Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Truly Off-The -Shelf PCs Make A Top-500 Cluster

Posted by timothy on from the ready-to-wear dept.

SLiDERPiMP writes: "Yahoo! News is reporting that HP created an 'off-the-shelf' supercomputer, using 256 e-pc's (blech!). What they ended up with is the 'I-Cluster,' a Mandrake Linux-powered [Mandrake, baby ;) ] cluster of 225 PCs that has benchmarked its way into the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world. Go over there to check out the full article. It's a good read. Should I worry that practically anyone can now build a supercomputer? Speaking of which, anyone wanna loan me $210,000?" Clusters may be old hat nowadays, but the interesting thing about this one is the degreee of customization that HP and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science did to each machine to make this cluster -- namely, none.

3 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Putting them to work. by nairnr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, it seems like super clusters are becoming very easy to build hardware-wise. If you throw enough commodity at a problem, it becomes easier. I would think the biggest problem with supercomputers is no longer the hardware itself, but networking, and the programming to take advantage of the hardware. These computers still only really work for something that distributes easily. The biggest factors are now the ability to distribute, and schedule work for each node. The more nodes you engage, the more you hope your problem is CPU bound, so it will scale more.

    Data transfer and message passing are such a big issue I belive the most important developments are in the networking topologies and hardware for these environments.

    That said, I still want one in my basement :-)

  2. It's at #385 in the list by CormacJ · · Score: 4, Informative
    The latest top 500 list is here : http://www.top500.org/list/2001/06/

    The cluster is at #385

  3. Re:This just goes to show you by BrentN · · Score: 4, Informative
    The problem with Ethernet in clustering isn't bandwidth, its the latency.

    The real issue is how parallel-efficient your algorithms are. We do molecular dynamics (MD) on large clusters, and we can get away with slow networks because each node of the cluster has data that is relatively independent of all other nodes - only neighboring nodes must communicate. If you have a case (and most cases are like this) where every node must communicate to every other node, it becomes a more difficult problem to manage. To deal with this, you need a high-speed, low-latency switch like the interconnects in a Cray. The only real choice for that is a crossbar switch, like Myrinet.

    And Myrinet is tres expensive.