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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."
But if you'd replace the expensive high-performance interconnect with a cheap ethernet, then it would be a Beowulf cluster.
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
A former client who worked at a Cancer Center used a cluster to simulate radiation treatments.
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.
I don't envy the developers... After every revision of LinuxBIOS, they get to reflash 1024 motherboards, which could take a while...
Think so? Wouldn't a system with disks be more suitable for that
:)
Nah, just one honkin RAMDisk. Could serve up mucho porn/warez, when the feds come knockin, just pull the plug, presto, no evidence
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:
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).
This one, brpoc, is different it is completely stable. You never get NFS wedges. Jobs launch in flash. Plus if you do reboot the whole thing is back up in seconds (literally).
Bproc is an incredibly light weight job submission system. It is so light weight and fast that it changes how you think about sumbitting jobs. Rather than designing long duration jobs and tossing them on queue, you can just run tiny short jobs if you want with no loss to overhead. It makes you re-think the whole idea of batch processing.
when the jobs run they appear in the process list of the master node. That is if you run "top" or "ps" the jobs are listed right there. In fact from the users point of view the whole system looks like just one big computer.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I will personally track down and slaughter the first person to mention a popular clustering architecture, and how one might imagine it...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Cluster Overview:
* 2050 Intel 2.4GHz Xeon processors
Now when people complain about the United States government being responsible for global warming they will have some good hard facts to use.
Is that an imperial shitload or a metric shitload?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Wrong. Render farms are neither clusters nor supercomputers. At best, a render farm might be considered an array.
A supercomputer is a single system image. Some people call large clusters "supercomputers," but technically they're wrong.
A cluster is an interconnected group of computers that can communicate with each other. Usually a cluster depends on some kind of software layer to allow programs to run across multiple systems, something like MPI. Clusters are tightly interconnected many-to-many systems.
An array has a single job control system and a number of job execution systems. Batch jobs are submitted by users to the job control system, which doles them out to the various execution systems and then collects the results. The execution nodes don't talk to each other, and one job runs on one execution node at a time. Render farms are basically arrays; each execution node works on rendering a single frame of a multiframe animation. Because each frame can be rendered independently, without any dependencies on the previous and subsequent frames, rendering is particularly well suited to array computing.
"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"
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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.
And what about the pop star who needs a belt for her pants (but I hope she doesn't get one)?
Ugg.. I do WISH that people would stop reading "Tom's Hardware", or at least that they would get a clue first and realize that Tom doesn't know dick-all about what he's talking about most of the time.
His comments about heat rising more then 1C/second make NO SENSE AT ALL! It's flat-out wrong! I don't know what orafice he pulled that comment from, but it certainly had no technical backing to it. The chip uses a thermal diode. It will tell you the temperature whenever you poll it. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you poll it, it will give you the temp. You would really have to go out of your way to try to break this sort of data to get it to only be able to handle a 1C/s temp increase.
As for the heat "problem". AMD's AthlonXP chips have a maximum power consumption of roughly 50-70W. Intel's P4's have a maximum power consumption of roughly 50-70W (yes, they consume almost the exact same amount of power, check the data sheets).
For comparison, Intel's Itanium has a maximum power consumption of around 100-130W, and IBM's Power4 is also on the high-side of 100W.