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Cray SX-6 Installed in Alaska
Dhrakar writes: "Now, I know that normally press releases are imediately round-filed, however, as this is the first NEC^H^H^HCray SX-6 to be installed in the U.S. it is newsworthy. The 8cpu, 64Gb system has been installed at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for benchmarking and other testing. See either ARSC or the NY Times (sub. required. Yada, yada) article."
Before anyone trolls about putting it in Alaska to save on air conditioning, Fairbanks gets into the 80F in the summer. Just thought I'd clear that up.
Maskirovka
Is a counter troll still a troll?
I thought cray was dead, but it turns out, they were just using BSD.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Just in case you want to play with toys like these, the ARSC is looking for an admin.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Cray SX-6 Installed at ARSC
Fairbanks, Alaska - The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) and Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) announced today an agreement that places a Cray SX-6 at ARSC. ARSC is pleased to be able to offer this leading technology to the wi
Oh wait a minute, it's a f*cking supercomputer! Sorry about that.
What I am waiting for is the Cray SV2 which can have up to 1024 Cray vector processors. Who needs a beowulf cluster?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Cray advertisement for the SX-6
Cray product sheet on the SX-6 (PDF).
A system that can pump out 64 gflops only running at a measly 500Mhz? Really shows how poorly mhz is as a measure of system performance.
It shall be used to create, download, store, and compile the WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL PORN.
hmm for all the people who wanna figure out what it would cost to run one of theese babies.
This link states in it that:
The "SX-6 Series" will be shipped from the end of December 2001 with the monthly rental price starting from 2,800,000 Yen.
By my calculations thats actually only about 22 thousand a month in dollars... not like im gonna be grabbin one, but frankly i would of thought they charge more
> I suppose Alaska could be the paradise for heavy
> metal and overclocking...
For only about 9 months of the year, probably a shift less. Fairbanks is deep in the interior of the state and is known for pushing 100 degrees farenheit in the summer (and then dropping to 30 below in the depths of January).
I think Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
Even less extreme parts of the state get to the point where you'd have to install air conditioning to get you through notable chunks of the year.
Check out the ARSC's website... they have some pretty snazzy hardware! SV1ex, few other Crays, several big SGIs...
.edu had that kind of money!
Wish my
The ARSC is well known for ordering their Crays in custom colors (usually white with black trim). They have some photos of their machine rooms on their website... the only white SV1 I've ever seen! Few other unnaturally white machines too!
Details are here
And yes, you get to play with the new Cray.
For more information, please contact:
Thanks! We're looking for someone with experience with supercomputers.
What other industry can you get a job in Alaska or Hawaii doing the same thing? You might even end up inventing the next Mosaic out in the cornfields. Gotta love them pork-barrel politics!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Beside the fact there is no 2GHz Athlon, you forget one very important thing: memory bandwidth.
A usual Athlon has a theoretical memory performance of 2.1GB/s. Now do 8 gigaops on 32 bit float numbers. That would translate to 32GB/s. So 8 gigaops is not sustainable. Just a short burst.
And don't forget that that SX-6 has 2048 memory banks. Best Athlon chipsets I know have 1 (in words: one). Best Xeon chipsets have 2.
So while the raw power of supercomputers and PCs look similar on a sheet of paper (peak performance, AKA speed you can never exceed) supercomputers are built to get most of that performance not only for a short period of time.
Another topic is price/performance. Here a plain PC cluster might be better. But if you cannot parallelize a problem that much, one fast computer solves a problem faster.
You don't need a supercomputer for any of those. Though Doom 3 might come close.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
If you have to run applications, where you can not make much use of vectorized instructions, then these systems are not faster than any other computer is, too.
There are two american companies which are developing very impressive technologies:
- IBM tries to build hypercomputers (quantum computers), and research results look pretty promising. - a few images
- They are going to build a One-Petaflop Supercomputer until 2005 utilizing 1,048,576 Processors (32 Cores per Chip, 64 CPUs per Board, 8 Boards per Frame, in 64 Frames) - Blue Gene Project
- They are developing CPU Cores, where all execution units are connected asynchronously - that makes it easy to reach an extremly high clock frequency.
Speed per processor doesn't matter - just think about Intel SMP systems compared to RISC SMPs. Scalability is the one thing that matters in supercomputer technology.
Well I wouldn't be moving my hardware up there anytime soon, Alaska is seven degrees warmer on average than it was 30 years ago.
I agree that Americans need a more heterogeneous set of supercomputers these days. Vector computing has "gone out of style", but it's still very very useful for a lot of applications. We may see vectors return somewhat with this reselling plan, and with the soon-to-be-released Cray SV2.
It can, but the matches would be SO precice as to eliminate all feeling of romantic conquest.
-Prof John Frink
It's NOT a measure of system performance.
It's a measure of clock speed.
It's like saying "This engine tops out at 2000rpm, but this engine here can do 4000rpm"
Is the second a more powerful engine? Hardly.. the first is out of a huge diesel caterpillar; the second is out of 20 year old Honda Civic.
Yeah. But can they sustain the same performance?
What about price/performance?
Alaska's temperature has risen 9 degrees in the past century. Why the hell are they installing super computers there? Maybe they should put their heat transfer unit inside a glacier.
(I know it's inisignificant amount of heat increase, but still... May be a start of a trend?)
Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
I wouldn't doubt it.
I used to live there some time back. The depths of winter would see super lows around -60F sometimes in town where the ice fog and carbon monoxide from running vehicles would pile up. (You'd be afraid to turn off your car, too, at those temperatures unless you were near an outlet you could plug your engine block heater and battery warmer into.) Fortunately, on the Fbx campus there are lots of parking spaces with such plugs.
Also, up on the hill where the UAF campus is located, the temperatures in the dead of winter are usually warmer than downtown Fbx, or places southeast of the city (Badger Road).
I could tolerate the cold with minor inconvenience. You can even wear tennis shoes outside quite nicely for up to about 15 minutes at at time - about the time to go between buildings in the worse case. The more insidious drawback to Fbx in the winter is the paucity of daylight.
Summertime high temperatures are usually in the 80s in early July; August is the rainy season. I once saw it go into the low 90's, but that's as unusual as going below -60F in the winter.
Oh, and definitely watch out for the mosquitoes. In the height of the season, the arctic is infested with as many of the little bloodsuckers as the everglades.
Not to be all down on Fairbanks - there's a lot of wonderful scenery (Alaska range to the south, including Denali(/McKinley). Great rivers, fishing, hunting, backpacking, etc. Frequently you can see the aurora borealis in the winter.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
People *seriously* underestimate just how pathetic the memory bandwidth is on your standard desktop PC.
For the coders among you: Suppose you had an algebraic structure datatype that you had test against a set of n! permutations. Standard programming dogma says: Generate the permutations once, store them in memory, and then grab them as needed... right?
At least on my Athlon XP (and, I suspect, any modern processor with a piece of crap bus)... WRONG. It ends up being MUCH faster to regenerate the permutations from scratch every freaking time you need them, rather than risk having a cache miss and grabbing them from RAM.
I know you won't believe me, because I didn't believe me at first either. I couldn't imagine that the memory bandwidth was THAT BAD. I coded it up this way to see how much WORSE it performed... and it ended up performing better. An important lesson about optimizing programs for modern Intel/AMD architectures was learned: often times is faster to recompute on the 2GHz processor, rather than wait for the not_2GHz_bus to fetch information from RAM.
But please, don't take my word for it, go try it for yourself.
Because....
The memory bandwidth of E10k's is a rounding error compared to an SX-6...
and... SPARCS aren't vector processors.
But since you think CPUs + RAM == net performance of a computer, I can safely assume you probably haven't the foggiest idea what a vector processor is, or how one could take advantage of it.
And its not a Cray anymore than the Dodge Stealth was truely a Dodge... the SX-6 is made by NEC and re-badged as a Cray for sale in NA.
The politics that follow this 'sale' ought to be rather interesting. NCAR bought a Japanese supercomputer some time back and nearly got wiped out by funding deletion by the US Congress.
What happens next ought to be VERY interesting.
On the other hand, the Cray employees I've talked to - needling them for giving into the dark side and selling a SX-6 - have said that anything that is good for vector computing is good for Cray: they can always sell a follow-ob with their SV-2 and SV-2e.
I saw a post that I skimmed above that stated something to the effect that "you'll never touch [a supercomputer]. We, at NERSC, are still looking for a few good sysadmins. Keep in mind we're pretty brutal about who we let in, but if you think you have the right stuff to be a sysadmin on some of the world's most powerful machines...;)
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
One VR helmet: $5000
One VR mouse: $1000
Integration cost of the VR equipment to the CRAY: $25,000 (roughly)
Spending the rest the next 12 months with your VR girlfriend in true cyberspace: Priceless.
There are things you can buy, and there are things you can build, and then there are things you can get buy building and buying and having a perverted imagination.
it gets about 923749083274fps in quake III ;)
:-]
You should see how fast it renders Pong!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
We have several systems at work with up to 24 gigs of RAM and 18 CPUs. Why is the installation of this thing that important?
If it had 64 terabytes of RAM, it'd be interesting.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
(up to) 1,024 Processors....@ 500Mhz *EACH*
...so thats the equivelent of 0.5Thz =D
or
500-fucking-GIGAHERTZ!!!