Slashdot Mirror
Linux Clusters Finally Break the TeraFLOP barrier
cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org
has just released its latest
list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For
the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters
have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP
barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching
3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier
include:
LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa
), the University at Buffalo
at #22 and Sandia National Lab at
#32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster
for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP
), and Argonne National Labs at
#46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just
over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by
Megware
) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."
It's going to take me 4 hours to read all of this.
How long until computing powerful enough to render the probability thought patterns of a manager? That's what I want to know..
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
a single node from one of these clusters?
(hey what else can I say, it's already a cluster)
in anticipation of the barrage of beowulf cliches:
Imagine all that power in a single computer with a single processor!
I know, I'm cheezy
She was more perky when I knew her, but I suppose she probably has quite a bit of flop these days.
Is that enough links there? Glad this isn't that impressive to me.
Will we be able to slashdot every one of them though? PErhaps someone should post some mirrors
Read it again. What does it say? EARTH-SIMULATOR
It's gonna take some CPU power to simulate earth, don't you think??
If we told you, we'd have to kill you.
It's a cluster, so I can imagine the nodes can boot individually, in parallel. Plus I can imagine the system never goes down as a whole, just some nodes may go down when parts break or other maintenance. 1 bootup per lifetime...
Perhaps the boot speed is limited by the ramp-up speed of the local power plant.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
pfft, FLOPS are for weenies - real men use bogomips. ;)
/proc/cpuinfo
$ grep bogomips
bogomips : 2962.22
ex$$
I had a K570 at a previous job that took literally 45 minutes to boot from power-on to login prompt.
Turning off the extended mem-check reduced this to 25 mins.
I once had a SCSI cable go bad, and I had to boot that darn thing up about a dozen times, swapping out cables, to find the bad cable. What a bad night that was! Swap cable, take 25-min break, watch SCSI errors from kernel. lather, rinse, repeat. 3 hours to find one bent pin on a scsi cable. yuck.
I hope none of those super computers was the webserver or else it's just the top 499 now. :p
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
As when other barriers are broken, a bit of a shock wave was created.
Windows machines for miles around were rattled.
Are there any Microsoft Windows-based systems that qualify as supercomputers?
(This is a serious question, I have no idea if they do or do not.)
The real impressive numbers would be the cost of Win2k Server licences for all those computers...=)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
- The weatherman is usually wrong.
- Aliens are abducting us. We need to send radio signals to Fife, Alabama, not out into space.
- Unified Theory is based on Heisenburg's stuff... You can have relativity and quantum mechanics... but not both at the same time. Damn, that guy was a genius. By the way, the unified theory is:
Of course, I'm sure Doom3 has this somewhere in its source code, so ummm... go crunch 40 TFLOPS on thate = 42; // always 42.
</humor>
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"It's just that Intel/AMD didn't make a song and dance about breaking the GFLOP barrier..."
I don't know 'bout AMD, but Intel has these funny BunnyPeople to promote anything from breaking speed limits to new processors as shown here. So contrary to what you believe, yes Intel does make a song and dance(plus commercial) about [insert_marketing_gibberish_here]!