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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.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these... erm... clusters?
-Berj
"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.
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
Was when the HP-powered cluster started assimilating some of the Compaq multi-Alpha machines as it's own.
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
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 ?
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.)
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.
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Wow, that's weird. Anonymous Coward posts Anonymous Coward's obit. Hofstadter would have a field day.
-AC 4eva! w00p! 4ll j00r b4s3!
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?
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...
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?"
Sez the cost was $210k US w/o cabling...why the qualification? What *would* cabling for 225-odd boxen cost?
Carousel is a lie!
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
- A Beowulf cluster of E-machines?
Maybe so, but this cluster still made into the top 500 most powerful computers.I dunno. It's kinda lacking when you compare it to all the other Beowulf clusters we've considered.
Now, imagine a cluster of Athlon 1.4GHz machines doing the same thing ... now there's a drool factor, and probably cheaper to boot!!
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?
Yes, we all saw the Apple ads for the G4 being capable of 1GFlop. What you didn't see, was that the Pentium III 500 was capable of ~2GFlop. Now that can run an 1GHz. You also didn't see that AMD's Athlon, having a superscalar FPU, is faster than a P3. And now they can run at 1.6GHz. The P4 has new instructions to speed up certain types of multimedia processing as well. By contrast, the G4 is only now approaching 1GHz. Go figure (as you Americans say.. :o)
An Apple is not a supercomputer.
RISC does not mean faster. It allows for simpler design which can lead to increased speed, but as we have seen, Apple have consistently failed to compete with Intel and AMD (not that they even make thier own chips...). CISC is actually a good idea, since with the huge speed differential between CPU and memory, and the introduction of cache, the bottleneck in any system is the memory bandwidth. Think for a moment : why did Intel add instructions to the x86 architecture in every iteration? Because its faster having one instruction doing something complex, than many simple ones, simply because of the reduced frequency of memory access. In todays computers, RISC doesn't mean anything, since memory, storage and network bandwidth is the bottleneck.
The moral of this story:
1: Don't believe Apple's advertising.
2: Don't believe what a Mac Zealot will tell you about RISC or some other claptrap.
3: Get ppc Mandrake if you're unfortunate enough to have actually bought a G4.
Yes, I use Macs. Daily. And I hate Apple. But my PHB is a Mac zealot. It frightens the hell out of me seeing all our company's work being stored on a Mac (OS9 (no pre-emption, memory protection, RAID, journalling, or anything you would want for a server...)).
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
You can crack every FBI, CIA, and any other encrypted file you can get your hands on... hmmm. That makes me uneasy
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.
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
If you really want to impress me, than you should not only build one of these from eMachines, but all eOnes... :)
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 guess this is what you do with all of that extra inventory. Clusters coming from Gateway and Dell next.
nonsense. It is not the superiority of cisc, it is the superiority of amd and intel. Opposite is also nonsense, cpus do not directly execute instructions for the last 20 years or so, there is always a layer for translation to simpler operations. It is not the architecture that counts- after all every current cpu is risc in a sense- it is the implementation.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Anyone who posts a comment containing the word "Beowulf" will be shot.
Including me.
Uh-oh.
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 . :-)
there is always a layer for translation to simpler operations
True. Every computer interprets instructions, right the way down to the simplest level of switching a gate on or off.
The difference between RISC and CISC is the instruction set exposed to the programmer (compiler, interpreter, whatever), and thus the number of memory accesses needed to implement something complex. But if you were to believe Apple advertising (which anyone who actually buys Apples must do...), you would think less instructions is better.
I was simply demonstrating that anything Apple tell their lusers is believed, whether it's true, fabricated, or just hiding certain facts (like the relative floating point performance of the G4).
Feel free to disagree.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
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!"
if they were easy to get, don't you think they would have used one?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The video card's bandwidth would max out with two processors- if you have a good pc and a shit video card it might already be maxed out.
When will people realize they can't just install Windows on a beowulf cluster ?
graspee
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
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.
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.
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.
"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
A quick Google reveals the following
Enormous FPU performance with three simultaneous instructions and one GFLOP at 500 MHz (1 billion floating-point number operations per second) with 80 bit floating-point numbers. Two GFLOP with MMX and 3DNow! instructions. That at least equals Pentium III's performance with full utilization of Katmai. The 3DNow! engine has even been improved comparing to the K6-3.
Yeah, they're talking about an Athlon, and it's only 1GFlop, but it's quite an old article, the Athlon still being in Slot 1 form.
Or, from Intels site (use lynx because it refreshes to a missing page)
The adder and multiplier were placed on different ports. This allows for simultaneous dispatch of 2-wide addition and 2-wide multiplication operations. This boosts the peak performance two more times when compared to the Pentium II, and hence, it allows 2.2 GFLOP/sec peak at 550 MHz. The new units developed on the Pentium III and modified P6 units are shown in color in Figure 3
Which also reveals that the PII was capable of 1GFlop.
Moral of today's story:
Search before flamebaiting, please.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
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 &
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
An example:
100 MHz [Intel Pentium] (166.3 MIPS, 3.30 SPECint95, 2.59 SPECfp95 on Xxpress 1M L2)
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!
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.
I never said you can't make a supercomputer out of Macs, in the same way you make a supercomputer out of e-machines. I was responding to the fallacy that a single desktop computer is a supercomputer. By definition, a supercomputer is one which is far more powerful than a desktop.
A single Mac is not a supercomputer, despite what Apple say. A single G4 is not even as powerful as a single P3. But string either of them together, and you can have a nice cluster.
Unfortunately, Apple shipped SMP machines long before any SMP-capable OS. And didn't tell their lusers that that second G4 was idling at 500MHz. They just run photoshop filters and say 'I'm sure that one went faster, just then'.
The reason people think Macs are good for Graphic Design is because Graphic Designers think they're good.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs