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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.
I have a physics test today! I love you Katy! I am going home tonight!
nooj.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these... erm... clusters?
-Berj
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
"We had to face heterogeneity by spreading it over Linux and Windows too," she said. "It's not scientific, but technically it's good experience." its good to see the two getting along...
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
What the hell would I do with a supercomputer anyhow? Probably a lot of pong, maybe some TuxRacer.
I've got an old POS Compaq with a Pentium 1. I say we all get our old POS's out and make our own cluster to get in that top-500 list :)
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port
..because the official line of the HP sales people at the moment is that the entire world will be using 64-bit Windows XP within 2 years.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Was when the HP-powered cluster started assimilating some of the Compaq multi-Alpha machines as it's own.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Faggot Stephen Douglas was found dead in his Virginia home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his cock, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
yes! I do!
i don't like waiting goddammit
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.
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.
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
a beowulf cluster of these!
by Dr. William Pierce
.380 caliber semiautomatic pistol. All of the killings were done with that same gun, and the police are still looking for it. Now, you certainly can be killed with a .380, especially if you're shot in the back of the head at close range, but it's not much of a man-stopper. It's a pretty anemic caliber, and it's only used because it's small and can be carried concealed easily. It's a ladies' gun. And yet three able-bodied White men let two Blacks armed only with a .380 pistol force them to stand and watch their women being raped and degraded and even to participate in the degradation themselves. And then they knelt obediently in the snow and let themselves and their women be slaughtered, one at a time.
Two weeks ago I told you about the atrocious murders of four young White men and women in Wichita, Kansas, last month by two Blacks. Two of my reasons for telling you about these murders were, first, the fact that the controlled news media in America had imposed a total blackout, outside the Wichita area, on the news of these atrocious crimes; and second, the fact that the Whites who were murdered didn't resist the Blacks who murdered them, and I wanted to draw a lesson from this failure to resist.
Well, another two weeks have passed, and the national Jewish news media have maintained their total blackout on the murders -- and during this time I have learned a few more details about the crimes which accentuate both points I made two weeks ago. What I told you in my earlier broadcast was that two Black brothers, 20-year-old Jonathan Carr and 23-year-old Reginald Carr, invaded a White home in Wichita on the evening of December 14, kidnapped the three White men and two White women in the home, all of them in their 20s, forced them to withdraw money from several ATM machines, then drove to a snow-covered soccer field on the outskirts of Wichita. There the Blacks raped the two White women, then told all five of the Whites to kneel in the snow and shot them in the back of the head, one at a time. After that the two Blacks returned to the Whites' home, burglarized it, and killed a pet dog they found there: a small, gray terrier.
One of the young White women they shot in the head didn't die however. She regained consciousness, ran naked and bleeding through the snow for a mile, and summoned police, who arrested the Blacks a few hours later. That's what the Jewish media bosses decided we didn't need to hear about, and they clamped a complete blackout on the story on December 15. In eager collaboration with the Jewish media, local authorities -- local politicians -- also imposed an embargo on all news about the affair. The local female district attorney, Nola Foulston, repeatedly asserted that race was not a factor, and that the rapes and murders would not be treated as "hate crimes."
What I have learned recently is that after the two Blacks drove the five Whites to the soccer field, they not only forced the White women to strip and then raped them, but they also forced all of the Whites to put on a sex show for the amusement of the Blacks. On that snowy soccer field they forced the White men to engage in homosexual acts; they forced the White women to have sex with each other; and they forced the White men to have sex with the White women before shooting all of them. After the Blacks forced the Whites to kneel naked in the snow and shot them in the back of the head, they deliberately ran over them with one of the vehicles they were driving. This additional information was leaked from the grand jury which heard the evidence in the case, despite the official news embargo.
Furthermore, three days earlier the same two Blacks murdered another White woman, Ann Walenta, a cellist in the Wichita Symphony Orchestra, while she was sitting in her car outside her home. And four days before that, on December 7, they kidnapped, robbed, and pistol-whipped a White man, 23-year-old Andrew Schreiber, the manager of a Wichita convenience store.
Nothing racial about any of that, right? And certainly nothing that the White public should be told about, right? I mean, it's certainly not as newsworthy as the dragging death of a Black ex-convict in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 by three White ex-convicts, is it? I mean, the Jasper killing was given top billing by all of the controlled news media in America -- and in Europe as well -- for two years, and the racial angle was emphasized over and over and over again: hardened White racists drag innocent Black man to death. So obviously the murders and rapes of five White people in Wichita by a couple of underprivileged and misguided Black youths doesn't need any news coverage. Enough news already about interracial crime, right? No need to exacerbate racial tensions, right?
Well, that's one of the points I wanted to accentuate. The other point is the total lack of resistance of the White victims. It now seems that the two Blacks were armed only with a
That's really embarrassing. One expects more of a White man. This sort of sheep-like behavior reminds me of a scene in one of my novels, Hunter, in which a group of White office workers kneel obediently on the floor and let a Black with a straight razor go down the line and slit their throats, one at a time. In my novel the Whites submit because they have been conditioned by the Jewish mass media not to resist Blacks. They have been conditioned to regard any resistance to Blacks as "racist." When I wrote Hunter 12 years ago, I was concerned that perhaps I was getting a bit ahead of myself, and that to portray Whites as so strongly conditioned by the Jewish media that they would meekly let themselves be butchered by Blacks would not be credible to my readers. I asked myself, will most Americans believe that Jewish media propaganda can have that strong an effect on people? Well, I worried about it at the time, but I left the scene in the book, and what happened in Wichita last month suggests that I really wasn't getting too far ahead of myself after all. That's a real shame.
Now let's talk about Jewish media propaganda for a while. Is it fair of me to describe it as deliberate, calculated psychological conditioning designed to demoralize White people -- and to emasculate White men in particular? Am I imagining things in believing that the mass media are slanted deliberately by the people who control them, with the aim of weakening White people and softening them up for the slaughter? Do I believe such things only because I don't like Jews and am therefore too ready to attribute bad motives to them?
Some listeners think that is the case. Some people suggest to me that the attitudes portrayed by the Jews in the entertainment they produce for White people simply reflects their prejudices, but that there's no purpose behind it to corrupt or weaken us. Nearly all Jews are liberals, they tell me, and so it is natural that they produce films and television shows that portray liberal attitudes. And I suppose, following that line of reasoning, that the way in which they cover the news for us also is simply an unconscious reflection of Jewish likes and dislikes, with no ulterior motives behind it.
Other listeners suggest to me that I am putting the cart before the horse to blame Jewish media propaganda for changing public attitudes and opinions. What the Jews put into their Hollywood films and television programming is simply a reflection of life in America, they tell me. Americans have become more liberal, they tell me, and the Jews of Hollywood and Madison Avenue simply are following that trend, not leading it. After all, they say, the Jews are businessmen, and they're just giving the American people what they want. And the same thing applies to the news. If the American public really wanted to know what happened in Wichita last month, then the Jewish media bosses certainly would have told them. But Americans don't want to hear that kind of news, they tell me. That sort of news has a racist flavor to it, and it makes Americans uncomfortable. That's the only reason the Wichita story wasn't covered; Americans didn't want to hear about it. On the other hand, they were interested in the Jasper, Texas, dragging story. Americans felt that sort of story needed to be told in order to help fight racism. That's why the Jewish media told it . . . and told it . . . and told it.
Anyway, that's what some people tell me in order to explain why the Jewish media do what they do: why they suppress some news and exaggerate other news. Personally, I don't believe it. I believe that the Jewish media lead the trends instead of following them. I believe that the Jewish media bosses have a propaganda agenda. I believe that they use their control of the news and entertainment media in a calculated way to shape public attitudes and influence public behavior in America deliberately in order to achieve goals of their own. And I believe that those Jewish goals are inimical to our people.
But you know, you should decide that for yourself. You shouldn't just take my word for it. Yesterday a new Jewish film premiered. The name is Save the Last Dance. The film was made jointly by Paramount Pictures and MTV Films, both of which are subsidiaries of the Viacom Corporation. The Viacom Corporation is run by -- and largely owned by -- Jewish media boss Sumner Redstone, who was known to his parents as Murray Rothstein. And Redstone also acquired CBS recently, making him one of the top three media bosses in America -- all three of them Jews, of course. Redstone has staffed his media empire with Jews from top to bottom. He has put in a Jewess, Sherry Lansing, as president of Paramount Pictures, for example. And Viacom's MTV division, which specializes in interracial entertainment for trendy young White people, is well represented by the executive there who has handled the Save the Last Dance project, David Gale. Gale, a Jew, is senior vice-president of MTV Films.
Save the Last Dance is a film aimed at 13- to 17-year-old White girls. Its message to these teenaged White girls is that sex with Black boys is "cool." Very briefly, the story line is this: Sara is a White high school girl who lives in a very White small town in Illinois with her mother. Sara loves to dance, and her ambition is to become a ballet dancer. Then Sara's mother is killed in an accident, and Sara moves to Chicago to live with her father. In Chicago she attends a mostly Black high school, meets a Black boy who is into hip hop, and the two of them are drawn together by their shared interest in dancing -- although their dance styles are as different as . . . black and white. And so, of course, they end up in bed together, despite the objections of Sara's "racist" father.
I might not have mentioned this film to you if it were simply another piece of the race-mixing filth the Jews of Hollywood have been churning out during the last few years. All of this filth has the same aim, but with most of it the people who don't want to see the truth about what the Jews are up to could argue that it is simply typically low-grade Hollywood entertainment which uses interracial sex for spice, for titillation, but that there's no evil motive behind it, no intent to encourage interracial sex.
Well, they can't argue that about Save the Last Dance. This is a film which is aimed squarely at teenaged White girls, by far the most impressionable and susceptible segment of the White population, and its intent is to make them more receptive to the idea of interracial sex. All sorts of advertising promotions have been launched for this film, and they're all aimed at teenaged White girls. If you want to know what's on the minds of the people who made this film, go to their very own web site, savethelastdance.com, and read what they say. Clearly, encouraging interracial sex was the thing most on their minds. The film's Jewish producer, Robert Cort, discusses his motivation with his co-producer, David Madden. They say that they and others at Paramount wanted to produce a film about:
interracial romance and the social impact created by such a subject. We felt a movie could explore what those obstacles were for people involved in such relationships, particularly young people in high school.
So the Jews at Paramount Pictures turned to a Black director who has a fixation on interracial sex, Thomas Carter. According to the movie's official web site, savethelastdance.com, Carter:
had been looking for a story about interracial relationships that he could bring to the screen. Carter says the film positively reinforces the possibilities for people to love and understand each other, even when they are from different backgrounds and races.
Well, that's just a small sampling. Look at some of the film clips from Save the Last Dance that you can view free on the Internet. Look at some of the promotions that are so obviously intended to persuade teenaged White girls to see the film and to imitate Sara's behavior. The clear message of the film to these teenaged White viewers is, "Go thou now and do likewise."
The last thing I want to do is put more money into Sumner Redstone's pockets, but I recommend that you see the film for yourself, so that it will stick in your mind and you still will remember it when the time for the cleansing of America comes.
I don't want to give you the impression that there's something special about Redstone or the other Jews at Viacom. Some Jewish media push interracial sex more blatantly than others, but they're all behind it: all of the Jewish newspapers and magazines from the New York Times and Newsweek magazine on down, all of the Jewish film and television producers, all of the Jewish advertising agencies. It's not just a Redstone thing or a Viacom thing or a Paramount Pictures thing; it's a Jewish thing.
I'll give you another example. The Miramax division of Disney also has a new film promoting sex between teenaged White girls and Black boys. The name of the Disney film is O. Although it hasn't been released yet, there's plenty of information available about it. It's been finished for more than a year, but the release has been postponed several times, reportedly because the Jewish bosses at Miramax, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, were nervous about some of the sex and violence in the film. There's a horrific scene in the film where the Black "hero" brutally rapes his pretty, blonde, teenaged girlfriend.
The Weinstein brothers are very close to both Al Gore and Hillary and Bill Clinton, and it has been rumored that they were concerned that controversy over the film might hurt Gore's chances in the recent presidential election. Perhaps Michael Eisner, the Jewish boss of Disney, Miramax's parent company, was worried too. And maybe the film's Jewish executive producer, Michael Levy, also expressed concern. Unless there's another postponement, however, O finally should be released sometime in the first half of this year. You should see that one too, in order to steel yourself for the hard and bloody things we will need to do in the future.
And really, that's what this is all about. As important as it is for White Americans to be informed about the criminality of Blacks and the hatred that Blacks have for us, as important as it is for us to be informed about atrocities such as those in Wichita last month, what is far more important is that we understand the systematic and deliberate distortion and suppression of the news by the Jewish bosses of the news media. The Wichita rapes and murders are more important as evidence of Jewish intent than of Black criminality.
And as important as it is for decent White Americans to be aware of the sort of destructive filth coming out of Hollywood which is targeting our children, what is far more important is for us to understand the systematic nature of this destructive filth, to understand that there is a purpose behind it, and to understand what that purpose is and whose purpose it is.
On these broadcasts I believe it's fair to say that I try harder than anything else to make myself clear. I try to state things as simply and unambiguously as I can. I try to find the most compelling evidence I can and to present it accurately and in a way that makes its meaning easy to grasp. Whenever I can, I use evidence that listeners can check for themselves if I tell them where to look. Certainly, that's true of the things of which I've spoken on this broadcast: both the Wichita rapes and murders and the Jewish films promoting miscegenation. And I try to draw my conclusions from the evidence in a way that makes those conclusions unavoidable for any reasonable listener. The principal conclusion I have drawn in this broadcast is that the Jews who dominate our news and entertainment media are not simply businessmen trying to maximize their profits, like any other businessmen. They are men who also have a political, social, cultural, and racial agenda. They report the news selectively in order to advance their agenda, and they produce entertainment for the public designed to advance their agenda. Among other things on their agenda are the moral disarmament of the White public, the destruction of any sense of White identity or White pride, the inculcation of a sense of White guilt, and the paralysis of our will to resist the total Jewish domination of our society, the paralysis of our will to survive.
Now, that's a strong conclusion to draw just from the evidence I've presented in this broadcast. But I've presented corroborating evidence in more than two hundred other broadcasts. The selective reporting of the news in a way designed to make Whites feel guilty and the production of Hollywood films that attempt to persuade teenaged White girls that they should look favorably on sex with Blacks fit in perfectly with the Jews' support for open borders, the Jews' tireless work for "diversity" and multiculturalism, the Jews' advocacy of more and more "hate crime" legislation, the Jews' campaign against the Second Amendment, the Jews' efforts to censor the Internet and obtain legislation against "speech crime." Look at Jewish motives and activities in the light of history. Look at the way in which America has changed demographically, culturally, and morally during the past half-century under the impact of Jewish propaganda and Jewish policies. These changes did not come about by accident. They are the result of design.
The biggest and most important single factor in the Jewish campaign against White America is the Jewish control of the mass media of news and entertainment. Most Jews, of course, are not media bosses. Most Jews are not in a position to plan the selective reporting of the news or produce films designed to encourage interracial sex, the way Sumner Redstone and Michael Eisner and the Weinstein brothers are. But all of them -- or nearly all of them -- support the same things these Jewish leaders do. What is happening to America is not simply the consequence of having a small number of powerful and evil Jews in the media. It is happening as a consequence of having six million Jews in America. A small number of them control our mass media. The rest provide the Jewish tribal infrastructure which makes that control possible.
Again I say to you: don't just take my word for it. Think about it for yourself. Check the evidence for yourself. Draw your own conclusions. But don't just continue sitting on your hands and ignore what is being done to your country, to your civilization, and to your race.
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 ?
I just heard some great news on Kur0shin - Troll/ Crapflooder Anonymous Coward was found dead in his parents basement this morning. There weren't anymore details. i'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't read at -1, there's no denying his lame trolling skills. Truly a cockgnome.
--EggTroll
Should I worry that practically anyone can now build a supercomputer?
Yes, you should probably worry that practically anyone can build a supercomputer. But you could mitigate all that fear with the fact that not practically anyone can whip up software that takes full advantage of it.
Thank god there isn't any off the shelf "missile trajectory" software in the CDW catalog. you would hope that any society that can whip together motivated coders to write such code already has access to some pretty spiffy kit.
(yeah i said "kit"... and I'm from Chicago... I feel like such a wanker.)
just to run Mozilla.
is that Iraq and Afghanistan could develop their own nuclear bomb programs.
Think about it. Mandrake supercomputer cluster + determination + funds = more fun for us.
And all the attempts by the NSA to restrict code will be meaningless.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
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.
Wow, that's weird. Anonymous Coward posts Anonymous Coward's obit. Hofstadter would have a field day.
-AC 4eva! w00p! 4ll j00r b4s3!
Windows.
Is being ported.
And people will actually be running it.
In two years.
Yeah, right. Tell me another. I remember NT4...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15584.html
You'd think a top computer manufacturer would be able to beat out a part-time dictator from the third-world in gigaflops, but I'm thinking it was more a demonstration by HP that they're getting set to embrace Linux and shelve HP-UX.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
shouln't that be Yahoo! Serious News now?
Technicly all you have to do is buy a single G4 Mac and you have a super computer. If you buy $210,000 worth of them, and use BlackLab linux from the Yellow Dog folks youll be good to go. Or you can just buy a few of their Briqs.
They mention in the end that they are working with Microsoft to support this approach. They also suggest using spare cycles. Unlike SETI@home, where you download some stuff, work on it, send it back, this appears to be a system where the power scales linearly with nodes.
Windows support makes a difference. Take a large company (10,000+ in a single location) that has some intensive projects. In this case, they could just drop the $210,000 (call it $750,000 with installation, support, etc.) and put it in a room.
However, a smaller shop, say, 50-250 employees, being able to install this software on the staff's machines. They rarely use their computers to capcacity, and can probably contribute 90% of the CPU 90% of the time. This approach could let people doing giant calculations do so cheaply.
The real question, however, is who needs that kind of horse-power. For those that need the horse power, is the savings with off-the-shelf components meaningful.
Its a tremendous accomplishment, and I wonder how much of the changes were new (vs. Beowulf clusters that we always hear about). However, if this fills a need, congratulations, its an impressive accomplishment regardless.
Alex
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.
Argh. Is it possible that when news articles come listed from Yahoo that a non-Yahoo source could be used instead, or at least added as a secondary link?
;)
As soon as I see a blur (pop-behind) ad I quickly close the page I'm on in the naive hope that they track when people stop visiting their sites and don't leave via an ad...
SLiDERPiMP writes: "Yahoo! Serious 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,' ...
lick my god damn mother fucking balls
you have to admit that the free open source tools, drivers, os code, and yes for the STALLMANnanites - GNU code are the real winners here.
They make it possible.
Kind of like having a linux router project floppy and adding enough to download/accept workloads from another system. No HD required == $150 or less per node.
i'll give you $210,000 so you can do exactly what with your new supercomputer?
also, who will pay your power bills?
i don't get this "drool factor" thing some people have for supercomputers... sure, they're cool and all, but they can do exactly nothing you would want or need to do on a day-to-day basis...
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
please suck my god damn cock
Sez the cost was $210k US w/o cabling...why the qualification? What *would* cabling for 225-odd boxen cost?
Carousel is a lie!
"A more daunting task might be taking the model to a consumer environment, which, Richard pointed out, is full of often dormant processors like those in printers and DVD players.
"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
The individual machines that made up the I-Cluster are now out of date, each running on 733MHz Pentium III processors with 256MB of RAM and a 15GB hard drive. HP introduced a faster version at the beginning of this month and will launch a Pentium 4 e-PC by the end of the year.
this kind of hardware is out of date? unless i'm mistaken HP markets these e-PCs toward home users looking for light processing power, such as the ability to view web pages, read emails, and play solitaire. this looks more like a power-user rig, or something a gamer would have as a decent Q3A machine. how in the world could this hardware be obsolete? i guess i should replace the pentium III 933 i'm running because lord knows it just won't hold up to today's high powered apps! man it's almost a year old, i should start worrying...
pxg
End of Post
You are at the end of the post. To the north lies the post.
There is a sig here.
The cluster is at #385
You could spend $210,000 or just get a g4 from apple for about $4,000! G4s are sure super computers too. And then you can use OS X instead of Mandrake Linux. Much better.
-Adam
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?
The worst terrorist attacks in United States history occurred less than, I dont fucking know how many weeks now, and you people are discussing "Off-The-Shelf PCs as Clusters."
How do "Clusters" help the 6000+ people that died as a result of being burnt to death, ripped to shreds, smashed, blown to bits, jumping from 80 stories to their death to avoid being burnt alive or being pinned between thousands of tons of steel and concrete for a week?
My *GOD* people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
Unless you are going to discuss something worthwhile to humanity, such as ridding the world of disease, then shut the fuck up and stop discussing this useless shit, please.
Quite frankly, the 6000+ people who died in this unprecedented tragedy could give a rats ass about the clusters.
You people absolutely disgust me. You are all poor excuses for human beings.
I am almost ashamed to visit this site after seeing the terrorist attacks in the news on this site for a few days and then just brushing it aside and moving along as if it was no big deal.
You people simply play too many computer games and thus have no grip on the reality of this tragedy.
Its obvious that computer-game-playing-linux-geeks have no sense of reality, are very self-centered and have no regard for human life.
You should all be glad that you are alive and well and able to masturbate as frequently as you like while looking at goatse.cx, and not stuck under 100 stories of a collapsed building with your penis sliced off from shrapnel.
By the way, we all know that Linux is a fucking piece of shit operating system thats only used by so-called "elitists" because it looks "complex" and childish technical messages scroll accross the screen when something goes wrong. The fact is, they should be running the superior operating system, Windows, on this cluster. It could be much more efficient.
. . . so you can do exactly what with your new supercomputer?
Richard said that supercomputing power could come in handy for certain tasks, like converting large video files from one format to another, that currently take a good amount of patience.
Any one else notice that this seems to be a very elaborate (and expensive) project just to bootleg encrypted DVDs?
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
While I agree with what much of flegged said, his/her post implies that modern Intel/AMD CPUs -are- largely CISC devices. This simply isn't the case. Both (the AMD moreso though) make heavy use of RISC-type design and technique.
RISC does matter, or Intel and AMD wouldn't be using it.
- Turq - "That's TRON, he fights for the users."
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?
.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
So if this solution was done with MS licensing.. what would it cost? 225(machines) * $1800(Advanced Server) + $210000(initial cost) = $615000. Ouch. And I believe theres a licencing cost for Cluster Services too isn't there?
As we all know, "kit" is a british slang term for computer hardware. What many people may not know is that it is also the secret weapon in a British campaign of cultural assimilation.
Yes, you heard me right. Cultural assimilation. The brits are sick of seeing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the sexy chick from Enterprise on TVs all over the world, and they're going to do something about it.
The British invented the English language, and in many circles certain British accents are percieved as more sophisticated or upper-class. They're capitalizing on that by inventing slang terms - "kit" being among the forerunners - that other English-speaking peoples appropriate. Thus is begins.
Soon, British TV will move off of PBS, where it belongs. British computer games and hardware will surpass American in popularity. And there is nothing - absolutely nothing - we can do about it.
(In case you hadn't realized it, yes this is a joke. And yes, I know it's offtopic and will be moderated as such. But this was fun to write.)
I'm the stranger...posting to
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.
Hey remember all those completely and hopelessly out of work Russian PhD CS grads sitting around and starving and writing strong crypto software for the Russian Mafia? You might even have heard that the Russian Mafia is always looking to explore new business ideas and strategy.
Well hell wouldn't this be a great business opportunity for both of them?Call it RMBM (Russian Mafia Business Machines), and then build cheap super-clusters and turnkey code for "specialized" clients. The possibilities are endless.
This is where you get them now: Support. You sell them the machines at a 25% markup and then charge a ridiculous annual service agreement.
From the presentation:
"Using "borrowed" Post-CCCP Mi-8TV assault/commando choppers RMBM support staff can be deployed to your corner of the desert in a matter of hours! Lets see IBM match that! Not even Larry Ellison and his personal Mig can touch that! (canned laugh track)"
I don't know, maybe not.
I wonder how many FPS you could get in Quake 3 running on a PVM? Or for that matter, install Free-M-Ware (or VMware if you like) and install XP on it. Heck, it might even run at a half way usable speed, judging from reports from people that may not be to far from the truth..
They did? I always thought it was the amalgamation
of german and french after the battle of hastings.
I guess this is what you do with all of that extra inventory. Clusters coming from Gateway and Dell next.
I just heard some sad news on Slashdot - faggot Anonymous Coward was found dead in his boyfriend's ass this morning. There wasn't any more jizz. I'm sure everyone in the gay community will miss him - even if you didn't suck his dick, you probably enjoyed it up your ass. Truly an american fag.
Anyone who posts a comment containing the word "Beowulf" will be shot.
Including me.
Uh-oh.
I just heard some sad dick on talk radio - Gay/Faggot Anonymous Coward was found dead in his Vagina home this morning. There wasn't many more dick. I'm sure everyone in the homosexual community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his dick, there's no denying his contributions to popular ass. Truly an american fag.
Can you imagine a bewolf cluster of these?
http://goatse.cx/goat.html
I'm a first time poster, so please bear with me.
Anyway... I just got a job working with the NCSA as part of a project called OSCAR. It's basically an open-source solution to the problem of creating a cluster. I'm part of the team working on documentation and training materials for people trying to implement OSCAR. I can say, from my own experience, that installing a cluster (even only with 4 PCs) is not a simple task. OSCAR is still young as far as software development goes, but it will do the job well once it is finished.
For those interested, OSCAR 2.0 is on its way soon.
As we all know, "kit" is a british slang term for computer hardware.
No it isn't. That's just the only context in which you've heard it used (translation: you read too much Slashdot, and should get out more often). "Kit" is the British equivalent of the American "rig" when used in this context. It is not used specifically to refer to computers.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Yahoo! didn't report this story, they just licensed it. Give credit where it's due . :-)
You must be thinking of converting the rip to DIVX, which is indeed processor-intensive and can take 6 hours to more than a day depending on the movie and your CPU.
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 =)
E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
So maybe by using e-pc's the peak performance went down some, but anytime you tie anything together in a clustered environment the sustained performance dies (not just takes a hit) too. Only way to make it hit close to peak is assign each node a process that doesn't require any interaction between processes/nodes. In that case, you wouldn't need to tie them together to make a top-500 cluster. Just assign some IP's, cross mount their filesystems and call it a morning.
Besides, government agencies (and scientific companies) are beginning to realize that when you cluster 500 boxes together, you're still administering 500 boxes. When real supercomputer companies make real supercomputers, you've only got to administer one computer. Maybe that's why the term "Supercomputer" isn't plural.
If clusters keep on being called supercomputers, you might as well call "the internet" a supercomputer too since it's an environment where lots of computers are connected and running processes that don't depend on another. "Wow! Look at the sustained power of all 5000 Counter-strike servers out there! It's a super-counter-strike-computer!"
-1 : Off Topic
:-)
:-)
I'm sitting at work with no one here. A full T-1 and a Mandrake box under my desk (not to mention the 4 or 5 other *NIX boxes around me). I'm typing this because people like to flame those who are drinking.
I'm drinking Gin&Tonics. I grabbed a Lime and Tonic water at the local convience store (WaWa, for you folks on the East-Coast). I stopped by the Liquer store after that for a small bottle (plastic) of Gorden's Gin. Then I came in here to work. Nope nothing's wrong here, just a fast pipe.
I keep a knife at my desk now. I use it to cut the lime.
I'm drinking. Screw karma. I finally got above 5, and now I realize I don't care...
-
Oh, and to keep this somewhat on topic, this is being typed on a Mandrake box...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I think having a cluster of Athlons would create a miniature sun with all that heat.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
I'm a student at a vocational college in New Hampshire, and I'd like to get a Beowulf cluster set up here. The obvious question, though, is how do I convince the local administration to go for it? Any suggestions? I'm thinking of having it be on a donation basis, although of course any support the schol can give will be supported. ;D I'd deeply and sincerely appreciate any suggestions.
Dave
------
http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
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).
- hardware cost per FLOP (everyone already tells you this)
- FLOPS per human time to build
- FLOPS per sysadmin time to maintain
- FLOPS per kilowatt of electricity
- FLOPS per cubic foot of rack space
- 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."
Anyone else reminded of A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge? In that story, IIR, one of the protagonists controlled a ubiquitous cloud of invisible compute "particles". Each particle was networked to the rest through its neighbors floating in the air around it.
Ok, so I thought it was a cool idea.
My spoon is too big!
I fail to see what is impressive about this.
... 225 @ 733 mhz? That makes it to #325?
It looks like the wheel reinvented several times.
For cluster installs on several machines, use system imager .
For using and controlling a cluster of machines for various taskes, use LSF .
The number of machines is pathetic too
How sad. I need to bench mark our render farm (200+ boxes, 120 are dual 1ghz) and see what we can come up with. I know it is higher than that... and we have a smaller install for the industry.
I looked for info to spec our machines but I couldn't find any info.... any help?
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
No, it isn't. Yahoo! News is repeating a story which, if you'd bother to read the byline they wrote, was
The article on CNET's site should be getting the Slashdot treatment, don't you think?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Since you could now build a Supercomputer with OTC stuff (well, Im sure you could before today as well), will that make software like this (read: Beowulf) fall under export laws preventing exportation to countries like Iraq and China?
Any insites?
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
Well, at least your didn't make an AYBABTU reference.
I refer to "the british" meaning the residents of the island now known as England, not in the sense of citizens of the modern political entity. I probably shouldn't have done that, but hey - it wasn't meant to be accurate anyway.
I'm the stranger...posting to
You're right, I should get out more.
Of course, you know that makes the threat presented by the word even more insidious. If non-techies can use it well - I shudder to think of the potential for linguistic infiltration!
I'm the stranger...posting to
It is true that the first nukes were developed without "a Beowulf or a Cray"- BUT, to develop good nukes without doing lots of tests (and the U.S. led the world in sheer number of tests) you need fast computers. To develop small nukes you definitely need fast computers... Hence the paranoia over supercomputers in the Wrong Hands(TM).
Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror? KING LEAR
why not boot ftom a tftp server?
no need for cdrom/dvd, disk drives etc.
lower power needs.
just a CPU, and enough ram for the
os and job at hand.
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.
256 e-machines... what is that, like 768 years of compuserve/msn membership?
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
They could reduce the cost by another 10% ($89x225=$20025) if they would return their *unused* OEM Windows licenses to MS..
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
hell, run bochs
It makes me happy to read about another Mandrake-based cluster. I was starting to think that I was one of the only people in the world to take advantage of Mandrake's optimizations and superior (IMHO) distribution. I just finished building a 16+1 node Athlon 1.33Ghz, Mandrake-based beowulf cluster. Granted, we didn't make the Top500 w/ just 16 nodes, but it's fun none-the-less.
most of the entries in www.top500.org list of clusters use POWERPC chips... almost NONE are intel.
check it out and download all 500 and read them and see , moron.
The reason????? they are the fastest.
My foray into the world of Linux began by downloading a "CD image" from the Linux web site. But don't worry, this isn't software piracy, it's perfectly legal! Linux is shareware, meaning that it can be freely redistributed without fear of a visit by the Business Software Alliance. The free availability of Linux is a major reason for its popularity among cash-strapped students and self-styled anti-capitalist hackers.
Before installing new software, it is always advisable to read the documentation. Unfortunately, an unpleasant surprise was in store for me in the "required configuration" section of the manual. I was shocked to learn that Linux Mandrake only runs on Pentium processors, meaning that my hopes of testing the water with my old Gateway 486 were dashed. Furthermore, a whopping 32 megabytes of memory are required to run Linux! Although the advocates of Linux self-righteously boast the efficiency of their chosen operating system and deride the "bloatware" produced by Microsoft, it appears that their claims are blatantly incorrect. Although my humble 486 will happily run Windows 95, it seems that Linux requires far more powerful, and more expensive, computer hardware. Is this really the sign of a lean, mean operating system? Of course not.
Sadly, not even being able to install Linux is just the first of my many complaints. A brief perusal of the features of Linux Mandrake reveals that Linux is sorely lacking many crucial productivity applications. For example, why isn't the industry standard web browser, Internet Explorer, included with Linux? Despite the best efforts of the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force to encourage adoption of the Internet Explorer standard, the creators of Linux seem to think that they know better. By refusing to adhere to recognised standards, Linux is simply undermining its own credibility.
Similarly, almost all of the world's most popular and widely used software is completely incompatible with Linux! It may surprise you to learn that your copy of Microsoft Office, Outlook Express, or Lotus Notes will not work under Linux. Those who wish to use their computer for recreational purposes are also out of luck, for almost all of the most popular games are unavailable for Linux. Although a wide range of software is freely available for Linux, these pitiful offerings are mostly unfinished, unreliable and do not bear comparison to their commercial counterparts.
Computer security is also an area that seems to have been overlooked by the developers of Linux. In these times when hacking and viruses are commonplace, it defies belief to learn that no anti-virus software is available for Linux. To add insult to injury, there is no Linux version of the popular ZoneAlarm firewall. By using Linux, you are issuing an open invitation to the hordes of ne'er-do-wells on the Internet.
The shortcomings of Linux are obvious. Without even installing Linux Mandrake, I have exposed several fundamental flaws. Surely it is not too much to expect that, after ten years of development, the creators of Linux would have addressed these problems? The real question that the prospective Linux user must ask himself is, "Why bother?" After all, Microsoft Windows comes free with most PCs and there simply isn't a need to replace it, particularly not with a product of inferior quality.
Although it is always tempting to support the underdog, Windows XP will be the deserved victor in the battle ahead. I recommend that those Adequacy readers who are hoping to upgrade their operating system patiently wait for the release of Windows XP, rather than foolishly wasting their time, effort and money on Linux.
"The individual machines that made up the I-Cluster are now out of date, each running on 733MHz Pentium III processors with 256MB of RAM and a 15GB hard drive."
I run a 750MHZ machine I guess ill soon be out of date. MY GOD i have to buy one one so i can eek out that one extra frame rate in quake (even though i cant see it)
Linux has nothing to do with this subject at all.
Besides, if you decide to flame Linux, at least know what you are talking about.
1) Mandrake, Slackware, RedHat, etc are not versions, but atonomous distributions.
2) The Mandrake distribution is specifiaclly compiled for a pentuim. Get Red Hat if you want to run it on a 386+.
3) There is no anti-virus software for Linux because there are no viruses (the concept of users and limited file access to a user prevents viruses from doing much harm).
4) Linux has an excellent firewall implementation called "iptables". Furthermore it's a stateful packet filter / NAT that does many things most firewalls can't.
5) IE is not a standard. It's a web browser.
The IETF NEVER encouraged the "adoption" of IE.
Standards are CSS, HTML, etc which the Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror, Galeon, Nautilus web browsers all stick to.
6) As for the apps, you have many choices. Here are some of the MS counterparts:
IE: Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror, Galeon, Nautilus
Outlook: Evolution, Kmail, Netscape Mail
Excel: Gnumeric, Kspread, OpenOffice
Word: Abiword, Kword, OpenOffice
Ignorant idiot!
How many CDs can be crammed into a 747?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
this page
The sight of some of these clusters is terrible!!! Yuch! You will be divorced before one of these babies takes up any of your living space! And if you got one of these going you will soon be divorced.
What kind of gaming could clusters support?
Two hundred million wrist watch communicators running Linux is the #1 on the top 500 cluster list. The cluster was created to make sure husbands got home in time for dinner.
Building a "beowolf" still won't factor numbers. It might do some of the groundwork, but without that terabyte of memory that can be processed extrenely fast, you'll still be wasting your time.
And mine.
"Making linux GPL was the best thing I ever did" - Torvalds. I'd hate to see the worst thing...
Listen mate, my sister has a supercomuter.
Its a PIII with a 1gig clock speed.
As far as I'm concerned, that is a seriously powerful bit of kit that nobody outside a serious mathematition would ever need. My only worry is that she only uses it to run M$ Word and Lookout Express. (Like eveyone else who is talked in to buying such a ridiculously powerful computer for such mundate tasks)
You cant stop progress!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I haven't used Beowolf at all so I'd appreciate any advice you guys could give. Years ago I worked with Transputers - which have similar problems: throwing the data round the transputer network is the bottleneck.
I work on actuarial calculations - which tend to be just a shedload of FP calcs done over and over again. Monte Carlo simulations are popular at the moment - which means really just running the calcs a few thousand times with some random elements changing, then getting a few percentiles out at the end. The result being, you end up doing 5 billion plus FP ops to get 4 numbers out the end. We'd like to produce this as a web service ('cos we have the client data - they just need a simple SOAP request saying what numbers they want) with a 5 seconds response. Yeah, I know.
Assuming I can design so that bandwidth isn't too much of a problem, does anyone think this will work? Is there latency inherent in the clustering software itself? Would I be better off looking at some sort of hardware vector processor, or writing my own stuff to send the data round?
I'll probably get modded down for ignorance and having the nerve to ask an actual question, but if anyone's got any insights, I'd appreciate it.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
For example, the P4 would probably take prize for a chess game (unless it requires a lot more data than I am thinking it does). On the other hand, for a weather simulation, I would bet on the cluster.
science is a religion
Last time I looked, they told me it was the limit of the swith : 256 ports.
But I thought you could scale the switchs...
using 256 / 512 / 1024 computer coud be possible with a 256 ports + fiber interconnect.
So am I wrong assume you could pile up 2-3 256ports switchs, or is it possible ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Or do will we send them the EFF in addition to the Marines ?
8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
...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.
You are simply wrong here. In computational fluid dynamics we use clusters to solve elliptic PDE's by partitioning the domain and iterating.
As for nuclear testing, I guess it's just a coincidence that DOE created C-Plant and Avalon.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Yeah, you heared me.
hmm..... maybe up ahead.
The United Kingdom consists of Wales, England, the Isles of Man, Scotland, and part of Ireland. So There!
Hail Brittania!
I'm the stranger...posting to
Check out the 439th entry at the top500.org then.
/ 09/presto3/P9290183.JPG
Here's a snap from the in-house sauna
http://matsu-www.is.titech.ac.jp/~sohda/news/2001
An example:
100 MHz [Intel Pentium] (166.3 MIPS, 3.30 SPECint95, 2.59 SPECfp95 on Xxpress 1M L2)
Um, Juno.com already does this.
check out "http://help.juno.com/privacy/agreement.html" and do a search for "Computational Software"
I know selling a supercomputer to 'rouge' or communist nations is illegal, but what if a nation just orders a bunch of PCs?
/. about PS2's [sony, not IBM] being made Taiwan or some area and the threat of high end chips going to China. There has been talks of Linux running on PSX or some such cheap hardware so that it may be clustered in Iraq.
Question: I know there was a story on
[now the q:] Where is the line drawn? Aren't there computers in nations such as Iraq? I just can't believe that he/they can't get 10, 200, 2000 PCs and hook them up. People smuggle drugs, can't they stow a pc? You wouldn't even need to transport the case, - hell you could build a case from wood or adobe [Native Americans made...]
So where is the line drawn? And why can't I store buy a simple cluster? Anything?
I know chip prices fall usually because AMD, Intel, etc stop making them and go onto new lines but why not 4 Athlon's [Slot A, cheap] onboard at 750 MHZ? I know the limitations; software needs to be writen for that, speed isn't 750Mhz x 4, etc.
I want an almost super computer!
Tell my Kernel to use one for disk i/o, one for net, one for X... one for seti i guess. Advaced crontab, AT 6PM RUN FETCHMAIL ON CPU2! Damn, I wish I could write code!
Get your Unix fortune now!
idiots, these werent e-machines, they were the hp e-pc found here -> http://www.hp.com/desktops/professional/e-pc/e-pc_ 40/
It is very plain to see that you are very ignorant in your comments regarding the Macintosh. If you are really interested in learning and understanding parallel processing why don't you take a look at:
e ed .html
http://exodus.physics.ucla.edu/appleseed/apples
After you are finished reading this you will understand why some of us, who are doing real work, use Macs for some parallel processing projects.
We have 72 1U rack-mounted dual 1GHz PIII boxes running Red Hat 7.1. Most of which are sitting idle at the moment, although that will change in the near future. :)
I wonder where we would be on that Most-Powerful-Computer list.
All the cpus could share a bank of super quick ram. Shared data would be copied there. Direct pci interface. read access to all. regions of writability for each cpu. all cpus have access to all data at super fast speeds.
throw those network cards in for tcp/ip.
so, EEs get out there and make a pci ram interface and a 40GB ram box. send me one when you've got it.