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Teragrid: Massive Grid Computing
onyxcide writes: "Envision is running a quick article on a new national grid of computing resources called TeraGrid. Half a petabyte of disk storage, 40-gigabyte-per-second national optical backbone, and 13 teraflops of computing power will make up this monster. It will allow "lavish amounts of online data to be continually available for instantaneous analysis, data mining, and knowlege synthesis." There's another article in the same magazine here: Transforming Research with High-Performance Grid Computing" LighthouseJ adds some details: "C|Net's news.com has a story about a new Compaq supercomputer named Terascale. It uses 3,000 Alpha EV68 processors distributed over 750 servers using networking systems from Quadrics. They say it can perform as fast as 10,000 desktop PC's combined in one second. The massive computer will make it's official debut on Monday at the Supercomputing Center in Pittsburgh PA."
Who gets to use this monster. There are a lot of projects that could use these flops, but who gets em? Goverment projects or privit one? And, Imagen a baerwolf cluster of these
Sleep is for the weak!
My guess - ten years.
Does it run quake 3???? ;-)
...it will take us to /. a site running on this!
Yes, yes, Moore was right again, and we can build an even bigger and faster network of supercomputers and throw them at the seven types of problems they're really good at solving. Of course, we've diddled this configuration a bit--massively distributed on the WAN level (instead of just sticking them all in Kansas an putting fat pipes to them directly).
So?
Wow, some part of my mind is drooling!
;)
The groundwork for a Matrix/Johnny Mnemonic-style cyberspace, anyone?
...someone *not* making a lame Beowulf cluster joke about these? No, I couldn't either.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Havn't we already seen a few stories about this system?
They say it can perform as fast as 10,000 desktop PC's combined in one second.
This line is really poorly-worded guys...
How can you combine 10 thousand PCs in one second? Teamwork?
"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?"
I tried combining 10.000 PC's once. Took me, my friends and a bulldozer all weekend.
If you're going to be in Denver the week of Nov 12, 2001, consider stopping by. If nothing else, the place will have free and open 802.11b!
-- Stanislav Shalunov
I bet it can perform as fast as 10,000 desktop PC's combined in one year, too! (WHATEVER the hell that means!)
I presume the author meant it was "10,000 times faster than a desktop PC".
I wonder if Hammer will be faster than those Alphas per processor...I'd think so.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
... it is the social (read human political) barriers. How often do you get organisations which have a disjoint culture agreeing to "share" resources? Scientists are no different as there's only a limited pot of government funds ... ask the Department of *ENERGY* why they're doing genome research. Corporate cultures makes it difficult to merge, just putting together a backbone and lots of honey pots (CPU resources) doesn't automatically lead to a automagic collaboration of trust. Grid computing doesn't address the social issues ... will my work be safe?, can I get a fair cut of the machine, will commercialisation contaminate standards, etc ...
... someone in a distant /. post noted that the GPL promoted a wierd form of trust ... because you knew the viral nature would eventually force publishing of any improvements, you had some confidence that the effort you put into developing software would (potentially) be amplified giving you improved down the track. The Sun Community Source License (SCSL) and Microsoft End-User License (MSFU) don't exactly inspire the same confidence and level of trust.
... but nothing different from a fancy queuing system. Other systems such as Globus are seriously researched but writing apps is still difficult. As for Microsofts .BET, it is stilll an unknown factor (and RPCs over low-latency internet doesn't exactly promote radically new killer apps). What does it require for a radically new level of trust (integrity, availability, confidentiality) to engineer the new killer apps? Chucking money at hardware without solving the human issues seem a little like an indirect government subsidy to the chip companies to me.
My point is that it takes a while for *HUMAN* systems to adjust to new technology waves. I would point out that in the early 1900s, factories were driven by belt-pulleys and machines (lathes/drills/press/etc) were contained in small 3-story buildings. Once electric motors got small enough and eliminated the physical requirement of being mechanically linked to the power source, then we could suddenly build whole acres of assembly plants and skyscrapers.
I see a necessary transition for software
Currently TeraGrids are the beowulf of ASPs
LL
beat me to it
All your Obligatory... remarks are belong to us!
Sorry, I had to say it. Actually, XP is kinda purty. Been playing with it the last couple days and haven't gotten it to crash... yet.
Counterstrike would run at, like, a billion frames a second!
I bet Square's pissed they didn't come up with that until _after_ they'd spent all that time rendering the FF movie. 10 megs a frame or some silliness like that? Sheesh.
The money for the TeraScale machine was awarded last year, and it went to the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center. The follow-on the the TeraScale machine was an award made two months ago, the Distributed TeraScale Facility, or the DTF. The DTF award went to NCSA in Illinois, SDSC in San Diego, Cal Tech, and Argonne National Lab. The winners decided to rename the DTF the TeraGrid. They've got a web page about the new system at www.teragrid.org
Got to hear a talk from Henri Casanova, one of the top dogs working on distributed application scheduleing and simulation software for The Grid. Neat stuff, but, as he addressed in his talk, we're really looking at a network of computers that only people needing massively intensive computations done on highly parallizable problems would find useful. Translation: only researchers in certain fields need this.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
FYI, this will be updated after supercomputing, but this is the list of the fastest computers in the world.
The Pittsburgh's super'puter will rank up there with LANL's new one (also a Compaq based one). Pittsburgh's will be the fastest SC for nonclassified work.
I'm not sure whether or not it'll dethrone LLNL's ASCI White or not. It does knock seaborg @ NERSC from the fastest unclassified SC spot though.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
It sounds like this monster will require a lot of wattage to run and generate a lot of heat. I suspect that the system could be used as a computer AND a furnace, i.e. the heat output could be cycled through the location where it's housed, reducing natural gas (or oil?) or electrical heating costs.
Hmm... think long and hard about that one! I'm not even stoned, and its messing with my mind.
"Knowledge Synthesis"... doesn't that defeat the point of "knowledge"? whoa.
>/dev/null
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Has a window popped-up yet that tells you that the latest crash can be fixed for a one time credit card charge of $29.95???
This sounds like the perfect thing to help the FBI analyze all of our email (started last Friday at 1045 EDT) for certain 'offenses' (ie, whatever they decide to call 'terrorist' on any particular day).
"Your government is not your country."
There would be plenty of room for speculation, and participants in the market would basically be betting on Moore's law, in addition to the other economic factors common to all derivatives markets.
The problems I forsee are to do with the standardization of the contracts. We would need to agree on an architecture, and a delivery method for the CPU cycles. All in all though, this could be a really lucrative business, especially with the demand for GHz from Hollywood movie studios set to explode in the near future due to actors being replaced with CGI animation.
Sometimes I feel like I am living in a Bruce Sterling or William Gibson novel, the pace of technology just seems to get faster and faster.
You've got to wonder how fast 10,000 PCs combined in one second really is. I mean, they're not really designed to withstand high-speed impact.
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
I doubt anyone will realize that this system will more than likely be used by the FBI and other U.S. "agencies" to process the vast amounts of data they will accumulate from the Internet with their new found powers.
Please learn the many uses of the '\n' character. Thank you.
All please read that announcement as having said "40 gigabit," 'cause that's what it is. Still fast... 4x OC-192.
God knows how the research people pay for this. Impoverished corporations like my employer still dick around with multiples of T1.
Avaki were in peddling their grid computing solution, and I had to say to the guy... "do you have any idea how little bandwidth we have?"
Grid computing will affect the rest of us when everyone can get high speed network connections.
I have a friend who's currently trying to think of a business case for Grid Computing ... but is having trouble. Apart from academics and researchers, can The Grid ever become mainstream? Why should companies invest in it, i.e., your average medium-to-large corporation? The books often seem to cite creation of virtual companies and vertical integration of companies (i.e. from the component manufacturers to the end retailers), but these situations don't seem particularly realistic ... and you'd have to agree policies over data sharing for a start!
TeraGrid can decode ssh version 1 and 2 streams, 128 bit ssl web sessions and other encrypted traffic in real time
Can it run Tribes 2?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
in a few years my wristwatch will be more powerfull ;D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
It's not funny any more!
Data mining and "knowledge synthesis" algorithms are NOT scalable to that many nodes, especially for such clumsy topology.
I suggest them to get their facts straight.
All you can do is to hold stupid matrices and do y=s.axb. And _rather_ slowly.
--exa--
Yeah, XP is pretty much looks only. As far as I could tell, I didn't crash it much if at all. The problem was most of my important stuff didn;t work.
What will this network be like when all of the pcs in the world are linked together?
Trapper-Keeper......
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these clusters!
Score:-1, Funny
If you want to crash it, check out the forums at www.flipcode.com for a printf() bug.
I find this area of research particularly interesting because of my own research and the high amounts of computing power that it requires.
But to answer some of the previous posts about the sharing of resources, one of the larger problems is to figure out and method of saying this:
Run program X at site Y under policy P providing access to Z under policy Q.
So, it's not like you'll just be able to tap in, there will be policies for program execution and data access. But it's coming faster than you think.
One of the coolest concepts is that of process migration which will probably be integrated into a ubiquitous computing grid. Whereby a process running on Processor A, Architecture X can migrate to Processor B, Architecture Y and preserve state. I've seen this work with some DEC's and Sparcs swapping processes and it's most impressive, but still needs some work.
I would suggest reading The Grid: Blueprint For a New Computing Infrastructure if you'd like to get more about the general idea of the grid. It's light on technical details, but a good high point view.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
why on earth all all these supercomputer folks using standard CPU's why not optical one and why not 100% pure optics for coupling and switches?
Keep in mind that only certain applications would work on a massively distributed basis. Things like Seti@home and Distributed.net are good because they deal with small chunks of data that can be processed by PCs. Things like CG rendering probably wouldn't work in a broad sense because of the kinds of bandwidth and storage needed to deal with frames. I have no idea how big (in bytes) a single frame of a motion picture is, but I would guess that the costs in bandwidth just to send back the finished product would neglect any benefit.
:-)
At the same time, I'm working on some artificial intelligence research, and I could definitely benefit from having computers spread around doing my work. I'd probably even pay for it.
A speech...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Another problem is posed by Moore's Law. If the net cost of computer power declines as regularly as it has for the last few decades then the average cost of a "CPU cycle" as you would call it will constantly be decreasing over time. The money you would pay for computing power now would always buy more computer power later. People would tend to defer purchase in the expectation that the next big speed increase is just around the corner and it will be cheaper to solve your problem then. People who have paid say $100 for X gigaflops (or whatever) would find that in six months their $100 worth might be worth $70, who would buy in ?
Time on the network could be the currency, that time could become more valuable as power increase and hitherto impracticable projects become feasible with greater computer power on tap.
As posted, this is all predicated on Moore's Law holding true.
Maybe they could start reimbursing the project by finishing Rc5 from distributed.net...
They should be able to wrap it under 7 days, and 10K$ is always a good start 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
You clearly do not understand futures/options markets. The whole point is to speculate on the rate at which moore's law works.
Small Times has a decent article today on use of the Teragrid for cancer research, including mapping cellular structures. All pretty spiffy.