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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.

10 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Practically anyone? I think not. by Pulzar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Should I worry that practically anyone can now build a supercomputer?

    Unless "practically anyone" has the funds, the storage room, and the manpower to maintain this monstrosity, there is nothing to worry about.

    And even if anyone could build a supercomputer, what's there to worry about? We don't live in the "War Games" world where supercomputers play chess, tic-tac-toe, and start nuclear wars for fun.

    --
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
    1. Re:Practically anyone? I think not. by KyleCordes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My guess is that people who understand how to use computers to do modeling for nuclear weapons design would be somewhat harder to come up with than the appropriate degree of computing power.

      Knowing nothing about it, I would nonetheless guess that it's rather non-trivial.

      Keep in mind that nukes were invented without the aid of a Beowulf or a Cray.

  2. This just goes to show you by bstrahm · · Score: 4, Insightful
    How powerful standard desktop computers are. There is only two orders of magnitude between a normal desktop computer (I refuse to call a Pentium III 733 as outdated) and a mainframe computer.


    Now all we need are ways of getting local connections significantly faster (Did someone say Gig Ethernet) to allow faster communication between the nodes and we will be able to scale beyond several hundred and break the top 100. I hear 1gig NICs will be falling in price to under $100 US retail soon...


    How fast do you connect to your cluster ?

    1. Re:This just goes to show you by kindbud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I hear 1gig NICs will be falling in price to under $100 US retail soon...

      I hear Gigabit switches won't be...

      --
      Edith Keeler Must Die
  3. Re:Imagine... by xkenny13 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    • A Beowulf cluster of E-machines?

      I dunno. It's kinda lacking when you compare it to all the other Beowulf clusters we've considered.

    Maybe so, but this cluster still made into the top 500 most powerful computers.

    Now, imagine a cluster of Athlon 1.4GHz machines doing the same thing ... now there's a drool factor, and probably cheaper to boot!!

  4. Re:An interesting project by bstrahm · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Absolutely none I would hope... The dataset resides on a centrally managed server, and because they are running a Linux desktop I get to laugh at what a trojan horse virii can do to a user account on a Unix box. This can also be removed as a problem by putting a keyboard, mouse and monitor on the desktop and locking the PC into a cabnet under each desk... What the user can't touch the user can't screw-up


    That is a serious problem though, and one I assume Beowulf clusters will take care of, what if a node goes down in the middle of processing, how does the cluster respond to it ?

  5. Yawn. Another One. by 4of12 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You know this Beowulf business is getting to be pretty staid and routine by now.

    In fact, I'd almost say it would be newsworthy if there were any organization (university, company, govt lab) that had not yet built "a supercomputer from the COTS components".

    What I'd like to see now is more metrics (some of which the article does, admittedly, reveal).

    1. hardware cost per FLOP (everyone already tells you this)
    2. FLOPS per human time to build
    3. FLOPS per sysadmin time to maintain
    4. FLOPS per kilowatt of electricity
    5. FLOPS per cubic foot of rack space
    6. can it run smoothly if Bad Andy goes behind the rack and unplugs a few network connections, a few power cords to some nodes?
    Everyone knows that you can spend your own time scouring dumpsters for cast-off computers and coaxing them to life, bringing up an old 486 with an ISA 10bT card as a member of your cluster. Unless you're doing it for your own educational benefit, it's just not worth it.

    Don't get wrong. I love these clusters and want to use them. It's just that, in 2001, their mere existence is no longer as exciting as it was in the mid 1990s.

    Now days, I care more about ease of use and ease of maintenance, taking the low cost of a Beowulf cluster as a given.

    With the size of these clusters going up and the ratio of hardware cost to human time constantly decreasing, I'd be more impressed to see how a system with many hundreds of nodes was brought up in a short time, never rebooted for a year, even as 13 of the nodes developed variously problems and become unproductive members of the cluster.

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  6. Re:amd for less by Graspee_Leemoor · · Score: 2, Insightful

    why in god's name would you want a cd and a floppy for each node ?

    Also why have a mb with integrated sound (and video) - this is a beowulf cluster, not a John Cage album...

    graspee

  7. For those wondering about nuclear testing... by segfaultcoredump · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, a beowulf cluster is the last thing that one would use for nuclear simulation.

    While great at highly parallel tasks that require very little synchronization between threads (think code cracking), nuclear testing (and almost all other fluid dynamic problems) generally requires all of the cpu's to have high speed access to all of the memory. So one needs a huge shared memory system (think Cray or Sun StarCat).

    And for this reason, I find the top 500 list to be a bit misleading in these days of massively parallel systems. Its great as a test of how many flops the system can crank out, but it does not take into account the memory bandwidth between the cpu's, and that is often more important than raw cpu horsepower.

  8. Power consumption of old CPUs by muffel · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I'm wondering: if you use many old CPUs (486, early Pentiums) vs. not so many recent (PIII/Athlon, ~1GHz) wouldn't you pay for your elecricity bill more than you saved on the hardware?

    Is there anything like a MIPS/Wh rating for CPUs? (Would thermodynamics dictate a certain minimum?)

    With a seperate power supply and hard disk per CPU (i.e. complete box) I would imagine that old PCs generate a *lot* of heat per CPU cycle.

    Has anybody done measurements/calculations on this?

    --

    bla