Terascale Computing System Installed

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."

Comments

Re:Where's Linux?

[warlock]

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.

teraflops per second ?

[Professeur Shadoko]

a flop is a floating point operation per second.
a teraflop per second would be an acceleration in processing power... not what the article means I guess

I thought the Alpha was all but dead...

[BitwizeGHC]

... good to see somebody getting some serious use out of that trusty old CPU architecture, anyway :)

Scales like a real UNIX should

[SumDeusExMachina]

3,000 Compaq Alpha EV68 microprocessors, in 750 four-processor AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX.

There will probably be a lot of people here asking "why isn't this running Linux?", without really knowing what they're talking about. First of all, Linux just doesn't have the kind of scalability that a commercial UNIX, particularly Tru64, does. Secondly, Tru64 is quite well-known for its excellent clustering capabilities, and its tight integration with the Alpha platform leads to high efficiency in computing. Finally, when you are paying $43 million for a supercomputer, you most certainly are going to be running the best software out there too, and frankly, the only reason that people out there are writing free software is that no one would want to pay for their code.

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, and frankly, high performance drivers for high-end hardware under Linux are sorely lacking.

Re:Scales like a real UNIX should

[Marcus Brody]

All though I agree with most of what you are saying, I think you should think about toning down the flamage:

the only reason that people out there are writing free software is that no one would want to pay for their code.

This is clearly not the only reason. There are a number of philisophical & practical reasons for free software. Furthermore, ther are numerous examples of people who are paid to write free software (e.g. linus, alan cox); and people who are paid to write propriety code (i.e. they are good enough programmers that someone is willing to pay them) in their job, but also are involved in free software projects in their own time.

Re:Scales like a real UNIX should

[bconway]

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).

Re:Scales like a real UNIX should

[Paul Komarek]

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

Supercomputers...

[maan]

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

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