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Truly Off-The -Shelf PCs Make A Top-500 Cluster

Posted by timothy on from the ready-to-wear dept.

SLiDERPiMP writes: "Yahoo! News is reporting that HP created an 'off-the-shelf' supercomputer, using 256 e-pc's (blech!). What they ended up with is the 'I-Cluster,' a Mandrake Linux-powered [Mandrake, baby ;) ] cluster of 225 PCs that has benchmarked its way into the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world. Go over there to check out the full article. It's a good read. Should I worry that practically anyone can now build a supercomputer? Speaking of which, anyone wanna loan me $210,000?" Clusters may be old hat nowadays, but the interesting thing about this one is the degreee of customization that HP and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science did to each machine to make this cluster -- namely, none.

4 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Can you imagine? (obligatory) by Andorion · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these... erm... clusters?

    -Berj

  2. $210,000 ?? by a.out · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Putting them to work. by nairnr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :-)

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

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

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

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