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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?
Make sure it has a red dot and says things like "Dave, what are you doing Dave?" Can't wait for mine!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
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- $210,000 (minus network cabling). On the other hand, they plan to release the open source tools they made as well, so that people can repeat this.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
And it shall be called. . . Earth!
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Those are some interesting ideas.
Now how about organizing them before publishing them? Call me pre-postmodern (and I'm still in my twenties), but I tend to learn more from a coherently-organized message than from a random jumble of statistics and facts. Cringely jumps from a detailed description of the KLAT2 and its innovative networking technology to a brief description of UWB. And then it's over.
Maybe I'm missing something.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Well, not to be one of those stick in the mud 'Read the %($#ING article' type people, KLAT2 is a reference to The Day The Earth Stood Still. Had you looked at the articles in question (particularly, the KLAT2 page) you would have discovered that indeed, they were intending the reference. Heck, go check it out - the poster they made up for it is worth the look! :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Maybe they could set things up so that ALL his articles hit the main page as soon as he posts them.
If this were the case he could put a "discuss this article" link on his page and simply link to /.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Btw, a little nitpick, the TX would refer to 4 pair (all 8 conductors), 10base-T uses 2 pair, 10base-TX and 100base-TX use all 4 pairs.
I think it translates to "Klaatu says not", but I'm basing that off of a half-assed knowledge of German ("nikto" -> "nicht"), the similarity between "barata" and "berate", and context. Maybe there's some kinda Latin thing in there somewhere, idunno. It's the instruction Klaatu tells Love Interest to give to Gort the robot, so he won't destroy the entire planet.
And since someone asked, yeah, that's the same line whatsisface has to use in "Army of Darkness", and it was the only part of that lame movie I can remember laughing at.
Now, the question is: Will I get modded down because this is actually offtopic as hell, or because I insulted "Army of Darkness"? %-)
Still though, after having to wallow through Cringley's painful lack of comprehension of basic technical knowledge, reading the ArsTechnica piece again was quite refreshing.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Cringely is completely missing the point. KLAT2 uses multiple routes and switches, not channel bonding. And what the project contributes is not the basic idea of using multiple network interfaces (which is decades old), but a specific approach: using genetic algorithms to optimize the network topology. More traditionally, such clusters have used manually designed topologies with known performance bounds.
Speaking as someone who, yes, has actually worked with the big iron...
Why bother. Remember, Moore's Law is still in effect. Recently, we've hit the point in the curve where supercomputers are no longer needed, nor cost-effective. That is, the time it takes for the industry to deliver a far superior product has eclipsed the average lifespan of your typical supercomputer.
We're living in an age where a single graphing calculator you can buy at Walgreens has more horsepower under the hood than what got us to the moon 30 years ago. Your $2700 PC will be worth $150 within 3 years.
Having a supercomputer in every garage makes about as much sense as taking a rocket fuel-powered dragster to the supermarket for a gallon of milk.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I'd rather have a superMODEL in every garage.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Also, if everybody had a supercomputer in their garage, they would no longer be so "super."
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.
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
Clusters are great for embarassingly parallel applications (ie ones that have threads which don't communicate with each other much. This includes things like SETI@home and batch rendering of images. What they don't compare on is applications that communicate a lot like nuclear physics simulations. This is not to say that that will never change in the future, but for the time being it's still true.
Last, and certainly not least, real supercomputers have memory bandwidth that can match the speed of the processor. A Cray or an SGI Origin has an absolutely massive amount of bandwith from the processor to local memory compared to a PC. That allwos a traditional supercomputer to actually *achieve* the fantastic peak performance numbers. On many applications, the working sets are huge and don't fit in cache so you end up relying on memory being fast. On a PC, it's not and I've heard from sources I consider reliable (though I have no actual numbers to back this up so it may be rumor only) that one large cluster site sees around 10% or less of peak on a cluster for a nuclear physics simulation, whereas, on a vector Cray, you can hit ~80% of peak. This means that the cluster has to be 8 times more powerful and when you start multiplying the costs by 8, they start looking like the same price as a real supercomputer.
So my point is that building a real supercomputer does not mean grabbing a bunch of off-the-shelf components, slapping them together with a decent network and running Beowulf (or a similar product).
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
...a single-CPU version of this!
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.
"(the operating system) will be QNX, a real time OS that supports massive parallelism and has very low overhead. QNX is fast! QNX is also Posix compliant, so there is lots of software that almost works under it."
If you're looking for software that almost works, I know of an OS that might fit your needs. You're not going to hook this thing up to the Internet, though, are you?
By definition only the fastest devices are supercomputers. These days that is about a teraflop. Thta includes the US DOE ASCI series and the announced installation of the Blue Storm and Blue Gene IBM computers. Ten gigaflop computers a dime a dozen and a hundred gigaflops not so rare.
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
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