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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.

2 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. 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 There is only two orders of magnitude between a normal desktop computer (I refuse to call a Pentium III 733 as outdated) and a mainframe computer.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 ?

  2. 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.