10-TFlop Computer Built from Standard PC Parts

OrangeTide writes "Using PCI host adapters and Xeon processors, engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Labs have achieved 10-TFlops relatively cheaply. More information can be obtained from this article at EETimes." Lately, Linux seems to be the operating system of choice for new supercomputers, and this one's no different. It's cool to see big iron made cheaply.

Comments

the world's fastest machines

[Wild Bill Hickock]

can be found here.

Re:Why XEONs?

[fitten]

- Depends on the Xeons they are using. The 'old' Xeons are around the same cost as their AMD counterparts. The 'new' Xeons have large L3 caches (1M and 2M).

- The AMD SMP chipset is slow (memory bandwidth) compared to the newer Intel chipsets.

- IIRC, the P4s use less power than the Athlons, probably this is not as important but it is there.

I'd like to see a comparison of a newer dual Xeon machine vs. a good dual AMD to see the performance difference. I would suspect that the dual Xeon machine would be a bit faster.

Re:Interesting Approach on Network

[hawkstone]

More details -- probably more than you want :) -- here:
http://www.llnl.gov/linux/mcr/.

More theoretical than you think

[tyler_larson]

Yes, I saw this computer before it was delivered to LLNL (hardly off-the-shelf parts, BTW). Very sleek looking, though.

The interesting thing about this setup is that it doesn't work like the traditional supercomputer. It's more like a community of totally independant computers all willing to work on the same problem.

The system employs a whole lotta control nodes that spend their whole time trying to assign work out to the worker nodes. The problem then becomes not just parallelizing the work but coordinating the workers. Apparently with this cluster design, it's not all as cut-and-dried as with a "real" supercomputer. They have been able to do some really cool stuff, though. Like, for example, any computer in the cluster can address the memory on any other computer.

The admins I talked to said they weren't really sure just how fast the system could go, because they could never get it to operate at full capacity. They said the fastest they'd gotten it to go was 4T-Flops, but they figured they were only at %40 theoretical capacity.