LinuxBIOS, BProc-Based Supercomputer For LANL

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."

Comments

Medical (Was:Uses)

[srw]

A former client who worked at a Cancer Center used a cluster to simulate radiation treatments.

Re:Uses

[marm]

Does anybody know other applications that supercomputers are being used for. I know some do weather predictions.

Ok, non-military uses, off the top of my head:

• mathematical research - simply complicated maths on big numbers
• fluid dynamics modelling - traffic flows, or aerodynamics, or hydrodynamics - this is also tied in quite closely with weather/climate prediction
• statistical modelling - wouldn't you like to know if the stock market is going to go up or down tomorrow, before it happens?
• computational chemistry/biochemistry - protein folding is just the tip of the iceberg - imagine being able to design a molecule and then simulate the effect it will have on the human body, without that substance ever having been actually synthesized or going near a human... this is the future of drug development
• quantum mechanical simulation - related to computational chemistry, imagine taking all those complicated quantum mechanics equations to their logical conclusions, predicting as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles and their behaviour, or to design better magnetic containment fields so that practical fusion energy generation is possible
• good old-fashioned databases and signal processing - when you have hundreds of terabytes of data that you wish to mine for interesting patterns, speed matters

I'm sure there are plenty more applications for supercomputer power - any kind of complicated or chaotic system is a good candidate for modelling, especially when there's more than one unknown variable (multivariate analysis is complicated, to say the least).

Re:LinuxBIOS

[brsmith4]

Probably the same reason we aren't on IPv6 yet: not enough need to insite change. I agree with you though, I would love to have 2-3 second boot times.

Re:Uses

[afidel]

The largest (largest by a long shot it outpowers the rest of the top10 combined) supercomputer in the world is the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan. It is being used to do the most detailed climate modeling ever attempted. Not only that but they are attempting a complete system model which AFAIK has never before been possible. In addition the last couple clusters that I have read about have been for biomedical research, maybe it's just what I read but I believe bioinformatics is going to be one of the biggest pushers of HPC going forward. Genomics is nothing compared to proteonics, mapping the genome probably takes about as much computing power as simulating the folding of one large protein series!

Good Stuff

[Perdo]

"The Science Appliance" as it is dubbed will use dual processor AMD based nodes.

Scary part is that this will be one of the top 5 supercomputers in the world.

Scary because you could buy all the hardware off the shelf for about half a million dollars.

On a lighter note:

"The Linux NetworX cluster will be used solely for unclassified computing, including testing on ASCI-relevant unclassified applications."

I think they mean text mode quake.

I guess they got tired of "Global Thermo-Nuclear War"

Re:Good Stuff

[Perdo]

Good dual amd boards come with gigabit ethernet. With prices as they are, the nodes can be put together for about $350,000. That would leave $150,000 for 512 ports of gigabit switches. Cisco gigabit 48 port switches run $5,000. Double that and add an additional nic to each box and use a flat neighborhood network (.pdf)

That should give each node about 200 MB/s aggregate bandwidth (the best gigabit ethernet runs at 800 Mb/s or 100 MB/s), easily exeeding what can be achieved with much more expensive solutions.

About the cost of a nice house.

Put into perspective, a cluster that could outperform Japan's earth simulator would cost 2 million in hardware costs. Outperforming Seti@home's 3,000,000 users would require $10,000,000.

I know where my lotto money is going :P