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JPL Clusters XServes

Posted by pudge on from the mmm-speed dept.

burgburgburg writes "MacSlash has a brief note how NASA's JPL has put together a cluster of 33 XServes that was able to achieve 1/5 teraflop. The original article notes that the Applied Cluster Computing Group, using Pooch (Parallel OperatiOn and Control Heuristic Application) ran the AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo and achieved over 217 billion floating-point operations per second on this XServe cluster. More importantly, their research indicates that no evidence of an intrinsic limit to the size of a Macintosh-based cluster could be found."

5 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Where's the GigE switch? by teridon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All G4s (including the XServer) have GigE built-in. I wonder if the GigE switch was too expensive?

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    I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
    1. Re:Where's the GigE switch? by batobin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I wonder if gigabit ethernet has better latency though.

      Anyone know?

  2. No comparison? by photon317 · · Score: 3, Interesting


    The article doesn't make any comparison between this and other (read x86 linux clusters) solutions. Do the x86 clusters have a problem scaling as well as xserves? I've heard of several-thousand node x86/linux clusters, so I would guess not, but I don't really know. Also no mention of $$/{MIPS/FLOPS/Whatever}, which would be nice to compare against an x86 cluster as well.

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    11*43+456^2
  3. Imagine This... by EccentricAnomaly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    2004, Jobs WWDC Keynote...

    "Today, I'm going to talking about Mac OS 10.3 and a big part of OS 10.3 is our clustering software.... [blah, blah] ...Apple has long prided itself on the easy of use of our products... [blah, blah] (the tv screen behind jobs shows a room with twenty people wearing apple t-shirts and a stack of X-Serve boxes) ...my friends here have several of our next-generation power-4 based X-Serves running OS 10.3... during this keynote they are going to unpack all of the servers and set up a cluster... ...by the end of the keynote we'll give the cluster a spin and see if we can make it into one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world"

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    There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
  4. Scalability... by godzilla808 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's my understanding that, using Pooch, you can add machines with different processor/speeds (G3, G4). This is in contrast to most linux clusters I've heard about in which all nodes must be identical. So instead of having to upgrade everything at once, you add what you can when you can. Anyone able to confirm/deny this?

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