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Sun Releases Starcat
SilentChris writes: "Sun has released the Starcat server, a beast with up to 106 processors running Unix. Anyone have an extra couple [million] bucks lying around?" They're not cheap.
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At last a platform to get descent java performance...
Je t'aime Stéphanie
until it shows up on e-bay from a disgruntled former dot bomb employee who five-fingered it from a linux shop which stole BSD code.
Lets remember, that this system is not intended to replace a beowolf cluster of cheap pc's. It is intended to do something that most beowolf clusters can never do: present a single OS image with half a terabyte of memory that any cpu can access at very high speed.
This is a system that is very good at things like fluid dynamics and massive database operations. It is not a good idea if all you want to do is get to the top of the list for the SETI@Home project
From now on, the official phrase should be "Whoa! Imagine a Starcat Cluster of those!"
And is it just me or did the old "Thundercats" show just pop into your head?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Configuration Error
1) Error calling config servlet: sunir.webdesk.common.checker.ConfigInternalExcepti on: Couldn't get sql connection
Then I tried to reload the page and didn't even get a response....
Funny and I thought Perl == Paid employment recently located
Sun themselves are in a need for boxes like that as their website seems severely slashdotted right now.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
This isn't even a really impressive box. I'd rather have an sgi O3K system if I'm going for the ultimate in servers you can actually purchase. The SGI Origin 3800 has anywhere from 16 to 512 processors, 716 GB/sec system bandwidth and up to a terabyte of memory. It's also a single system image machine. Oh yeah, and you can cluster them to scale way beyond 512 processors.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Now I can model the water flow down the shower drain (fluid dynamics). Cool. But can it model the flow of $$$ down the drain that would occur if I purchased it?
I'm all for new and spiffy hardware, but some things are just too much. I woner what the margin on one of these things is... I'm having trouble seeing how they expect to sell enough of these to cover the R&D costs... Maybe they'll sell them to the NSA so that agency can be brought into the 21st century...
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
The system grows to 106 in the following way:
There are 18 "cpu/memory" boards that hold 4 cpu's each. This brings the system up to a total of 72 cpu's and 576GB of ram.
Now, if you want an server that just does number crunching and dont care about I/O, you can then add 'MaxCPU" modules. Each module holds two additional cpu's (no memory) and occupies the hPCI module slot (a hot swap PCI case that can hold what looks like two to four pci cards). You can use up to 17 of the hPCI module slots to hold MaxCPU modules. (there are 18 pci channels on the system, and at least one must be used for accessing the boot disk).
So there ya have it, 106 cpu's and half a terabyte of ram. I think that in most cases, folks will opt to not use the MaxCPU modules and just stick to the 72 cpu limit.
Dear Santa,
I've been a real good gEek this year. I wrote several white-hat worms to fix IIS holes. I defended IP rights in the Linux kernel. I also mirrored the LOTR trailer.
Could I please get just one little old Starcat Server from Sun? Please make sure it is the 106 processor version with 576 GB of RAM.
I will be real good and use my idle time for SETI.
Your pal,
digital_freedom
P.S. Chocolate chip cookies are your favorite right?
Maybe the performance with 107 CPUs is lower than 106 CPUs. Adding more CPU does not equal more power.
M0571y H@rml355.
These can be either. It depends on how you configure it. And the fun this is, you can reconfigure it on the fly. You want a cluster in a box? You got it. You want 2 seperate instances of Solaris running, each using 1/3rd the resources of this box, while you pull out the hardware on the rest of the box for maintenance? You got it. This thing is _configurable_. You can hot swap everything except the backplane, pretty much. It's _sweet_.
I'm glad to see that some companies are at least trying to accomplish new things and come out with new products given the state of our economy and markets and such. Even if people think it is overpriced or under-powered and what not that still doesn't degrade the fact that it is a relatively new product in a squishy market. Personally, I own a few hundred shares of SGI stock, but I'm still happy to see any tech comapny suck in their gut, tighten their belt and release a new product in this market. Makes me want to believe the tech markets will turn around sooner than people believe. Kudos to Sun for still working on new products and trying to generally improve things. Now, if Cray would follow suit, I'd be a happy man...
Things you can say to your dog that you can't say to a girl: "How about a nice bone?"
"Wow, look at all the hits we're getting on the Starcat shopping cart! We're going to make a mint on these suckers!"
As someone who does nothing with these types of systems, nor follows them, I think it's great that you can have different processor speeds using "partitions."
I wonder if memory is treated the same way... i.e., separated by "partitions," or if you also have a choice to use it as one, large unified memory resource... or, I wonder if memory can be dynamically partitioned... hmm.
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it... are all of the processor partitions considered peers? I mean, are the partitions all treated as if they were a single processor... then treated equally?
to get on the National US ID Card database bandwagon with Oracle... It'll only need to store about 300 million records with DNA, fingerprint, picture for facial recognition software, key escrow, etc...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Since when has new (let alone the latest and greatest) Sun hardware been "cheap?" Sure, there might be some good values but it's never cheap.
And then there's the product itself. It's huge, it's fast, it's not intended for the home user, or even a medium-sized business. Let's just look at the specs, pulled from Sun's info page:
Up to 18 fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains, which are fully configurable while applications are running.
Are you trying to be funny by saying it's not cheap? Was that a +5 Insightful comment that we all would have missed out on had you not enlightened us? Are you implying that there are other manufacturers who do sell these kinds of systems for cheap?
In your defense, you do have an astonishing command of the perfectly obvious.
Configuration Error
i on: Couldn't get sql connection
1) Error calling config servlet: sunir.webdesk.common.checker.ConfigInternalExcept
Hmmm... looks like their DB server is down.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I wonder how this would compare with the sheer amount of hardware that was thrown at the rendering of that movie. (I can't find the original link, but over and above the SGI stations that were used there were hundreds of clustered 'normal' PCs)
Just thinking "could they've just slapped a few of these suckers into place instead?"
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
"Huh? I understand that the nation's air traffic controllers may need updated equipment in light of the existing crisis, but how hard can scheduling be? I could see a use for a massively parallel monster like this in, say, flow-through or structural analysis or something, but scheduling? "
What your missing is that this isn't a matter of airtraffic control. This is a matter of determining which planes and crews to fly to which locations at what times to maximize revenue. This is a classic, big, nasty travelling salesman problem. The bigger of a beast of a machine you get, the closer you get to an optimized solution. I.E. Most passengers willing to pay this most money with the least use of resources. It's a huge problem that needs massive computational power.
The good thing about Intel based render farms is that theya re cheap. The bad thing is... theya re cheap.
Intel based hardware does NOT have great MTBF (Mean Time Between Faiulre) unfortunately but inevitably as Intel boxes are commodities built for least possible expense. As a result large Intel farms mean near constant maintainence. Soem machine is always on the verge of failure.
In contrast so much horse power in a highly reliable box means both fewer machiens to fai lAND much lower MTBF per machine.
The result is much lower Total Cost of Ownership.
Actually the reverse is probably true. The cost of running a compouter site is in the upkeep not the initial hardware cost. See m yTCo explainatio nabove.
You can forget about Tribes 2 being ported anywhere...didn't Sierra close the doors? If Tribes 2 were ported, it's far more likely the x86 arch would be chosen as a target instead of the SPARC arch, as game-playing weenies don't care for anything without a BIOS.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
microsoft.com/unix...it's there, but don't expect anything close to stability.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Hey, slashdot messed up my URL...it should be microsoft.com/unix...for some reason it put in a link to slashdot itself...more slashcode wierdness, go figure.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
1) Error calling config servlet: sunir.webdesk.common.webconfig.WebConfigException
wow...
But a lot of the cost of doing business things, which can be done using a graph, don't have to be.
Look into operations research. An early on thing you will learn in OR is the simplex method, where in you boil down a lot of your information (cost to move part A from here to there and buying B if needed, etc...) into a matrix and then use something like the Simplex Method you can maximizie say your profit, or minimize the delays, or minimize the total number of planes in the air, etc..
Now, does the world's flight system have a lot of inputs - you bet, planes, fuel, flight crew, union regulations, holidays, tons of things that you and I could probably never think of...
Now... I just wanted to post that there are ways of solving these problems without a graph - yes a graph is a lovely way for highly dynamic systems, but if you want to answer the question "What is the best schedule given these 1,000 limitations?" then look into operations research. Yes, I mentioned the simplex method, and I fully exepct following posts arguing Parametric Linear Programming or maybe some Markov Chains and their impact, but the core is still the same - if you have a set of limitations and are looking to maximumize (or minimize) something, then operations research is a fun thing!
Wheeeee
That name isn't mentioned on Sun's page - or does their search engine show such a product?
Pretty simple, StarCat was it's codename in development. Just like Serengti was for the E3800, E48x0 and E6800.
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
I'm not sure what is so exciting about a system with 106 processors. When the SGI Origin 3000 can scale to 1024 with a single image of the OS running on it, now that is impressive. Maybe everyone should check out http://www.sgi.com/origin/3000/3800.html Though the site states that it only goes to 512, there is now an official installed system running 1024 that you can see at www.sgi.com/streaming/products.html#sara Now that is IMPRESSIVE!
Sort of accidently read that as "this machine is optimized to run IE". :) Don't mod me down, I submitted the story. :)
200-240 single phase VAC, 47-63 Hz, with six 30 Amp circuits redundant with another six on 2 separate power grids
Can you get it bundled with 12 30A 240V 100meter extention cords? (So you could plug it directly in to every panel on the block.
But you don't need to do every problem with a graph. Look into operations research. What you do there is boil down all the limits.
Example, to fly this plane means R fuel cost, S crew cost, T maintenance, U airport costs, V etc... Now put in this information for all possible flights, and all the passenger demand info (you'd want regular flight days, as well as holidays, etc..) and put all of this into a gigantic equations where you are trying to maximize or minimize something - maximize profits, or maybe minimize certain costs. Then you can relate this to a rather large matrix. Now so far we haven't asked for any info you wouldn't need for your graph. Then you apply one of the methods from operations research to your data set and you get either a number, or maybe a bound range of an answer - without the contruction of the graph, or all of the graph traversals...
Yes, if you want to do something on-the-fly, like have a computer fly the planes for you, and update as weather changes then you'd probably want to think about a graph. But to generate the day-to-day schedules for your planes, look into OR.
Here's the textbook I reccoment to learn Operations Research: here
Wheeeee
Liberty.
Man, you'd have to be Bill Gates to afford one of these suckers!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I thought we weren't supposed to use strcat anymore, because it's subject to buffer overflows?
My eyes playing tricks :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We all know strncat() is better.
Liberty in your lifetime
Given how much you can shuck and trash without powering down the whole machine, a second box is going to be for the people who really need the 'five nines' availability. Other than an extreme power failure or WTC-style disaster, it's hard to think of a situation that would require shutting down all 6 power supplies at the same time.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Let's not forget SGI with the Origin 3000 (a system which I worked on a lot when I worked for SGI). It scales to 512 processors in a single system image (perhaps 1024 by now?) with a terabyte of RAM. In addition, you get 128 I/O channels with that each of which can have up to 12 PCI slots (or 4 "legacy" XIO ports). If you want redundancy, you can partition the system into multiple OS images. A 128p Origin as a single system image regularly gets over a month of uptime without a failure. So basically, while Sun can make this look like the best thing since sliced bread, it *has* been done before.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
"Click here to buy online"
Who the heck buys this stuff online ???!?!?!
"Mhmm I think I'll charge this one to my Discover card"
What are *you* smoking? The Origin 3800 is certainly *not* using the "same back plane a the sun was 2 gens back". In fact, if you were anything other than a hopeless troll, you'd realize that the Origin 3800 doesn't *use* a backplane at all. You get, on a 512p system, 128 I/O channels, each of them supporting up to 12 PCI slots or 4 XIO slots. I can't remember off the top of my head what the bandwidth per channel is but it's on the order of a gigabyte/second (I wanna say it's 1.6 GB/sec, but I might be wrong).
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
I actually ran into this as a problem about 10 years ago. In 1992, we bought a machine from IBM that we nicknamed 'brutus'. The idea behind brutus was pretty simple: we bought the machine, and with just about every dollar we had left for the project we bought memory.
Brutus ended up with 380 Meg of ram (this was back in 1992, when most people were really happy to have 8 meg of ram and a 200 meg hard disk). It also had a single 800meg hard disk. This is where the trouble began. After loading AIX and all of the upgrades, etc, we had about 100 meg left for swap space. Unfortunately, AIX needs swap space for backing store before it will allocate memory, so we had a mondo-expensive box with about 200meg of ram that we couldn't get to.
We cobbled together enough money for a second 800meg drive, and while we were waiting (months) for it to be delivered, our IBM rep assured us that the extra memory wasn't completely wasted.
"The system will use it as a disk cache."
I pulled the extra memory boards and swapped them into a bunch of other (smaller) boxes while we waited for the extra backing store.
You may wonder what we wanted 380 meg of RAM for back then... It was a graphics lab, and some of the grad students were doing research on volume visualization. 380 meg allowed you to play with a 512x512x512 cube in ram (8 bits per voxel, 2 copies).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
SCHZHCHC.. Thank you for choosing Sun... Can I take your order
Umm... Lemme see... It's not breakfast anymore is it?
No sir....
Hmmm... Can I have one of those Sun 15k servers?
Ok... 1 Sun 15k server... That will be $1,808,110.00.... Would you like to super-size that order?
Yeah sure... Why not..
Aight... That will come to $4,140,830.00
Would you like to add on the extra disk array for only $480,400.00
No thats Ok
Ok... With tax your total comes to $4,430,688.10
Please drive around to the next window
"I think the world will probably need about 5 of these machines and not more .... :)"
Yeah, and nobody will ever need more than 640KB of RAM. My company alone has two E10Ks (the predecessor to this beast), so I think there's a decent market for these...
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
I worked with a guy who was using genetic algorithms to schedule harvesting, and it really quickly racks up an insane number of permutations.
Simply put, with 10 airports and 10 airplanes, our first step has 100 possible _initial_ (opening) moves, and they permutations mushroom really quickly after that. He ended up using a small Beowulf that always had the current real world state, and this way he could shuffle scheduling on a daily basis, adapting to changes.
In comparision, our local bus network is re-scheduling, it's going to take one guru a couple of months to "zen" a new schedule.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Given the way other Sun boxen like the E3500 work, I expect that's the 15K has 18 boards, each of which takes 3 modules, either 2xCPU of 8GB RAM.
That means that 72 CPU / 288 GB memory is 18 boards, each with 2 2xCPU modules and one 18 GB memory module, and the box is full.
Since you always need some memory, the most CPUs you can get is 17 boards w/ 6 each and one with 4. Of course, that leaves you with 8GB of memory for your 106 CPUs.
The other end is (17 x 3 + 1 x 2) 8 GB memory modules for 424 GB on a pair of CPUs
But that's just a guess...
Um, there's a lot to it, that's why. Airlines operations are basically a big exercise in logistics.
My current client has initals that might contain the letters L, A, and U, and they use an RS/6000SP for exactly this type of work. Nice machine. This Sun box is a direct competitor to the SP, but very different architecturally. Large scale SMP vs MPP.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
From the site:
With 106 UltraSPARC III Cu 900-MHz processors, more than half a terabyte of memory, and fifth-generation Dynamic System Domains, the Sun Fire 15k server helps redefine total cost of ownership in data center environments
Yeah, no kidding...
You think 100 processors are a lot? Take a look at SGI3000 which can come with 1024 processors at any time. Now that's a lot! ;-)
most ATC systems run on really slow equipment.
most AFTN Mesassages (fliight plan, met data etc) fly between airports as 2400baud. some of the faster ones use 28,8 modems, or X25
the computers are often pentium class machines (running slack 4.something) or stratus servers (hpux ones)
the point is speed is not nessasary, ensureing the message gets there reliably before the aircraft does is nessasary.
Yes, there's a buy online button. But that's used to get info so one of their sales droids can contact you. It's not like you can slap it on your Visa card. :)
(Disclaimer, I work a lot with E10Ks, so this post is written mostly from my experience with those.)
The 15K is basically just an improvement on the E10K architecture, from what I've seen and heard from Sun's SSEs. The E10K started out life as the Cray SuperServer, and was sold to Sun for a song. It's not architecturally perfect. The E10K is set up to allow individual system boards to be part of domains (aka partitions), which can make for some great scalability in the domains. I've seen tiny little one-system-board domains, and domains with 13 fully populated system boards in them.
One of the major advantages to this platform is the fact that you can hot-swap everything except the centerplane. (Of course, I've never seen a centerplane fail.) The E10K also has Dynamic Reconfiguration, where you can remove system boards from a running domain, but unless your platform is set up in a certain, specific way, this doesn't work as well as advertised. I've personally never used it. The best thing about the E10K is the use of the System Service Processor, which handles all the administrative tasks for the entire cabinet. I've heard that the SSP is now integrated into the 15K, thus eliminating the need for a separate system to perform these tasks and monitoring.
The only thing I've ever seen this class of system used for is data warehousing. No modeling, no graphics rendering, just Oracle databases. Just because it has a large number of processors, doesn't mean they're going to be suitable for every task imaginable. (I used to have a 180MHz Indy R5000, that got 68kkeys/sec in d.net. My 166MMX got something like 350kkeys/sec.) These are workhorse processors, not sports-car style processors.
Though I wonder if Sun's gotten around to fixing that nasty ecache parity error problem with their processors... Having a domain randomly crash because the parity bit on a processor got flipped is no fun when you're dealing with a large production database. I have a feeling that problem will continue to plague them in the 15K.
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
8+ years of Solaris admin experience available.
Contact hubert@feyrer.de.
(Yeah, I know, I'm feeding the trolls) Please provide an example of another system providing a total single system image which does better at the same system size. You may have problems since there aren't that many machines out there that grow to 128p (I suppose the 106p Sun box is "close enough").
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"