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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.
Oh well, here's a list of mirrors...
I've got to wonder why they are using Crusoes. It's a good chip for the application, don't get me wrong... but the last I heard the main advantage it has over StrongARM is x86 compatibility, which shouldn't be an issue here.
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Dude, imagine a beowulf cluster of...*KRONK* [hercynium is clubbed with a shotgun and dragged away by the moderators...]
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Imagine if these weren't clustered...
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
It all comes down to "power consumption, size, reliability and ease of administration", apparently.
And the marketing people at RLX Technologies should be shot for not having a press release up for this, as it's all based on their product...
The only trick would be getting the things to work properly in a headless configuration -- Apple won't ship them without a graphics card, but I'm relatively certain that you could get a LinuxPPC installation to work even without the card installed.
and ease of administration
could someone explain how a microprocessor is administered?
Heh you know what's funny? I damn near posted almost the exact same thing, except like 5 other people did.
It kind of reminds me of a Star Trek convention I went to (the ONLY one I ever went to...) where they had a costume contest. 249 out of 250 people the day before said 'I bet Ill be the only Klingon there!'
"Derp de derp."
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.
I was always amused at how a unibus PDP-11 with 512K of main memory could beat the snot out of a 386 at real-world tasks. I/O is critical for so many applications...
However, don't write off clusters yet; have you looked at The AGGREGATE? The link points to Klat2 (Gort, klaatu barada nikto! Sorry) which is a very photogenic aggregate-based machine. The techniques these guys are developing may bring high I/O throughput into clustering at mainframe levels eventually.
Where did you see anything about Mainframes?
These clusters are NOT designed to take over from Mainframes, but from Supercomputers. Totally different animals.
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Wow, so it is true... Linus is a robot.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ok, finally that's a legitimate response. It's true ARM doesn't include an FPU. However, the last I checked (and I'm not real up to date on it) using libfloat it had emulation good enough to keep up with IA32 fairly well on FP.
I imagine, though, this is probably the reason. It seems reasonable that Supercomputer work would require some FP, although I don't know for sure.
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Why limit yourself to the x86 instruction set when the transmeta processor just needs a new instruction set decoder to emulate pretty much ANY processor? It seems like while they'll be able to use lots of existing software out there, they could get even more performance, efficiency, or maybe just easier programming by using whatever instruction set makes sense for the project.
It's all in the pre-processing with the crusoe, x86 is just there for slideways compatibility and doesn't need to be a limiting factor. When you're using a custom computer, whether it's one or a thousand crusoe processors, wouldn't it make sense to try for some compiler efficiency based on the actual hardware instead of the 8086 legacy?
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?
Get a clue. The Crusoe consumes about 2 watts. Very nice compared to Pentium-class room heaters, yes, but I asked why they choice Crusoe over StrongARM, not Crusoe over IA-32. A 600mhz SA uses 450mW, so you can run roughly 4 of them for the same power and heat as one Crusoe.
The advantages that Crusoe has are two - first, as I mentioned originally - x86 compatibility. This is not a help for a supercomputer - you're going to be compiling everything from source anyway. The other advantage, that I forgot, is that the SA doesn't have an FPU. That, at least, is a legitimate reason to consider the Crusoe, but I'm still not sure the decision actually makes sense - the SA is a very nice chip and if programmed right it should have no problem keeping up with the Crusoe even on FP, figuring that you can use 4 times as many SAs for the same heat and power requirements.
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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.
http://saveie6.com/
> Feng also proposed that a new technique is needed for measuring the performance of supercomputers. Instead of looking primarily at how many calculations a system can run in a given amount of time, researchers should also consider factors such as downtime, size, price and maintenance requirements, he said.
Following Feng's lead, the whole supercomputing industry has reacted to this new paradigm shift. Industry leader Cray has ceased development of its upcoming SV2 and has designed a system based on the reliable commodore 64. Explained lead scientist Joel Grey, "We managed to get a C64 computer out of the dump, and bought 1,000 surplus 'Barney' solar calculators off of ebay for $30".
The new system, dubbed the SV64, is not quite as fast as the SV2, but exceeds at new metrics: Converted to run on solar power, and having spent the last 15 years in an uncooled closet continously generating the "experiencing technical dificulties" logo for a local community access TV station, the new computer shatters existing power and reliability records. "With an expected retail price of less than $1M USD, we expect this computer to eclipse [Japanese rival] NEC's lead and become the platform that will be used to perform most of the world's weather, biological, and nuclear simulations well into the next decade", said Grey.
Wall Street analysts pointed out the the system has never needed maintence, nor suffered downtime, nor needed the services of an UNIX system administrater, and as a result, the total cost of ownership should remain low. Shares of component manufacturer Commodore rose 10 points to 10 1/64 in heavy trading today.
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It's sort of hard to imagine Gordon Bell sharing a stage with Linus, at the unveiling of a Linux cluster. Isn't he the guy who absolutely loathes Unix in all its incarnations, and has been steadily trying to kill it as part of his job at Microsoft? I imagine he (and his superiors) are foaming at the mouth over the fact that Windows isn't running this cluster.
I went and read their tco estimation in their whitepaper and came across something that really made me question their conclusions.
They compare tco for 24 node clusters of different architectures of beowulfs against the bladed cluster. The biggest expense by far for the traditonal systems is sysadmin time, over half, this after they spend most of the article talking about power. They estimate sysadmin costs for each of the traditional beowulfs at $60k over a 4 year period, while the bladed cluster at $800. Where does the $800 come from? They say that they haven't had to do any maintence on their system in the 9 months its been running! That doesn't sound like a very scientific data sampling to me.
There are other bladed designs, non-transmeta based, presumably the sysadmin costs would be the same. The last chart demonstrates that sysadmin costs are what's important, and that power, space, and downtime not nearly so.
Actually I found some specs, SA@600MHz uses 450mW, so you could power 4 for the same price as one Crusoe. Perhaps it's a political thing, I'd certainly rather Transmeta get the business than Intel, but I still don't see the technical justification.
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I suspect the same thing (that the motor consumes more power than the processor). That would certainly be true if the Volt was a traditional CD player (that had an Arm processor for some reason)... But because the CD only needs to spin occasionaly thanks to our friend compression, the answer isn't so obvious. It's possible that the motor uses less power than the processor.
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a version of Linux that can run on my Sony VAIO C1MV?
Hmmm. It was my understanding that the 0.5W figure for the ULV P3M was in "Deep Sleep" mode. I was also assuming that when running a task, the CPU would be a full-tilt for any of the types of applications a "supercomputer" would be needed for. I see where Intel is reporting the AVERAGE power of the unit running TYPICAL OFFICE APPLICATIONS. The problem with these measurements is the CPU is 99% idle when people are typing in word -- it doesn't matter if the CPU is running at 700 MHz or 7 MHz, you aren't going to out-type it.
The ULV P3M runs a 100 MHz bus, like the 633 Crusoe but the 677 Crusoe runs a 133 MHz bus like some of the LV P3Ms.
The final problem with the P3M is the thermal diode. To control heat, once the core CPU temp reaches a certain number (100 deg F, I think -- the "maximum junction temperature"), it clocks down to reduce heat. Again, that's fine for someone typing in Word or Excel. It can clock up for the 3 seconds needed to run that macro, but for sustained high-performance computing, it will be a problem.
I'll agree that Intel is very competitive in the laptop CPU market and their LV and ULV, SpeedStep enabled chips are great in that market -- hell, I'm typing this on an IBM laptop with a SpeedStep enabled 1 GHz P3M, and it blows the doors off the Dell P3-450 I just got rid of.
However, for sustained computing where you aren't relying on user input to clock-down between, I think the fewer transistors on the Crusoe generate a hell of a lot less heat and use lots less electricity. Transmeta has some nice thermal photos on their website, but I believe they are comparing with the "old", non-SpeedStep P3M and not any of the LV/ULV stuff.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Your math is wrong. It should be:
1,555,200 * 0.00175Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $272.16 electricity cost/year (Crusoe)
1,555,200 * 0.00575Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $894.24 electricity cost/year (Intel)
This savings is absolute dollars is much less significant when you divide by 10.
...will be based on Legos.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here's a representative Amazon review of his disrespectful tripe: I was so completely flabbergasted by this abominable, paranoid, anti-American, self-flagellating screed that I don't know where to beging telling you how awful it was. Upon finishing the book, I actually felt dirty for having read the whole thing. Just one example on the first page.
Yes, he's a great linguist. If only he stuck to what he is actually good at, he'd be respected instead of ridiculed.
sulli
RTFJ.