ackthpt writes "Code named Red Storm, Cray and Sandia National Laboratories (US Dept. of Energy) to build a 100 Teraflop super computer employing AMD's Opteron (Hammer) processors. Alluded to in the WSJ (non-free-as-in-beer subscription required), also in Infoworld, and Reuters."
Ok I'm not going to use any words that even resemble beowulf or cluster in this post anywhere!
Hopefully AMD will be able to produce a quality product that far down the road. They've been bleeding money at an alarming rate and some say they're focusing too much on marketing instead of engineering- much like 3dfx did back in the day. Let's hope this pans out- my framerate could definitely be more killer.
Quake3 and its offshoots (mostly) supported smp, good for online servers but for your homebox, the video card is what it needs to pump out the FPS.
I personally went from a dual box to a single cpu (price/ghz), and I miss how smooth windows was on a dual box. Any dialog box, or hardware (floppy/cdrom) or network share can pause your system. Hyperthreading will not increase your speed on games, but it will make your whole (win) OS smoother, which is VERY noticable.
temporary setback
by
GunFodder
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
AMD has been suffering recently because they are focusing their efforts on Opteron, and meanwhile Athlon isn't getting any younger. This is a temporary setback; if Opteron is any good then AMD will be performance competitive again, allowing them to sell at higher price points and get a better margin.
AMD was in the same funk back when Intel released the Pentium II and AMD was still working on Athlon. Once AMD got Athlon out the door they started doing a lot better.
Re:Free-as-in-Beer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
It comes from a quote
"Open source is free as in speach, not free as in beer" ~RMS
It's a reply to the people who think OSS is all about getting free stuff (most of them are pre-college age)
What the hell are you talking about?
by
Wakko+Warner
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hopefully AMD will be able to produce a quality product that far down the road. They've been bleeding money at an alarming rate and some say they're focusing too much on marketing instead of engineering- much like 3dfx did back in the day.
I donno where you've been, but, "back in the day", 3DFX was the only 3d card manufacturer, and the products they produced were light-years ahead of their competition (who WAS their competition? S3? Nvidia? Remember how hard Nvidia sucked before they bought 3DFX?)
What's even more damaging to your argument is that, back in the day, the only CPU manufacturer worth a damn was Intel. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you know AMD's current line of CPUs is as competitive and high-quality as anything else in the PC arena.
In conclusion, stop being retarded.
- 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?"
Re:What the hell are you talking about?
by
fferreres
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· Score: 3, Insightful
NVidia focused on engineering. 3DFx lost a lot of their core developers and focused on marketing and/or bets (integrating with board manufacturer, increading marketing expenses, restricting chip sells to their own producers, etc).
I know, because I have an Edge 3D which puts me scene even BEFORE 3Dfx released their first product.
3Dfx had the best product for 3D, and was a small company. They focused more on 3D only. They cut expenses by ditching integration with a 2D core, which meant the procesors could only do full-screen, and even with the arrival of Rush3D, they could only do 3D in ONE window at a time.
They made a lot of mistakes really. Nvidia just kept focusing on engineering at a HUGE LOSS (don't know where that money came from because they REALLY LOST A LOT OF IT, only with TNT2 they managed to get afoot, several years later. All other companies like Rendition, 3DFx, S3, etc didn't survive). Nvidia did survive, money pumped at it by unknown investors (was venture capital at the time).
I am pretty sure that wasn't coincidence. Remember Sega was to use 3Dfx chip. And finally 3Dfx closed, and some years later XBox is born powered by Nvidia.
-- unfinished: (adj.)
Re:running Linux?
by
rotwhylr
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· Score: 3, Insightful
AFAIK, Linux doesn't scale above a small number of CPU's. Looks to me that implementing it on a 16,000 cpu computer would require a complete rewrite of the entire OS.
Even high-end UNIXs like Sun's Solaris don't commercially scale much beyond 100+/- cpus, and are generally intended for UMA, not NUMA.
When you step away from standard SMP systems into parallel and NUMA architectures, there are lots of problems to solve that don't exist at the small end of the scale, both at the OS and the app level. OSes better suited to that environment already exist (anyone have more info ???).
-- -- Windows is not simply installed on a computer; it is inflicted.
Parent is troll, or else trying to be funny but isn't. I'll bite anyway.
Basically, Sandia is betting the safety and sanctity of the Free World on computer simulations... Basically, you're saying the safety of the free world rests on our ability to blow the rest of the world off the face of the earth with nukes. But you know what? We can do that already. We have enough ICBMs to kill the "godless commies" a hundred times over, and i have no idea why we are doing more testing unless it's for some sort of intercepter. Now those have to be modeled first, and you can't test them anyway because that would require an atmospheric blast (bad).
Please, contact your local senator and representative, explain the dire need for the US to resume nuclear testing to prove that we have a valid, proven deterrent. See above, for why this is unnecessary. Also recall the so-called "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty." I wonder what that does....
In conclusion, the parent is a troll or a very stupid bigot. Let's hope it's the former.
-- I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Re:The mighty have fallen
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
True true true.....
Different systems architectures are suitable for some and not suitable for other kinds of computing problems. It bothers me when people (particularly on Slashdot) say we need to run a Linux cluster for everything. There is a place for every kind of solution. You don't see people throwing away all their big iron! Why? For some requirements (reliability, scalability, I/O throughput) they are the best solution to the problem.
The place I work at uses pretty large (about 3500 nodes) of Linux for Seismic processing. Works brilliantly. However, for some other applications we run, a cluster is bloody pointless because the software can't take advantage of the parallel processing....
Re:Heating issues?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
layer of glass
Actually, nowadays they use Silicon dioxide. They used to use sapphire, but the cost was too prohibitive, so the idea was temporarily scrapped. Silicon dioxide is much cheaper than sapphire, and is typically what they use now.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok I'm not going to use any words that even resemble beowulf or cluster in this post anywhere!
Hopefully AMD will be able to produce a quality product that far down the road. They've been bleeding money at an alarming rate and some say they're focusing too much on marketing instead of engineering- much like 3dfx did back in the day. Let's hope this pans out- my framerate could definitely be more killer.
I wonder what kind of framerates UT would get on this thing. Of course, they would have to use software rendering, but it'd still be dang fast.
AMD has been suffering recently because they are focusing their efforts on Opteron, and meanwhile Athlon isn't getting any younger. This is a temporary setback; if Opteron is any good then AMD will be performance competitive again, allowing them to sell at higher price points and get a better margin.
AMD was in the same funk back when Intel released the Pentium II and AMD was still working on Athlon. Once AMD got Athlon out the door they started doing a lot better.
It comes from a quote
"Open source is free as in speach, not free as in beer" ~RMS
It's a reply to the people who think OSS is all about getting free stuff (most of them are pre-college age)
Hopefully AMD will be able to produce a quality product that far down the road. They've been bleeding money at an alarming rate and some say they're focusing too much on marketing instead of engineering- much like 3dfx did back in the day.
I donno where you've been, but, "back in the day", 3DFX was the only 3d card manufacturer, and the products they produced were light-years ahead of their competition (who WAS their competition? S3? Nvidia? Remember how hard Nvidia sucked before they bought 3DFX?)
What's even more damaging to your argument is that, back in the day, the only CPU manufacturer worth a damn was Intel. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you know AMD's current line of CPUs is as competitive and high-quality as anything else in the PC arena.
In conclusion, stop being retarded.
- 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?"
AFAIK, Linux doesn't scale above a small number of CPU's. Looks to me that implementing it on a 16,000 cpu computer would require a complete rewrite of the entire OS.
Even high-end UNIXs like Sun's Solaris don't commercially scale much beyond 100+/- cpus, and are generally intended for UMA, not NUMA.
When you step away from standard SMP systems into parallel and NUMA architectures, there are lots of problems to solve that don't exist at the small end of the scale, both at the OS and the app level. OSes better suited to that environment already exist (anyone have more info ???).
-- Windows is not simply installed on a computer; it is inflicted.
Parent is troll, or else trying to be funny but isn't. I'll bite anyway.
Basically, Sandia is betting the safety and sanctity of the Free World on computer simulations... Basically, you're saying the safety of the free world rests on our ability to blow the rest of the world off the face of the earth with nukes. But you know what? We can do that already. We have enough ICBMs to kill the "godless commies" a hundred times over, and i have no idea why we are doing more testing unless it's for some sort of intercepter. Now those have to be modeled first, and you can't test them anyway because that would require an atmospheric blast (bad).
Please, contact your local senator and representative, explain the dire need for the US to resume nuclear testing to prove that we have a valid, proven deterrent. See above, for why this is unnecessary. Also recall the so-called "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty." I wonder what that does....
In conclusion, the parent is a troll or a very stupid bigot. Let's hope it's the former.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
True true true.....
Different systems architectures are suitable for some and not suitable for other kinds of computing problems. It bothers me when people (particularly on Slashdot) say we need to run a Linux cluster for everything. There is a place for every kind of solution. You don't see people throwing away all their big iron! Why? For some requirements (reliability, scalability, I/O throughput) they are the best solution to the problem.
The place I work at uses pretty large (about 3500 nodes) of Linux for Seismic processing. Works brilliantly. However, for some other applications we run, a cluster is bloody pointless because the software can't take advantage of the parallel processing....