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200-Gigaflop Mac Cluster
Mauro Notarianni writes in that the Danish Technical University (DTU) has developed the Scandinavia's largest dedicated Mac cluster. "Velocity-X" is packed with 32 dual G4/800's (200 Gigaflops), and will be turned on Monday. Its primary use will be studying the influence of proteins on cancer, and, more importantly, large film and animation projects. It can be rented for DKK 50,000 (about USD 6,500) per week.
More importantly? Animation? Than cancer?
Apparently someone hasn't had any relatives die of cancer recently. That's a pretty insensitive remark. If this was a comment, I would be sure it was a troll.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
MacOS X doesn't strike me as a good choice for a cluster OS. No process migration. No kernel-level checkpointing. No network channel bonding. etc. etc.
Does anyone know what software they'll be using to study those proteins?
this article, which may shed some light on what they plan to do with this and why OSX is a requirement. Does anybody know anything more about protein crystallography and why it would require "stereo" video cards?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
i do agree it seems like a much cleaner happier way to do it (if you have the money). unfortunately there are some issues.......
1) xserve isn't shipping yet. apple site says 2-3 weeks still, though there are rumors they will be shipping any day now.
2) the dual processor xserve is $4,000 (the single processor is the $3000 model). i would wonder if the included software would be seen as a waste when buying a plethora of these. then again if you are curing cancer i guess worrying about the extra $$$$ for the right equipment seems like crying over spilled milk.
as posted above, dual 800mghz G4 machines are older stock so i am guessing they were either purchased a while ago, or they got a good price break. i think we'll see them down the road, supposedly the xserve will be easy to cluster. actually according to stories posted here and on MacSlash in the past it seems that people can unbox, setup and startup a G4 cluster in a day.
The OS X version os BLAST (a bioinformatics package - what they are doing) is apparently many times faster than any PC version, due to its altivec/vector optimization.
> The F-14 was designed on PowerMacs...
Very impressive indeed.
Even MORE impressive, considering that the F-14 was designed years before Apple even existed; and more than a DECADE before the Macintosh was created.
I wonder how Steve pulled THAT one off?
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Consistantly, Apple has been making strides to create a platform that is ideal for scientific applications like this. The Altivec processing unit allows the G4 to handle 256bit chunks of data at a time and process it fast. The large cache will allow the process to never starve for info from ram. Optimized number crunching aps for Mac smoke (most) anything else out there, and certainly anything on the x86 side of computing.
Further more, anyone out there who complains about wintel and isn't up to their neck in open source development should back off on the Apple bashing. Here is a company who is, at the very least, trying to innovate or just evolve computing to be better for everyone. (while making money, as any business is designed to) Unintelligent Apple bashing is getting pretty old by now. Why don't you come up with some factual arguements..or better yet, go to an Apple store and use one for a while. Start the terminal..find out just how half-baked windows is compared to OS X and how easy the Mac OS is compared to the hair pulling fun of linux. (yes I know red had can be installed by a monkey, but if you break it, good luck for any newbie)
Just a piece of my mind.
counting about 4 fp per clock cycle! Only a trivial loop in assembler can achieve this kind of performance. I bet that on the LINPACK benchmark, considering a fast ethernet network, this thing can achieve maybe 50 GFlops max depending on the amount of memory available. A cluster of XP 1800s delivering the same performance costs about $30,000 nowadays including a switch. Besides, I see only the point of paying for computer power in the case of, say, a 1 hour run on a 1000 processor machine with 500 Gb of RAM, which one could never achieve on "normal" workstations. The danish MacWulf doesn't seem so interesting.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal