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$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?
... 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!
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
Scheduled to be fully operational in early 2003...
Won't it be obsolete by then?
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.
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.
Let's see the story when they make one with 1,800 AMD processors!
Since HP is an insider on that Itanium development, I'd imagine they'll have 'em in hand before the rest of us do.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
- 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.
That answers my question of what I would have done if I won the Powerball last night
Get your Unix fortune now!
You mean Microsoft's Xenix?
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
"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
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 ?
Yah, because they need the horsepower to run solitaire...
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
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?
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??
For someone with such stong opinions it'a pity you weren't brave enough to own them. Poor effort Microsoft. Slashdot will probably outlast you once your shareholders wake up.
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." -
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!
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.
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
Didn't IBM build a few large clusters in the last year or two?
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?
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.
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
If this doesn't show the power of linux scalability, nothing EVER will
I would expect these over-generalized, broad assumptions from Mr. Katz... not from Slashdot readers. There are folks out there currently researching many dimensions of the scalability of Linux that delve deaper than the challenges creating of a supercomputer.
it's nice to see these companies working together to further common platforms.
Don't be so quick to buy into the Mr. DeMillo's corporate rhetoric. Pacific Northwest made an educated business decision (*that's* why this is a good thing). For Linux to be truly embraced in the business world, organizations must realize the business value that this OS can provide for their company. Companies do not undertake large expenditures such as this to 'further common platforms'.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
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.
No storage is cheap, a netapp with a half terabyte of fibrechannel disk storage is like $60k, so even for what is very much an expensive way to get storage you still only get like $6 million for 53TB of fibrechannel disk space, if you went jbod I can't see it costing much over $3million even with the fibrechannel switches etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
'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
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.
"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.
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
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...
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.
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 $53million grant. Various researchers will have access to the system to perform a variety of simulations. Possible uses include :
-Molecular modeling for disease detection
-Drug discovery
-Automobile crash simulations
-Climate and atmospheric simulations
-any other approved scientific research purposes
The TeraGrid will be unique because it will link together various computing clusters at different locations rather than host them all at the same location. Globus is providing open-source protocols that will determine how the grids will communicate with each other. These open-source protocols will create a "plug-n-play" type effect where more machines could easily be added to the network.
The largest section of the TeraGrid will be hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There will also be portions of the TeraGrid at the University of California San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.
Argonne has a scalable Linux cluster. It's called Chiba City
--
The Grid Report
shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures
Last I checked, only intel made itanium architecture chips, chipsets and firmware, and all the machines are intel reference designs. How is this not a proprietary platform again?
Even Sparc is less proprietary then this. It's unfortunate that intel and HP can blatently lie, and people will eat it up.
It may have fancy hardware, but is it any good in a fight?
M$ Licensing fees!
Build boards not bombs
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
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.....
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
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.
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?
Umm, no I get full support for that $60k ( I damn better since I can build a pretty damn reliable box with over a TB of space for $3k). In fact the software solution and the support are the only reasons I even use the netapps (they share out files over both nfs and SMB as well as do snapshotting and a host of other things, as for support I get 4 hour turnaround on everything, so I doubt thist cluster comes with better support)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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...
_
-
Well, it'd be cool, no? Maybe Unreal Tourney wouldn't lag anymore...
Well, considering that Yahoo uses Google for its searches, Yahoo uses Linux too. Bet you feel like an idiot now. I mean, if FreeBSD is so tuff, then why does Yahoo have to rely on Google?
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.
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.
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 ...
Mhh, so what would you built with 25 grandgrands? Will it work? Will you need to push the OS in other ways? Would you need any custom stuff to be accounted for? Will you need to provide warranties that it will work perfectly? Or you are just guessing you could build the array for just the cost of the hardware + some scatered support depending on each vendor, and hope that everything will run smooth and that they won't have any other requirement than that?
All these questions need to be adressed before you can complain. And this of course doesn't mean i don't agree with you, they can always save a lot but they just like paying more, for some reason. I've seen companies spend 1 million for some task, and another company spend 10k for the same task. Yet the 10k solution was no worst.
unfinished: (adj.)
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