Slashdot Mirror
$24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US DOE) signed a $24.5 million dollar contract with HP for a Linux supercomputer. This will be one of the top ten fastest computers in the world. Some cool features: 8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors. Nice quote: 'Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,' said Rich DeMillo, vice president and chief technology officer at HP.
Read Details of the announcement here or here."
What OSes do the other top 10 supercomputers run?
I need a supercomputer to replace the pile of junk sitting on my desktop. Who needs a Beowulf cluster when you have this.
Sorry, couldn't resist. :-)
BTW: First Post? Hope so. Jippeee...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... I guess its just for processor intensive rather than data intensive tasks. So, spy or military is the question ....
If they used a real OS
yes it is.
a beowolf cluster of those...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
...but does it run Serious Sam?! Who gives a damn about a computer if you can't hear Sam's magnificent "WooHoo! Let's go bowling" quote before you woop some kleer ass ;)
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
... Cause if they put WinXP Pro on it, the project would cost:
$24,500,399.98
Which was juuust over budget!
BTW - Can you put in code during the "post slashdot story" to automatically close the <I> tags? I don't think that would be too difficult to add...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here's a short list of Linux flaws that make it look silly:
/usr/include/linux (come on. honestly.) Lame. Nonstandard. (for the clue-deprived, this means that any code written for linux using the linux/ headers will be incompatible with all other Unix flavors.) Guess what: string.h, types.h, malloc.h, signal.h, and so-on don't belong in a platform-specific include directory. Hope you didn't want to port your code... /usr/include/linux... /bin/sh != sh; /bin/sh == bash. Lame. Nonstandard. Result: broken shell scripts and nonportable code. /usr/bin/make != make; /usr/bin/make == gmake. Lame. Nonstandard. Same result as above: nonportable code. ...such professionalism! ...apparently it's better for any user to attack the root password than to offer added security. Ignorance of security is a common Linux thread.
*
* Neither the sigaction manpage nor the signal.h includs indicate what the system defaults are. Of course, they've put signal.h in
* "intro" manpages are a joke. Compare the BSD section 2 intro with the one from Linux.
* file systems mount async by default (power outage and your fs dies)
* Most linux users don't have pubes yet and are intolerably lame (3Y3 4m 1337 H4x0r d00d [uz 3y3 h4v3 L1Nux!)
* Too many things in user space that belong in the kernel (nfs)
* Too many things in the kernel that belong in user space (java)
* No standard distribution. Linux people say this is a good thing? Try writing software or software configuration instructions when you never know how the OS is going to be laid out, or try finding the responsible party for a block of OS code, or try fixing security problems when they arise and you'll see that this is NOT a good thing at all.
* no consistant pronunciation the os'es name (line-ucks? lynn-ucks?)
* svr4? bsd? make up your mind?
* Lame NFS & dd
* #linux, #hack, #linuxwarez...
* New kernel every week that breaks half your applications
* Security flaw/Root compromise of the week (see below)
* glibc? libc? libc5? libc6? glibc2?
*
*
* ext2fs
* Linux will mount partitions that are not clean
* can't handle partitions > 2GB (i've hear they finally fixed this one)
* e2fsck deliberatly leaves/creates corrupt files (if there is a block that it duplicate between two files, e2fsck will clone the duplicate (while fsck will remove both files. This can also result in a user gaining unauthorized access to another user's data.))
* it swap likes swap to swap swap too swap often swap
* only allows 128M of swap at a time; for a 1G of swap, you need 8 swap partitions
* can't handle more than 1GB of RAM
* To install Joe's program, you need Bob's kernel hack, but for Bob's kernel hack, you've got to have Suzy's patches, but Suzy's patches only work with a year-old kernel, unless you get Mike's patches to Suzy's patches, but even then, those conflict with Jeff's drivers, which can be resolved only by installing Nancy's patches...
* Can't handle the same IP on more than one interface
* Can't handle large files
* Max file size: 2GB. (*BSD: 4 Terabytes)
* Dynamically linked root shell. Doom!
* lilo! any boot loader that needs to have magic block numbers is wrong
* linux icmp.h is *NOT* unix icmp.h - they're totally incompatible.
* flatfile password files make listing large ftp directories impossible due to huge numbers of flatfile searchces.
* password file can be non-shadowed - encrypted passwords visible to all
* shadow.h! hahahahahahaha!
* Slowass network code
* Did I mention slowass network code?
* Oh, also slowass network code
* Miserably pathetic threading implementation doesn't scale for shit: all threads wake up on signals (stampeding process problem).
* L1nux c0d3rz!
* LILO can't cope with kernels > 1Mb, so the kernel has to be gzipped.
* strfry and memfrob
* Can't cope with hard drives > 32GB
* GPL - a license and a virus
* Fundamental design and direction problems. It turns out that Linus is not the smartest man in the world and the saviour of all mankind.
* OS or religion?
* UNABLE TO LOAD INTERPRETER...memory leak much?
* This is a real Linux error message: Uhhh. NMI recieved. Dazed and Confused. Trying to cope
*The GNU su manpage actually says this:
This program does not support a "wheel group" that restricts who can su to super-user accounts, because that can help fascist system administrators hold unwarranted power over other users.
* vi != vi; vi == vim. vim links to X libraries. Wipe X, and now you can't use vi. Retards.
* Still no USB support in 2000, after NetBSD and FreeBSD have had it for nearly 2 years. So much for the "million geeks" theory of rapid software development.
* Always trying to help you hold your weewee when you're going tinkle.
* No version control used to manage the system.
all that capability and all I can think about is how much power the dang thing would consume... it'll take one big, big UPS/power conditioner.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
or did the author forget to end an italic tag in this story?
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Imagine a cluster of a few of these ;)
Sorry, couldnt resist....
Scheduled to be fully operational in early 2003...
Won't it be obsolete by then?
McKinley will be released in the middle of this year and Madison will be released in the first half of the next year.
It will take at least a year before this Supercomputer will be functional.
Hewlett-Compaq have sold their first machine!
Smile, don't click...
I have one of these on my desktop right now! I am not running Linux though, I am running Palm OS. However, I only use it to play solitaire and for my address book.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Franklin
WE have someone willing to spend $24.5 million just to get a machine to play Quake a little bit faster! Have you any idea what that money could do for starving children in India, Iraq, and Japan?
Imagine how fast it could crash!
How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP (Q314458)
.
.
/dev/sda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 1)
/dev/sda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/sda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 1)
/dev/sda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/sdb1 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 2, partition 1)
/dev/hda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 1, partition 1)
/dev/hda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (IDE hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/hda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 1, partition 1)
/dev/hda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (IDE hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/hdb1 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 2, partition 1)
n fo/admi nistration/management/mltiboot.asp The third-party contact information included in this article is provided to help you find the technical support you need. This contact information is subject to change without notice. Microsoft in no way guarantees the accuracy of this third-party contact information.
The information in this article applies to:
* Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
* Microsoft Windows XP Professional
For a Microsoft Windows 2000 version of this article, see Q247804
SUMMARY
This article explains how to remove the Linux operating system from your computer and install Windows XP. This article assumes that Linux is already installed on your computer's hard disk, that Linux native and Linux swap partitions are in use (which are incompatible with Windows XP), and that there is no free space left on the hard disk.
NOTE : Windows XP and Linux can coexist on the same computer. For additional information, refer to your Linux documentation.
MORE INFORMATION
To install Windows XP on a computer on which Linux is currently installed (and assuming that you want to remove Linux), you must manually delete the partitions used by the Linux operating system. The Windows-compatible partition can be created automatically during the installation of Windows XP.
IMPORTANT : Before you follow the steps in this article, verify that you have a bootable disk or bootable CD-ROM for the Linux operating system, because these steps completely remove the Linux operating system from your computer. If you intend to restore the Linux operating system at a later date, verify that you also have a functional backup of all the information stored on your computer. Additionally, you must have a full release version of Windows XP to use during this installation. If you intend to use a Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM, a CD-ROM of a qualifying Windows product must be available. Setup from the Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM will prompt you for this CD-ROM.
Linux file systems use a superblock at the beginning of a disk partition to identify the basic size, shape, and condition of the file system.
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap). The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from either of the following locations:
* The hard disk Master Boot Record (MBR)
-or-
* The root folder of the Linux partition
The Fdisk tool included with Linux can be used to delete the partitions. (There are other utilities that work just as well, such as Fdisk from MS-DOS 5.0 and later, or you can delete the partitions during the installation process.)
To remove Linux from your computer and install Windows XP, follow these steps:
1. Remove the native, swap, and boot partitions used by Linux:
1. Start your computer with the Linux Setup floppy disk, type fdisk at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
NOTE : For help with using the Fdisk tool, type m at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
# Type p at the command prompt, and then press ENTER to display partition information. The first item listed is hard disk 1, partition 1 information , and the second item listed is hard disk 1, partition 2 information
# Type d at the command prompt, and then press ENTER. You are then prompted for the partition number that you want to delete. Type 1 , and then press ENTER to delete partition number 1. Repeat this step until all the partitions have been deleted.
# Type w , and then press ENTER to write this information to the partition table. Some error messages may be generated (because information is written to the partition table), but they should not be significant at this point because the next step is to restart the computer and then install the new operating system.
# Type q at the command prompt, and then press ENTER to quit the Fdisk tool.
# Insert either a bootable floppy disk or the bootable Windows XP CD-ROM, and then press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart your computer.
2. Follow the instructions on the screen to install Windows XP.
The installation process assists you in creating the appropriate partitions on your computer.
Sample Linux Partition Tables
Single SCSI Drive
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Multiple SCSI Drives
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Single IDE Drive
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Multiple IDE Drives
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Additionally, Linux recognizes more than 40 different partition types, including the following:
* FAT 12 (Type 01)
* FAT 16 > 32 M Primary (Type 06)
* FAT 16 Extended (Type 05)
* FAT 32 w/o LBA Primary (Type 0b)
* FAT 32 w/LBA Primary (Type 0c)
* FAT 16 w/LBA (Type 0e)
* FAT 16 w/LBA Extended (Type 0f)
Note that there are other ways to remove the Linux operating system and install Windows XP. The preceding method is included in this article because of the assumptions that the Linux operating system is already functioning and there is no more room on the hard disk. There are methods for changing partition sizes with software designed for managing partitions. Disk partitioning software may cause instability with the Windows XP installation. Microsoft does not support the installation of Windows XP on partitions manipulated in this manner.
You can also use an MS-DOS version 5.0-or-later boot disk, a Microsoft Windows 95 Startup disk, or a Microsoft Windows 98 Startup disk that contains the Fdisk utility to remove an operating system from the hard disk and install a different operating system. When you start Fdisk and multiple drives are installed on your computer, you are presented with five choices; use option 5 to select the hard disk that has the partition to be deleted. After that (or if you have only one hard disk), select option 3 ( Delete partition or logical DOS drive ), and then select option 4 ( Delete non-DOS partition ). You should then see the non-MS-DOS partitions that you want to delete. Typically, the Linux operating system has two non-MS-DOS partitions, but there may be more. After you delete one partition, use the same steps to delete any other appropriate non-MS-DOS partitions.
For additional information about how to use the Fdisk utility, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q255867 How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk After you delete the partitions, you can create partitions and install the operating system that you want. You can create only one primary partition and an extended partition with multiple logical drives by using Fdisk from MS-DOS version 5.0-and-later, Windows 95, and Windows 98. The maximum FAT16 primary partition size is 2 gigabytes (GB). The largest FAT16 logical drive size is 2 GB.
For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q105074 MS-DOS 6.2 Partitioning Questions and Answers When you install Windows XP, the Linux partitions can be removed and new partitions created and formatted with the appropriate file system type during the installation process. Windows XP allows you to create more than one primary partition. Windows XP does recognize the FAT32 file system. During the installation of Windows XP, you can create a very large FAT32 drive. The FAT32 drive can be converted to NTFS after the installation has completed, if appropriate.
For additional information about how to multiboot with Windows XP, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Q306559 HOW TO: Create a Multiple-Boot System with Windows XP For more information, browse to the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techi
The third-party products discussed in this article are manufactured by vendors independent of Microsoft; we make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding these products' performance or reliability.
A lower cost? Hell...maybe I'll pick one up after work today. With a price tag of only 24.5 million, you're actually making money with this purchase (or, as cases dictate, losing money by not taking advantage of this offer)!
Sheesh. I think 'reduced' cost is more appropriate.
All I can say is:
"I have GOT to get me one of these!"
-- Will Smith, "Independence Day"
(42 Karma, don't mod me)
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
painting the football field...
great good googly moogly.
awesome, lets just hope it functions as it is designed to, could be a huge publicity boost for Linux....
Sent from your iPad.
If it is so open, they should let us all have shell accounts on it.
and already 4 comments about a beowolf cluster of these things. cmon slashdot, you can do better than that
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
That is all.
Let's see the story when they make one with 1,800 AMD processors!
- AIX is dying.
- AmigaOS is dying.
- BSD is dying.
- BeOS is dying.
- CPM is dying.
- DOS is dying.
- FreeBSD is dying.
- GNU Hurd is dying.
- HP-UX is dying.
- IRIX is dying.
- Inferno is dying.
- Linux is dying.
- LynxOS is dying.
- MINIX is dying.
- MacOS is dying.
- Mach is dying.
- MicroC/OS is dying.
- NachOS is dying.
- NeXT is dying.
- Nemesis is dying.
- NetBSD is dying.
- NetWare is dying.
- OS-400 is dying.
- OS-9 is dying.
- OS/2 is dying.
- Oberon is dying.
- OpenBSD is dying.
- Palm OS is dying.
- Plan 9 is dying.
- pSOS is dying.
- QNX is dying.
- RTEMS is dying.
- SCO is dying.
- Solaris is dying.
- SunOS is dying.
- TRON is dying.
- ThreadX is dying.
- TinyOS is dying.
- Unix is dying.
- VMS is dying.
- VxWorks is dying.
- Windows 2000 is dying.
- Windows 3.11 is dying.
- Windows 95 is dying.
- Windows 98 is dying.
- Windows CE is dying.
- Windows ME is dying.
- Windows NT is dying.
- Windows XP is dying.
The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing defines an operating system as: "The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running. The OS may be split into a kernel which is always present and various system programs which use facilities provided by the kernel to perform higher-level house-keeping tasks, often acting as servers in a client-server relationship. Some would include a graphical user interface and window system as part of the OS, others would not.The operating system loader, BIOS, or other firmware required at boot time or when installing the operating system would generally not be considered part of the operating system, though this distinction is unclear in the case of a rommable operating system such as RISC OS. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around the machines on which it runs.
I wonder what fps you'd get.
That answers my question of what I would have done if I won the Powerball last night
Get your Unix fortune now!
is turning SlashDot into an Italic hell!
How fast would it run quake?
Might as well be me.
1) Imagine a beowolf cluster...
2) Can that thing run Quake?
3) Finally! A harddrive big enough for my MP3 collection!
Seriously though, it's nice to see these companies working together to further common platforms. And running linux! If this doesn't show the power of linux scalability, nothing EVER will.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
So does that mean it has 3.6 Terabytes of swap space?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Wow, do the math thats $17,500 per processor (node). Thats 24.5 million divided by 1400. Whats the deal with that? Even with top of the line components, the fastest interconnects available (Dolphin or Myrinet or whatever), thats a 7 million dollar computer at most (5 grand a machine, with SCI could even build much faster then a 8Teraflop box, hell a dual Athlon or Intel based system would be cheaper and whale on that). Software? Nothing, althought they are probably going to use Scyld or something and pay the bucks. Im willing to bet that half that cost pure adminstrative and contract over head and support.
Jeff Knox
so, what will that supercomputer will be used for? Arms? Petrol? Investigation? What?
I wouldn't be happy for such thing happen...
I'm kinda surprised to see that this computer is actually running on intel proccessors. Typically when this kind of horse power is required while a risc processor gets chosen. I'm not real familiar with the itanium other than i know it's a 64bit proc, and the workstations are REAL expensive :) The question is how does the itanium compare to it's oppenents like the POWER3-II copper based chip?
Later,
Phil
I work at a medium sized ISP in a south american country, we have had several problems with our HP LT and LS servers, the hard disks are disposable. After several hard disks replacements I had to use a linux software raid to get around those crappy hard disks, it saved my life once already.
Anyways, I hope this super computer DOESNT use the same kind of disks, if not, you will feel... PAIN
"Open architecture"? How many other "open architectures" are only and will only be manufactured by one company (Intel)? Itanium is as closed as they come. I've gottta go out now, and buy that "Open Windows" Microsoft just started selling.
/.?
McKinley isn't out yet, and Madison is its successor. Why don't they just build it using Pentium 8s and Athlon XP 52s?
Sure, mod me a troll for not eating up the nonsensical marketing garbage that is being passed off as a news story. Did HP start advertising on
I think that this will be one of the few machines in the world to run the Perl desktop on a reasonable speed ;)
Geez, ud think they might just invest a little R&D into the hurd and have an even more scalable OS.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
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1) 8.4 TFLOPS lets you find the sum of 4.2+4.2, 168 trillion times a second. .(+ all the MP3s you downloaded )
2) 170 TB can hold 42.5 thousand times the contents of the entire Library of Congress books
3) 1 TB of RAM may let you run as many as 13 Windows applications simultaneously.
How will this affect linux ?
Will HP come up with something revolutionary in linux development while constructing this system or is the tech used conventional - just on a bigger scale ?
and it still can't break 3des
They're awfully confident of McKinley not following in the footsteps of Merced if they've placed this order.
This raises an interesting question, though. If you want to build a high-performance compute cluster nowadays... what do you build it out of? The old answer, Alpha, doesn't really apply any more.
Sun is optimized for communications bandwidth, not FLOPS, and I'm not sure if SGI even _offers_ machines that huge. HP is betting on IA64. And x86 is competely unsuitable, for memory space reasons if nothing else.
What am I missing?
Well, not a lot of people know this, but there are a whole bunch of optimisations that have crept into the linux Kernel but are note enabled by default because they've been thought 'unstable'. .bashrc or .profile (depending on shell) but obviously then the system operations don't gain the benefit.
One of these is 'exec mode'. When enabled, the linux kernel uses a smart caching algorithm to speed up application load/start times.
It's actually quite easy to install too. Simply add the line 'exec true' to your system profile (/etc/profile generally). It's possible to enable on a per user basis by inserting this into a
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.... oh wait, never mind.
Sorry I just couldn't resist.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Are there good optimizing compilers for Fortran95 and the other major research languages for the IA64 yet?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,"
24.5 Million Dollars?... Lower??
Do the world a favour and kill yourself, bitch.
I am impressed, however, with any of these clusters, and am amazed at the cost savings. But, you have other concerns with a huge cluster: redundancy, heat, energy usage, space requirements, etc.
Click here or here.
for the ibm this thing is replacing. it'll only be 6 years old in 2003...
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
I am a poor German faggot. Mein interests include Linux and Slashdot. Mein Fuehrur, I vish to have anal intercourse vit you. Vould you allow me?
2002-04-17 06:28:41 HP to build Linux supercomputer (articles,hp) (rejected)
Any bets on Microsoft suing HP for using Linux, and/or jacking them on the license fees for Windows that HP is using? "How dare you use Linux in such a public fashion! Pay! Pay! PAY!"
imagine a beowulf cluster of these
Its for the package, not just the hardware. It could even include tax and shipping.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
ACK!!!
On my system, at least, this would make the system unusable!!! 'exec' is a shell builtin that calls execve() to replace the shell process with another process. 'true' just returns a true value to a shell script, and does nothing really.
Be careful of this troll.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
but at least OS X isn't dying...
Just think how fast I could crash!
Sigs pose an operational security risk and help the baddies aggregate data. I guess commenting does too, oops.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [kuro5hin.com] in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
With all that exotic hardware, how do you think it will react?
The guys on kernel dev are going to have to work a good deal to support that. Anyway, I wonder what its average uptime will be.
"8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors."
Microsoft finally release the baseline specifications for there next generation operating system...
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
nt
Didn't IBM build a few large clusters in the last year or two?
Yours can be /bin/false
Mod this guy down. Putting 'exec true' in
the profile or login scripts will break the script.
John
What about this one?
3:00 a.m. March 22, 2000 PST
The University of New Mexico and IBM are teaming up to build the world's fastest Linux-based supercomputer.
Named "LosLobos", the new supercomputer is scheduled to be fully operational by the summer
Whats the current status?
I wonder if this is based on the same technique HP used to benchmark
their way into the top 500 using 255 Pentium III 700s running Linux Mandrake
back in October. Back then they said the physical limit for such a cluster was
255 devices due to switching capabilities. Hmm...
What's "a computer" (singular)? The "details" links are a little short. 1,400 processors, wow. How many kernels? 1? 1,400? What's the topography? Will it use resources completely dynamically, or can you split it into fixed side sub-units? If you can hot swap parts, can you turn off e.g. half of it and still feed the other half problems? Are various parts of it drawing from independend power sources? Is there a single point of control, or are there multiple master processes?
What I'm getting at is: at what point does a multiple processor "supercomputer" start to be indistinguishable from a "distributed computing network". Imagine a Beowulf cluster of SETI@home networks, for example. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think not
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
All alcoholics quit. Some while they are still alive.
Yeah, it runs Linux, but I bet they didn't make any profit on the sale.
Can You Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
will it run nethack?
SGI certainly do sell machines with more processors than this: SGI ASCI Blue Mountain has 6144 CPUs
Re: your less-than-insightful comment on x86: Intel's ASCI Red has 9472 x86 CPUs. Guess what - they don't share 4GB memory...
Like the other poster said: look up NUMA.
nic
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
a beowulf cluster of these... Sorry...
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
But can it a survive a Slashdotting?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Gb/s interconnects are old hat, point taken on the storage stuff though.
I think 359 people have already said that.
FP?
Soon to be the new record holder for linux kernel
compile time.
Most supercomputers have been using Unix (and the many varients thereof) for a long time. Unix has always seemed to be able to handle multiple processors efficently. This is just the rich man's version of a beowulf cluster
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
This could be well-spun by Linux companies... this machine is rather obviously not using Linux because it's free-as-in-beer, which is still the common perception of the best reason to use it. Microsoft says "when you pay for software, the software is held accountable", well, $24.5 mil is some pretty deep accounting.
...a beowulf cluster of these!
(Sorry, but I just had to...)
'Open architectures'? But it's going to be running Intel's proprietary IA-64 family, where the USPTO has even granted patents on certain CPU instructions. H-P's claim would ring more true if they'd gone with IA-32 (which has two competing suppliers, at least) or SPARC (which you can license from some half-baked consortium).
Unfortunately there is no fully open hardware platform at the moment, and closed hardware is less of a problem than closed software, but still this sounds like marketspeak.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Cause if they put WinXP Pro on it, the project would cost: $24,500,399.98
If one of the design goals is raw performance (and it likely is), the number might be a lot higher with XP on it.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
They could have put together a Beowulf cluster of old XTs (say 100,000 or so) for chump change.
It would have cost 26.49 million dollars less and be several times more powerful!
Sheesh, our tax dollars down the drain.
Do you think it has a joystick port? for $24 million it better have a freaking joystick port and a sound card. And if the freaking thing doesn't have edlin loaded on it just forget it.
... If you hold your HD to your ear can you hear the c:?
170 Terabytes of disk thank god it's not being shipped to Canada. Imagine the price tag on that thing!
how does one change his
But if they are talking about the software on the machine, why the emphasis on HP? Did HP fund the IA64 linux port? Perhaps they are referring to HP's willingness to sell a big pile of boxes with Linux as the operating system.
Steve Jobs states, "Just because it's a little faster, one must remember that Megahertz counts for nothing when experiencing the joy of using a Mac."
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
"Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,"
:-)
Yeah... only about $2.5 million per buzzword... Proprietary platforms DO cost only $2 million per buzzword, but they have a lot more of 'em
OK, does it strike anyone else as being very odd that a processor like McKinley would be used in this manner over a RISC processor? Smells like Intel's close relationship with HP had a hand in the decision making process for this one. What would be the benefit of all that extra silicon crammed into the IA64 chips over a much smaller RISC chip in this kind of computing environment? One would not be remiss in thinking that a similarly equipped RISC-based system from IBM or SGI would probably cost a lot less both up front and in terms of power consumption, etc. than this monster of a space heater they're planning on building. If there is any reason other than marketing that they are going with McKinley on this one I'd genuinely like to know.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Maybe we can elect that thing to be our new President...and get that other "President" back to his oil wells and baseball team.
I know all that sounds really impressive but I will have to wait and see what the Quake III benchmarks come out at or how fast it encode DiVX :)
"This will be one of the top ten fastest computers in the world."
Anyone else find it amusing that the link to the top 10 fastest computers in the world appears to be slashdotted?
Pib.
"NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer" - some
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these babies
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those...
What about Google?!? It should qualify as a Linux supercomputer. For those who don't know, Google, the popular search engine, uses a huge cluster of PCs running Linux.
Kernel compiled in 1 ms, UT starting in 0.5, a vast RAM space to put whatever crap i can think of.
I got to r00t me one o' these!
I think I just had an orgasm...
You're new here, aren't you?
AIX is Unix
BSDI is Unix
HP-UX is Unix
Solaris is Unix
Sun-OS is unix
Digital Unix...is Unix
FreeBSD is Unix
NetBSD is Unix
OpenBSD is Unix
A/UX is unix
Xenix is unix
Unixware is unix
SCO Unix is Unix
NextStep is unix
Unicos is unix
Irix is unix
Ultrix is unix
and yes, Linux is Unix.
It may not be Unix(tm), but it certainly is unix, at least as much as any of the above operating systems are. Whether or not an OS has one line of code from Thompson and Ritchie or BSD is irrelevant. What matters is what kind of a system its code implements. The code for Linux, including all of the GNU components and other userland parts, implement an operating system that is at least as similar to any of the above mentioned OS's as they are to one another. I don't know just exactly how compliant Linux is with the various posix standards, but I have heard it referred to as posix compliant, and I know that NO version of unix is completely compliant.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....its a duck.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I wonder if Slashdot could be considered a terrorist for "slashdoting" a government website?
The worlds largest supercomputer is being built as we speak at various campuses around the world. Its a multipart system with various clusters linked together at the different campuses. If your interested I covered the basics of the system below.
TeraGrid is the name of the soon to be world's largest computing cluster that will be completed in 2002. It will contain approximately 3,300 Itanium(TM) and McKinley processors on IBM servers running Linux connected through a Qwest fiber-optic network. Once completed the TeraGrid will be capable of a massive 13.6 teraflops and will have access to 450-600 terabytes of data.
This is a huge step (for Intel at least) in acceptance of the Itanium processor into the server market. Intel is fueling the program by providing optimized compilers and software as well as various customized tools.
It is being funded by the National Science Foundation by a $53million grant. Various researchers will have access to the system to perform a variety of simulations. Possible uses include :
-Molecular modeling for disease detection
-Drug discovery
-Automobile crash simulations
-Climate and atmospheric simulations
-any other approved scientific research purposes
The TeraGrid will be unique because it will link together various computing clusters at different locations rather than host them all at the same location. Globus is providing open-source protocols that will determine how the grids will communicate with each other. These open-source protocols will create a "plug-n-play" type effect where more machines could easily be added to the network.
The largest section of the TeraGrid will be hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There will also be portions of the TeraGrid at the University of California San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.
Runs the new BMW 745i.
...a Beowulf cluster of these?
Argonne has a scalable Linux cluster. It's called Chiba City
--
The Grid Report
shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures
Last I checked, only intel made itanium architecture chips, chipsets and firmware, and all the machines are intel reference designs. How is this not a proprietary platform again?
Even Sparc is less proprietary then this. It's unfortunate that intel and HP can blatently lie, and people will eat it up.
It may have fancy hardware, but is it any good in a fight?
And they think any of the top 5 and 10 are in that position... can't wait until someday we get to see what the NSA and CIA are running... will make these machines look like wrist watches I bet.
For instance, two years ago the Congress approved an additional 198 million for a black budget program, computer related. This was in addition to their publicly disclosed hardware budget. Where do you think that went???
They're really going to be kicking themselves when they see an ad on TV a month later for a computer that's just as powerful for only $12 million.
The Red Pill
MS has > 40 Billion US$ in the bank and moving towards 60 quickly. They routinly pay compaq and other companies to run their SQL Server and IIS stuff to try and get their numbers up.If MS was even remotely capable of doing any Super computer, don't you think they would simply pay the 30 Million themselves and create the worlds largest and fastest computer on-site? Something for you MS type to think about ever time you state that they should be running MS.
How long before distributed computing networks such as those used in the projects by United Devices, SETI@Home and KaZaA :-P are included in the supercomputing list?
Wow, I bet this thing could handle at least an eight day retention of a full alt.binaries feed.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
"8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors."
in other news: "The geeks that will use the supercomputer, being loyal slashdot readers, are already planning how they will casemod that baby, they already ordered thinkgeek.com 28 window case kits and 1400 water cooling system"
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
You know what they say :
"It's not a Super Computer if the Quake3 Benchmarks suck!"
Ok...i'll stop being funny.....
Well if they are going to run linux on it they have to compile it with gcc, and gcc for itanic sucks.
Well it is just the OS, do not know how much owerhead it will do. But I expect that all the applications will HAVE to be compiled with intels
CLOSED compilers (to perform better then a 386).
that's it
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Please accept my apologies - it was clearly I who wasn't thinking. I feel like a real twat now. Sorry.
I retract my previous comment as it is very obviously wrong to anyone with a brain.
nic (hanging head in shame)
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
hitler.diaryland.com
All you would need to do is put together 10 powerMac G4's and you would be at about 150GFlops and bam, your on the list!
AF-Design, web development.
A dedicated Half Life server.
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
I'll smash your face in.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
But does it sync with my Palm?
I have a shitty sig!
Tuxracer would be absolutely wicked.
Can't they just wait for 2006 when it'll be available at the local computer shop for $700?
Maybe now they have a computer that can run a website that can't be slashdotted!!!
IBM leaving the storeage business probably means cheaper drives....
... I knew there was _something_ good about it...
_
-
It won't matter if it is obsolete. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory believes this machine will be able to invent the Pacific Northwest quickly, and then the Laboratory's work will be done.
Want to buy a slightly used supercomputer? Only used once.
With any luck, Google will avoid the curse of all the *linux companies that have gone belly up by switching to a real OS, like FreeBSD, which Yahoo uses.
Well, it'd be cool, no? Maybe Unreal Tourney wouldn't lag anymore...
I wonder how many nodes will fail every day?
It only takes 35 minutes to install IRIX 6.5.16
on a 1024 CPU Origin 3800. Administration
of that many PeeCees will be kind of insane.
Administration is going to be a nightmare.
For real power, check out the new Cray SV2 video from www.cray.com. 10gigaflops per CPU nugget.
And heat dissipation that would make AMD jealous,
it turns the coolant to steam!
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these babies?!
He's a co-worker of mine. We both work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the DOE labs where these machines keep appearing. Computer scientists here program on them all the time.
So Linux brings us the next generation of nuclear weapons?
My guess is that about 100000+ scientists can simultaniusly surf to /. on it.
Wondering what would happen if thay all Google at the same time.
Everyone's going to be asking them "Does it run Word?"
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Each node only has 1256megs of ramwould be my guess. 1800gigs of ram today / 1400 processors. That comes out to be ~1.28gigs. The harddrives are also not that much a terabyte of drives is about 8000 grand using high quality scsi (okthey use fibre channel, close enough price bracket). Still doesnt account for 17.5 grand a processor. Thats a prett high cost per gflop rate.
Jeff Knox
Check out the bowl-job, Marge.
--Homer
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So you'd describe Apple Macintoshes as "open" systems too then? Connecting 1400 closed architecture CPUs together doesn't open it you moron.
I thought Microsoft and Unisys had all the answers for high-performance computing.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
So, will they have to buy 1400 Windows licenses then throw them in the trash, like the rest of us do?
This thing would make Half-Life SMOKE!!!
Yeah, this computer is nice, but imagine what a Beowulf cluster of these could do ...
Fifty years of innovation have increased the raw speed of individual computers by a factor of around one million, yet they are still far too slow for many challenging scientific problems. For example, detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, by 2005 will be producing several petabytes of data per year -- a million times the storage capacity of the average desktop computer. Performing the most rudimentary analysis of these data will probably require the sustained application of some 20 teraflops (floating-point operations) per second of computing power
http://www.griphyn.org/
European Data Grid grid.web.cern.ch/grid
Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid www.neesgrid.org
Particle Physics Data Grid www.ppdg.net
The Globus Project www.globus.org
The Global Grid Forum www.gridforum.org
that is all.
One of the goals of these programs is to try the latest high end CPUs in supercomputer applications. An early example was the Intel Paragon built out of i860s. Note that the ASCI machines have both NUMA and distributed memory types. Besides reaching high computing rates, they want to try various technology and see how it works, hence Linux and IA64.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
*Supply-Sided economics rock my world*
but win XP only supports at most 2 proc. an above post does talk about 2k datacenter which does support 32 proc. So i'm not sure if your just out of it, dumb, or trolling. So I'm sure your math is off, you need to price data center, which is not possible because you can't just buy datacenter the only way to get it is with a big computer, and then you get into the debate of how much of the price is the OS and how much the hardware/support cost...either way your math is off.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error