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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 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)
I have often wondered how long it takes to boot one of these things. In the HP-UX world I know how long it takes for a K class (sometimes more than 20 minutes). Superdomes are sometimes faster, but not by much.
Semper ubi sub ubi
1 NEC Earth-Simulator 35860.00
2 Hewlett-Packard 7727.00 Los Alamos
The distance from the first to the second is pretty impressive. What on earth did NEC really do over there?
HTTP/1.1 400
I built a small Beowulf cluster. It was actually very easy, apart from writing the MPI enabled code.
./your-prog
;)
;))
Step 1: Install the lam packages on all the nodes
Step 2: Create an account on all nodes, and use a passphrase-less ssh key to avoid prompting.
Step 3: Compile your code with mpicc (rather than gcc)
Step 4: Copy to all nodes.
Step 5: mpirun C
Admittedly it was only a 4 node cluster, but hey
Please, someone break it to me gently if this wasn't actually a Beowulf cluster
Get your own free personal location tracker
int simulate_earth()
r eturn 42
{
sleep(years_to_ms(30000));
}
dunno what they need the computing power for..'
oh yeah, to generate the program to call that.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Since nobody is answering your question: The Top500 supercomputers are ranked by the results of the LinPack benchmark.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
This is not such a dumb question. The LinuxBIOS project was started by and for the Los Alamos National Lab. One of the nifty things this allows them to do is change Kernel without taking the machines down. You can then switch to a kernel compiled for different purposes.
Help fight continental drift.
Ah, that would be because Apples 'supercomputer on the desktop' marketing drivel was just that.
Hell, the Sony Playstation 2 was subject to export restrictions because it was 'too powerful', which was driven by/followed with the requisite marketing drivel, but you don't see and PS2 clusters in the 'Worlds fastest supercomputer' list either.
It has been a long time since Apple PPC was competitive in terms of price/performance with x86s. Of course thats not the only reason to buy a computer, i don't want to get the apple-zealots panties in a bunch.
It's just that Intel/AMD didn't make a song and dance about breaking the GFLOP barrier, since that happened way back with the P3/Athlon 600-800, hardly cutting edge chips.
Hell, a 600Mhz Alpha had GFLOP performance years before either the G4 or the x86s.
The PPC has a nice vector processing unit (Altivec), which could make it a good choice in some situations, but given the premium you pay for Beowulf nodes (Xserves?) from Apple, you will, in general, get a lot more bang for the buck from x86.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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.
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.)
Meh, it's got pretty impressive image recognition, but can't do math for shit - all in all, I'm not amazed.
sic transit gloria mundi
- 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>
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