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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.
Scheduled to be fully operational in early 2003...
Won't it be obsolete by then?
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.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
That answers my question of what I would have done if I won the Powerball last night
Get your Unix fortune now!
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
Nonono, don't you remember? AMD is evil this week.
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?
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.
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!
"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
Let's see the story when they make one with 1,800 AMD processors!
Palo Alto, CA: In the news today, 26 researchers, who had been constructing a new super computer for the government running on 1,800 AMD processors, were killed today when they fired up the machine for a test run. Apparently, they had forgotten to turn on the water pumps for the computer's cooling system before starting up the computer. Thousands of megawatts of electricity were instantly turned into heat energy, resulting in a contained explosion that vaporized all the researchers instantly, and turned the building into a pile of melted plastic, metal, and concrete.
One local, who wishes to remain unknown, said when interviewed, "It was crazy! I mean, the whole building just melted. The heat waves coming out of the building were staggering, it was all I could do just to run into the nearest air-conditioned Starbucks and catch my breath."
The speed of time is one second per second.
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.
If you look at the current list on the TOP500 web site, a large portion of the systems are SP2 clusters, so I'd say yes.
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.
'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
"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.
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.
This is something I've found interesting too. A couple of the recent super computers have been Itanic. I think Intel has done something that allows them to scale pretty well into the several hundred or thousand processor range. Meanwhile, most of the RISC server processors are focused on configurations of 2-128 processors. I'm speculating here, but that's my guess.
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?
so, what will that supercomputer will be used for?
Read the link. It's being installed in the Molecular Science Computing Facility, located within the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.
Quote: "The Molecular Science Computing Facility provides the advanced computing capability needed by staff and users of the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) to address "Grand Challenge" scale environmental research problems."
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Well, it's being installed in the Molecular Sciences Laboratory, so...
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.
that's it
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
And if we built it out of old Cyrix chips, we'd melt a hole to the center of the earth. Cyrix chips run hotter than anything short of a V8 engine. When the fan on one of mine broke, it melted the foam between the cpu and the fan in seconds.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
I'll smash your face in.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
it melted the foam between the cpu and the fan in seconds.
May I make a suggestion then? Next time, put a metal (aluminum, silver, copper, etc) heatsink in between the fan and CPU, it might hold out better than foam.
The speed of time is one second per second.
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?!
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?
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.)
I have no idea why it was the way it was. It came to me that way from the salesman.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)