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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 FLOPS not FLOPs!
FLOPS=Floating Point Operations per Second
Impressive numbers. I suggest you go take a look at that hardware that runs the Earth Simulator (#1 on the top 500 list). That flash movie is impressive. .. But don't forget that you got a helluva lot faster CPU inside your head - your brains beat all that expensive hardware all the way.
----
The Earth Simulator is a 640-node computer, housed in a building the size of a stadium. Each node is
a 64 GFlop Nec SX-6 supercomputer. (5,120 CPUs total).
It has its own dedicated, custom-built power station. 'nuff said.
Google is your friend, but for starters:
http://www.sw.nec.co.jp/hpc/sx-e/sx6/index.html
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0203/0801.html
"Simulating the Planet Earth", an article about the Earth-Simulator, has some good information about the system.
One big item to note is that many of the supercomputers built in the US are for weapons research; as opposed to the NEC supercomputer, which deals with, obviously, changes of the earth.
More links:
Press release for the Earth Simulator, dated March 8, 2002
General system information on the cluster
Next time this happens, turn the key fully clockwise and on the console do "CTL B". This means it will stop at the BCH prompt - this ONLY works on the K boxes unfortunately, on all others watch the screen for the "hit any key or wait 10 seconds" message. At the BCH prompt type SER. This will do a search of all potentially bootable devices and should include all disc drives. No drive= bad drive, SCSI cable or SCSI controller. By the way, on any HP computer do not disable the memory check unless your troubleshooting, the extra few minutes might save you problems later on.
Semper ubi sub ubi
A real supercomputer supports much faster I/O, higher interconnection bandwidth and lower interconnection latency.
And btw. the new Cray X1 delivers the performance of a all but the largest linux-clusters in a single cabinet (820 GFlops peak that is..). In terms of computing efficiency it makes even the Earth Simulator look pale. I am really looking forward to the next iteration of the TOP500, when the first X1 machines are included.
Actually, Mac's are used in super computer clusters. JPL has an intresting benchmaark of 33 Xserves. They get 1/5th of a TeraFLOP of performance. Not bad, considering how cheap they are.
Myrinet Software. Not only does it support Windows plus a whole range of *NIXes.
You know the best part? I hear that it's programmed entirely with Visual Basic.