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Truly Off-The -Shelf PCs Make A Top-500 Cluster
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.
How about $0 Baldric a student run beowulf at the University of Western Ontario built one on hardware dontations. It's not exactly top 500 but it still kicks ass.
The ultimate Linux selling tool, every linux box in your company is a node in a cluster, add a few servers for extra speed, add a few computers to provide file I/O and backup capability, and you have one of the fastest supercomputers available to your company without having to spend an extra dime (everyone needs a desktop anyway). Can you imagine the extra cycles available for simulation, whatever when people start going home at 5 PM.
Uh, I was doing this in the early 90's (as were many others). The idea of using idle cycles from your workstations is beyond old. Is it somehow newsworthy because HP did it? The article makes it sound like a revelation. I'm willing to bet what I was doing was more sophisticated. My processes would relocate themselves whenever a regular user logged in and would even save the system state to prevent any lost work. Hmmm ... sounds like a nasty virus! And while I'm at it, Beowulf was nothing more than rehash as well. How far back does PVM date? Guess it is just because the name sounds cool.
What I'd like to see is a shot at a distributed supercomputer cluster utilizing the spare cpu cycles of computers on high-speed internet connections (cable or DSL). Since efficiency would be remarkably degraded by slow communication times and the fact that many of these computers would be running Office (ahem), you'd have to scale up at least one order of magnitude.
Technically I can't see why this wouldn't be feasible. It would be beyond SETI and protein folding in that the 'control center' could change what problem was being worked on at any time. It may not be incredibly practical compared to setting up specific machines in a single large room, but it would be free and have a potential user base in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
Imagine: instead of the same SETI screen output time and again, you'd get a message on your SS saying "would you like to see what your computer is working on right now? How about high-pressure fluid dynamics in environment x?"
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I wasn't able to get hard facts about this, so I'm going to throw out the question for general "gee whiz" value.
I was pondering the computrons per watt of a cluster such as this versus a real honest-to-Bob supercomputer (Something from Cray/Terra/SGI, for example). we can assume that each machine in HPs cluster uses probably 60-80 watts (because they're sans monitor), so youre looking at about between 1.2 and 1.8 kilowatt hours to power this thing. I'm not sure what a Cray TSE uses, but I have to think it's nowhere near that because of all the redundancy that PC clusters use (one Power supply, chipset, etc per Core).
Though, I'm sure if you can afford either a Cray or 256 PCs, you can afford the power bills, too. If you have to ask how much it will cost you, you can't afford it. But while CIP (Cluster of Inexpensive PCs) is cheaper, is it as efficient?
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Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
using a bunch of those 1U dual athlon rackmount boxes for this? seems like it would reduce the overall footprint by several orders of magnitude, as well as easily doubling (if not tripling) the power. comments, anyone?
I stole this sig.
Then, the US gets tired of bombing, and HP sells them new machines. Soon thereafter, we decide their new "good" dictator is just as bad as their old "bad" dictator, and the cycle begins again.
i think i could build a better supercomputer
for less money with amd procs/mobos/etc
1gig tbird $100
decent cheap amd mobo w/integrated vid/snd/net $100
256meg ram $25
15gig ide $50
floppy drive (needed??) $15
cdrom (needed??) $25
decent nic $20
cheap case $40
total $375
subtract 10% (due to quantity purchase) gives less than $350 total each
pay a bunch of college kids $10/hour
they'd build 2 machines/hour
so 125hrs total to build comps is $1250
$350 x 250 machines is $87,500
add in (8) good quality 32 port switches @ $200 each and you're up another $2k
add in 250ish cat5 cables for another $1k (who wants to make them, buy for $3-4 ea)
your total cost is way under $100k
or even better
use the new SMP durons, 1gig each
not much more $$ since durons are cheap
add like $50 for the 2nd proc (total $150 for 2 duron 1gig smps, unsure if thats reasonable pricing) and another $50 to mobo cost for dual smp mobo
thats $450 ea box
250 x $450 gives us $112.5k for the boxes
add in networking stuff etc
less than $125k prob
man i want to do this
need someone with $$ =P
--wayne =)
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