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LinuxBIOS, BProc-Based Supercomputer For LANL

Posted by timothy on from the yeah-but-what-about-the-neon-lights dept.

An anonymous reader writes "LANL will be receiving a 1024 node (2048 processor) LinuxBIOS/BProc based supercomputer late this year. The story is at this location. This system is unique in Linux cluster terms due to no disks on compute nodes, using LinuxBIOS and Beoboot to accomplish booting, and BProc for job startup and management. It is officially known as the Science Appliance, but is affectionately known as Pink to the team that is building much of it."

3 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. LinuxBIOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder why LinuxBIOS hasn't taken off. I've debated ordering one of their "kits." It seems to me the 3 second boot time of LinuxBIOS should be a selling point for some obscure Linux vendor, but no one really offers it yet.

    I really imagine a machine with an 8MB EEPROM/ROM that can be updated as needed, but provides a boot environment and login screen - while spinning the disks in the background. This would make an excellent product.

    Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

    Curious

  2. Why not use embedded tech? by Chirs · · Score: 4, Insightful


    This sounds like some kind of dual-processor rackmount type solution. Why not go all the way and use something like compactPCI? You can fit 21 cPCI blades into 8U of rackspace.

    A standard blade could have up to a couple gigs of ram, a powerpc or p3/p4 cpu, 100BT or 1000BT ethernet, etc, etc.

    You boot the things using bootp/tftpboot and then run linux off a ramdisk.

    We're using cPCI at work to run VoIP softwitches. Currently we're at over a million calls an hour on a wimpy 450MHz processor.

  3. Don't be so sure by marm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A supercomputer is a single system image. Some people call large clusters "supercomputers," but technically they're wrong.

    Says who?

    Once upon a time 'supercomputer' meant 'any computer made by Seymour Cray', and this was reasonable, because he (probably) invented the concept. Then there was the mid-80's loose but widely-accepted definition 'any computing system that can do more than 200 MIPS'. Then MIPS went out of fashion and processors got faster and it was 'anything that does more than a GigaFlop'. Or there's the US Department of Commerce definition which was 'any computing system that does more than 195 Mtops (Million theoretical operations per second)' during the 80's, which then got changed to 1500 Mtops and is probably something different now.

    Note that most Linux cluster systems would meet the requirements of most of these - indeed, most single-CPU computers today would meet most of these requirements, which is how Apple manages to get away with calling the G4 a 'supercomputer'.

    Really, these days 'supercomputer' means absolutely anything you want it to be, although if I had to define it, I think probably the fairest definition would be 'anything that can run the LINPACK benchmark suite and get on the Top500 list'.

    Nice try at creative redefinition though.