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Transmeta Meets Blades
The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance.
" Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.
Given that you don't need to actively cool these chips, I think what would be even cooler(N.P.I.) is a cube of chips stuck together and interwoven with some sort of vascularized heat-sink. A meaty cluster of 100 chips you can hold in your hand, and plug into a big cube-shaped socket on your supercomputing motherboard. Now *that* would be New for Nerds.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
But this does explain why it's been very important for Linus to push MP in the kernel.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Actually, look a little more closely at the tech specs on apple's site... it says that os X server was specially tweaked to run headless on these. (it also mentions the db9 serial port set up for the old-skool unix geeks! Yay!)
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
How can you even compare this to a mainframe?
:) They are vastly different concepts, apples and oranges.
Clustering is a very good and very cheap and superior alternative in some cases.
In the cases where you really need a mainframe, no cluster is going to help you. Mainframes aren't even really that fast. What they are good at is having tons of I/O bandwidth, even between nodes.
If we quit comparing clusters to mainframes, then people might take clustering more seriously. They are not intended for the same classes of problems.
I have an OpenMosix cluster at home, and I work with an Origin 2000 at work. (If anyone else uses IRIX you know that you work *with* IRIX, not on it, it has a mind of it's own
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Using this site as an example to estimate power usage, we get:
240 computer blades in Green Destiny x 6,480 hours uptime (9 months) = 1,555,200 computer hours of uptime
Assuming the only thing changed on the blade is the CPU -- and North Bridge chipset, since the Crusoe includes
a North Bridge on die and the P-III does not -- at full blast the Crusoe consumes about 1.75W of power and the
P-III + NB consumes between 4.5 - 8 W, depending on chip model. However, the 4.5W number is an approximation
from the 0.13 micron ULV P-IIIM chip running in "Battery Saving" mode, or SpeedStepped down to 300 MHz. Running
at full 700 MHz tilt, with NB, we are still talking 5.75W of power consumed.
1,555,200 * 0.0175Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $2,721.60 electricity cost/year (Crusoe)
1,555,200 * 0.0575Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $8,942.40 electricity cost/year (Intel)
A saving of approx. $6,200/year in direct electric costs.
However, the big savings comes from the heat dissipation of the units. While the newer LV/ULV P-IIIs do not require
active cooling, they still run quite a bit warmer than the Crusoe units. As a result, you don't stick a rack
full of them in a room that isn't temperature controlled. The difference in the air conditioning bill can
easily reach tens of thousands of dollars.
In business, there are two types of money/budgets. One-time grants and acquisition budgets are large chunks of
cash. Recurring expense and operations budgets are smaller. Being able to get a large chunk of cash to BUY a
cluster/supercomputer is one thing. Being able to go back year-after-year and get the funds to keep it running
is another project altogether. $15,000 - $20,000/year for electricity used in running/cooling computers is a
LOT of money to some people. This doesn't include construction or maintenance costs on a custom facility/room.
As far as reduced administration costs go, many conventional supercomputers required chilled water and other
special considerations for operation. People with experience managing things like Sun E15000s and Cray T3Es
are few and far between. They are the last of the "high priesthood" of computer administrators and cost a LOT
of money to employ.
A blade server, on the other hand, is a bunch of x86 computers running Linux -- nothing a couple of grad students
can't learn the ins-and-outs of over a term. Maintenance contracts, spare parts, etc. are also TONS cheaper for
the blade/cluster solution as opposed to high-end SGIs, Suns, Fujitsu and Cray super-computers.
Another site with a bit of good supporting information is
PC Stats.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
could someone explain how a microprocessor is administered?
In a large cluster, the question is not whether a processor has failed, but how many have failed. Such clusters generally make it possible to swap out a failed processor while the program is running. Chips that last longer will reduce the dependency on expensive technicians to keep coming in and swapping in new boards.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I had a beowulf supercomputer designer at my linux users group and he mentioned that alpha's were the cheapest per operation to run over any other platform. This was 2 years ago so this might be a little outdated and would be cheaper today to implement but anyway he was processor agnostic but if he did the math. The processor is only a small fraction of the total cost of the system. In this guy's example for weather forcasting modeling he had a 1 to 2 gigs of ram in each node and some expensive fiber based networking cards and switches. If you do not have at least a 1gb/sec transfer rate you have a major bottleneck. Anyway an intel based solution for his 35 mode cluster added with the networking, ram and switches averaged $2,000 a node. An alpha would average close to $3,000 a node. But he would recieve close to a %50 performance gain for using alpha's. So thats a %50 gain for a %30 price increase. Sure cooling might cost more but thats tiny compared to the amount saved by the cluster finish faster.
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