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Terascale Computing System Installed

Posted by Hemos on from the more-power-then....something dept.

lysie writes The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, with Compaq and the NSF, has installed the Terascale Computing System. Worldwide, it's second in power only to ASCI White at Livermore. However, it's the most powerful system in the world for unclassified research--6 teraflops per second. 3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 microprocessors, in 750 four-processor AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX."

8 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where's Linux? by warlock · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bah... why not Tru64, why Linux?

    Obviously you've never used Digital Unix, and you are not familiar with their kick ass, highly optimizing compilers... they ain't gonna build a cluster like that to run apache+mod_php and serve crap you know, it's all about number crunching.

  2. Supercomputers... by maan · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm in a class at CMU with the head of the PSC...we've been having fun these past weeks, with him talking to us about this "machine". Seems their #1 objective right now is to submit the best possible score for the TOP 500. Apparently, the deadline was October 1st, but then they have some time after that to "rectify" their score...

    There was a fun story apparently about a slowdown that was due to _one_ RAM dimm not seated properly... So 2999 processors were doing their job, but then waiting for the last processor to finish its job, which was taking much longer...

    I've seen pictures of this beast. All I can say is: wow. So many cables, so many machines...

    And apparently, they're not yet completely connected. Each box is supposed to have two connections to a "fat tree" quadrics network. Well right now they only have one... But it seems that Linpack isn't so communication oriented, so it's not too big a strain on the network.

    Maan

  3. Links to more info on TCS1 by martyb · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here are some links to more information:


  4. Re:Scales like a real UNIX should by bconway · · Score: 4, Informative

    Alpha was the first non-x86 port of Linux, done by Linus himself after being given a DEC machine as a gift on a trip to the US (though I don't recall if it was on loan or not).

    --
    Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
  5. Re:Scales like a real UNIX should by oozer · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you are a big enough customer you can get the source to almost anything. Many VAX customers had the source of VMS back in the day (not that you would want to read it as it was mostly written in Pascal and Macro-11 but still, if having the source gives you that warm fuzzy feeling all's the good). The same was true for large Solaris installations even before Sun 'opened' their source.

    Bearing in mind that this machine was built by Compaq under contract I would find it inexplicable if the systems programmers on site did not have the source to tweak as required.

  6. Re:Practical Uses.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    PSC is run by Carnegie Mellon University, Pitt, and Penn State, IIRC. I'm only a sophomore at CMU and i've had accounts on two of their machines, already; one of them being the Cray T3E. So, right, students do have access to these machines.

  7. Re:I cannot see the point by T-Punkt · · Score: 2, Informative

    > TRU/64 is used because Compaq Alphas are 64 bit processors, and
    > Compaq wanted to use their own Linux distribution.

    Err, Tru64 as it's called now, is no Linux distribution. It's Digital/Compaq's version of Unix for the Alpha architecture (or "AXP" if you prefer that). It had the names "Digital Unix" and "DEC OSF/1" before it was renamed to Tru64.

    And please: Don't feed the trolls...

  8. Re:Scales like a real UNIX should by Paul+Komarek · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some of what you say makes sense, but mostly you sound like an advert. I'll pick on this line:
    "When you pay for the cost of commercial UNIX systems, you are paying for the assurance that 1) you aren't going to have stupid design flaws like the one the 2.4 kernel has in its inability to use virtual memory efficiently and 2) All of your nice new custom hardware is going to be supported"

    Having administered a Tru64 4.0 and 5.0 box, I can't agree with your statements about "what you pay for" when buying commercial UNIX systems. We had to upgrade because Tru64 4.0E did not support more than 8 SCSI devices on a single chain. Why on earth did we have to pay $1000 to be able to support an old SCSI standard?
    We would have moved to linux, except that we have a half-terabyte of ADVFS-formatted data -- i.e. our data is "held hostage" by a proprietary file system format. If all goes well, we'll soon have 700GB of linux-readable space with which we'll rescue our data and then reformat the original array.

    Oh, and let's not forget the time (before I was the admin, thank goodness) the machine was crashed by facilities to stop it from relaying spam -- turns out Tru64 ships (or shipped) with an open mail relay. linux has flaws, but at least you get the flaws for free! ;-) Oh, then there are the Tru64 network drivers for our old tulip based card . The card doesn't support full duplex, but Tru64 tried to make it support full duplex!

    Now there's the reboot cycle it got into, which corrupted the filesystem. However, the disk check ran without errors, and there's nothing unusual in the logs. Tru64 has some great features, none of which we need. We're only using it because we have to. We only paid to upgrade it because we had to.

    -Paul Komarek