period is five years !
This is why so many stay and work for them. They have one nice office they show people when they start working there, but pretty soon (like, 1 week) later they ship you off to mexico where you have to work on Atari ST's (not even SGI's) and lightbulbs are not alowed because their to expensive.
My friend has even been whipped to make him code faster and has the scars to proove it.
So, Don't ever work at SGI - it'll be five years of hell, and my friend is still waiting to be payed.
Belluzzo was formerly chief executive officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), where he was responsible for defining and executing a return to growth and profitability for the company
See page 5 of the CSAR Focus newsletter (PDF).
The dual processor G4e manages a sustained 11.8 gigaflops. The peak is much higher. More info here.
The PowerPC G4 is a Very Nice Processor. It's too bad enough people don't recognise that. Maybe now with OS X and G4 processor boards for other architectures, development will start.
Lies about crimes
However, I think the reason that SGI is not producing a desktop version of Onyx 3000 is obvious - SGI tried to do battle with Sun, etc. and failed. SGI tried to do battle with Dell, etc. and failed. They're not about to do the same thing to NVidia...
The original SGI targetted what was at the time a niche market - 3D graphics. It looks like the new SGI will also retreat into niche markets - very high-end graphics and compute servers.
You're also right about the Itanium server - there's nothing very interesting about it. I believe this machine is only intended as an interim solution to allow developers onto the platform until SN-IA is available (whenever that might be).
Then we'll see something a little more impressive than OEM Itanium boxes with low-bandwidth Myrinet interconnects!
blah blah, where are the benchmarks. some definitive examples of ia64 speeds, etc..
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
So you guys know, Myrinet is a 2Gb peak interconnect with a 7us minimum latency. FULL CROSSBAR SWITCH :-) Fiber or serial.
A interesting fact is that up until a few days ago, Myrinet only supported 1 GIG systems. I ran into this while setting up the University of Nevada beowulf named cortex.
I must admit, IA64 with Myrinet 2000 is gonna kick some serious computational ass.
The article says that Myrinet will run MPI, but it will also run PVM and TCP/IP stuff too.
Check it out at their site
I hear you. The linux stuff is cool and all, but where is my "Octane3" with quad MIPS R14000 CPUs? SGI sure ain't the company it once was. Hell, none of their Pentium or Itanium machines are even custom designed. They're all OEM. Even the "Silicon Graphics 750" is the OEM Intel Itanium box with an ATI video card. Are they trying to kill themselves?