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Cringely Wants A Supercomputer in Every Garage
Nate LaCourse writes: "Real good one from Cringely this month. It's on building his own supercomputer, but with some twists." You'll probably also want to check out the KLAT2 homepage to learn more about their Flat Neighborhood Network. And since KLAT2 has been around for nearly a year (check out the poster on this page!), perhaps a 3rd generation is in the works?
This is a very interesting concept that he is putting forth, but at the same time, how many geeks out there are going to really make use of such a clustering farm? Not everyone I know does video compression projects, and it would seem kinda prohibitive for a black-hat to set one up to break encryption codes. Could someone please tell this naive soul what useful everyday application all these CPU cycles could be used for? (if you say SETI@Home, I am going to bitch-slap you)
Secondly, UWB seems to be the holy grail of wireless networking, yes, however is this something that the agencies of the world are going to let out of the bag so easily as he says, I can think of the CIA and the NSA having a few choice words about such "undetectable signals" being used by commonfolk after September 11th...
Just my two cents
ZDNet has an article of HP building a supercomputer like this as well, called the "I-Cluster." It has 225 networked computers running Linux Mandrake (so changes could be easily made) on 733 MHZ out of the box PCs. The only catch is that is is slightly more expensive- $210,000 (minus network cabling). On the other hand, they plan to release the open source tools they made as well, so that people can repeat this.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Back about... 15 years ago? 20? Something like that.
I was in the office of a research company and the owner showed me their shiny new minicomputer. I can't remember what kind it was, unfortunately.
He said something then that struck me as very insightful and I've not forgotten it to this day.
"You know, minicomputers are looking more like micros every day."
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Dr. Dietz used to teach at Purdue, and I had the good fortune to take a compiler course taught by him. On the first day, when introducing himself, he came to the part where he was describing how to get into contact with him. When giving out his phone number (at Purdue, on-campus numbers were 5 digits long) he mentioed that his phone number was "GEEKS". He added, "No, I didn't ask for GEEKS, but when I figured it out, I thought it was pretty cool."
Needless to say, it was a pretty cool course.
Sadly, you are partially correct.
25 dual p650s in my home office ... when I crank it all the way up I come in at somewhere in the 50-100 range on the dnet rc64 dailies. Sadly the original reason I built it has evaporated and with the current cost of CA power I just have a fraction running
One: Because we can.
Two: Ever seen the stuff they run on supercomputers today? Simulating a supernova for 1 nano second can take a month of CPU time on some of the world's fastest supercomputers. Oh, its still very nessesary. If the past is any indication of the future, we will always need blazing fast machines to push the limits in the scientific world.
I assume you mean big iron as in mainframe, which is NOT a supercomputer by any means. Mainframes do the work that runs this world, supercomputers help us discover what we'll do in tommorow's world. They are very different worlds.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I don't know about every garage, but as someone who is currently working on a research project at a University, I can say we'd find something like this very interesting, as would a number of other departments on the campus. We've got a couple of Crays sitting around, but can't afford the cost of maintaining the things. Something like this would be way more affordable to buy and maintain for educational/research purposes where traditional supercomputers aren't even vaugely an option.
Why?
The machine I worked on in the early 90s is still in the top 100 of the supercomputer charts (or would be if the compilers knew about it).
While a desktop Cray-1 can now be had at commodity prices the machine is now two decades old. The obsolescence rate is nowhere near as giddy as some would claim.
The really big iron tends to have a lifespan of about five years and is typically retired because the power consumption and maintenance costs favor a move to newer hardware. True supercomputers rarely fall victim to Moore's law. Even the KLAC machine discussed only barely qualifies as a supercomputer, 64 processors is at the low end of the scale. People have Web servers with that number of CPUs. True big iron starts with a few hundred processors and goes up to the tens of thousand.
If by working on the big iron you merely mean you used to use IBM 3090 class machines, then the joke is on you, those machines were often obsolete before they were manufactured. When I worked at one lab I had a desktop machine (first production run Alpha) that was considerably more powerful than the CPUs of the just-installed campus mainframe.
Fact is that many of the people buying 'big iron' in the 1980s and 1990s were incompetent. They bought machines that ran the O/S they knew, which often meant they bought obsolete IBM mainframes for applications where a ntwork of IBM PCs would have served far better. I spent quite a bit of time in institutions where wrestling control of the computing budget from an incompetent IT dept was a major issue. In fact the World Wide Web began at CERN in part as a result of such a struggle. Tim, bless him wanted the physicists to switch from the IBM mainframe CERN VM to use NeXTStep machines. One of the schemes that the CERN CN division had cooked up to force people to use the mainframe was to only make information such as the address book available on the IBM mainframe. Attempts to make it more widely available were treated much the same way that Napster was treated by the RIAA. The Web took off at CERN initially because you could access the address book from a workstation or from the VAX.
Very few mainframes were actually designed to provide fast processing. The IBM 3090 series was actually designed to perform transaction processing for banks. As a scientific CPU it offered tepid performance at a price arround 100 to 500 times the price of a high power workstation.
There are certain applications in which CPU cycles are still the limiting factor. Admittedly they are much smaller as a proportion of the whole than they were 10 years ago.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Yes, these systems are not sometimes the best for handling vectorizable jobs, but they are so inexpensive compared to the old specialized hardware that it is easier to waste cycles than build special hardware.
As to memory bandwidth. Modern CPU caches make the question nearly moot.
If all of this were not true, then people wouldn't be building clusters and the majority of the top500 list wouldn't be dominated by clusters. Instead there are 3 traditional architecture machines in the top 20. This is the reason that Cray (etal) no longer dominates the marketplace... commodity systems have overtaken nearly all of the specialized hardware world.
-- Multics
>But what do you expect from someone who practices identity theft [wired.com]?
How exactly do you steal the identity of someone who never existed? The man we know as Robert X. Cringly was the Infoworld Cringly for 8 years! I'd say he pretty much defined who that Cringly was (or is today, I don't read Infoworld.) Saying he practices identity theft would be a valid argument if the Infoworld Cringly was someone else and he had just appropriated the name for use on PBS, but he didn't. He built up the Infoworld Cringly and so I believe he has a right to go on with the persona he's used for all this time.
man RTFM
No manual entry for RTFM.
I have a TiBook. Apple *could* do away with the screen, keyboard, and speakers, and replace the CD-ROM slot with a ram-bay.
:)
Not only could you hook them together using gigabit ethernet, you could take advantage of the firewire port as well, perhaps chaining them together with some sort of SAN, though you are still limited by the ~50MBps, though perhaps that's not useless, I don't know.
Still, with the ram bay you could up the memory from 1GB to something crazy, like 16GB. The battery is useful as a backup-emergency device, allowing the slab to run for about 4 hours in case of emergency (woo!).
You could even concievably netboot the thing, since OS X allows for that, right? Minimize the hard drive or get rid of it altogether... you could seriously make a slab about the size of 1/2" by 8" by 8" I suspect
GPL Deconstructed