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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."
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.
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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
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.
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
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
think again, Apple current top-end dual 800Mhz PowerMac G4 runs AltiVec code at over 5GFLOPS. My older dual 450Mhz can run up to 3.2GFLOPS... And don't forget, the G4 has a successor due pretty soon now. I think these guys will find the pleasure of being the first will be tempered by eventually having the worst price/performance 64bit cluster in academia.
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