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SGI NUMAflex Linux System On Display @ SC2002
jarrod.smith writes "
According to SGI will unveil
its Intel® Itanium® 2
NUMAflex shared-memory supercomputer architecture (which runs Linux as its OS) at Supercomputing 2002 which runs this week in Baltimore, MD.
The link at SGI says the system will be on display at the show. The exhibit floor opens this evening. Unfortunately I did not go this year. Can those lucky enough to be at the meeting scope it out and post comments?"
Wow!
NumaFLEX... And to think... All that AMD could come up with was Athlon 64.
You'da thunk that they'd at least stuck a period or an 'e' on there somewhere...
eAthlon.64?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Additionally, it offers unparalleled scalability in the line of Linux supercomputing. This is a system built to grow with a business, although your business better be pretty much grown already to back the check you'd need to fill out to buy it.
My conclusion: it's an excellent largish solution for academia seeking a more stable environment than can be achieved with Beowulf clustering and excellent pricewise solution for businesses seeking to expand without sinking a lot of money into unnecessary costs.
(which runs Linux as its OS)
WRONG! It runs linux as it's kernel.
1: Fine-tune Linux to fit the platform
2: Design the platform to utilize linux
So it sounds fair to me.. Consider installing some propriatory OS instead.. where they cannot play around, change kernel design, drivers, VM or whatever they fancy. Would not that be a greater drawback ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is building a supercomputer based on a Beowulf Cluster with 1024 nodes (2 processor in each node). You can read the story here or in this Slashdot thread.
Consider installing some propriatory OS instead.. where they cannot play around, change kernel design, drivers, VM or whatever they fancy. Would not that be a greater drawback ?
But IBM already have the source to AIX... they wrote it.
SGI has been working on this machine for a while now, and you can be sure the linux it runs has been tweaked for performance.
This machine is Intel based. SGI had to choose to port IRIX or make Linux run well. IRIX isn't going on their IA64 computers, period.
SGI has always focused on high speed internal communication in its machines, and SGI has tended to lag behind the curve in the MIPS processor's raw MHZ. The IA64 chips are much faster than any MIPS processor out there. This machine has some amazing performance--I think everyone will be surprised at what SGI has done. If you need a high end single image shared memory Linux or Intel solution, SGI has filled that role.
To be fair, if you don't need this machine.. don't buy it or think about it. SGI is a dying company and in the long term you'll get better support elsewhere. Sun and HP will have competing machines out, but they won't perform as well. I trust HP and Sun to be around longer than SGI though, and they won't fuck you over like SGI will.
What else can I say? Oh, the one I saw was painted in penguin colors.
The "open source developers" of which you speak now count among their number professional developers from companies like IBM and SGI who have been working hand over foot for the last few years to bring Linux to large computing platforms. Check the development mailing lists.
It's not like Linus has been sitting in his bedroom coding for a decade and now suddenly SGI is going to download the kernel and throw it at supercomputing hardware. Big companies are and have been investing development dollars in Linux in order to make Linux ready for platforms like this one. And the great thing about Linux is that whatever SGI or IBM adds, the community tends to get back in the form of permanent enhancements to Linux.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
With all of the time and money they're putting into this, wouldn't it make sense to code their own operating system? I don't know much about coding OSes, but it seems that it would be the best way.
Regarding Linux: I don't know a whole lot about the kenel structure and what-not, but it seems that the good things about Linux are things that a supercomputer wouldn't care about (portability, a good GUI platform, etc.). Why not use IRIX?
You know, if they wanted a stable OS, they'd use Windows 98 and just pay the money for the second edition and then patch IE. That's pretty stable, right?
Well, damn as nearly. Linux is only in catchup when the manufacturor will not release spec on how to use thier hardware.
When it comes to NUMA machines, Linux is up there. It may not excel at everything (yet - I'm sure that it will get there if it's not already). I'm mostly talking about the 2.5 kernel series.
From the status list
New scheduler for improved scalability (Ingo Molnar)
Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading (NGPT team)
Syscall interface for CPU task affinity (Robert Love)
Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)
NUMA topology support (Matt Dobson)
Per-cpu hot & cold page lists (Andrew Morton, Martin Bligh)
NUMA aware scheduler extensions (Erich Focht, Michael Hohnbaum)
The biggest performance changes in 2.5 seem to be in the many thread and many CPU region, including NUMA.
I'd trust it. (Yes, I do do scientific supercomputing).
LINUX!? WHY LINUX!? Why not a stable OS...
Like Windows ME!
...okay so Linux is being applied to all these terrific projects of scale both large and small. Is it because it's an open system with seemingly hyperactive development or is it because it's simply better than anything else out there?
I'm trying my best to maintain a level of respect for the MS operating system product so I'd like to know if anyone knows of any amazing projects MS OSs are being used for. For that matter, what about other OSs in general?
I think it's terrific that Linux is used this way but I wonder if it's because of its availability or because of its technology. I tend to think it's for its availability but I'm no expert. I think answers and other points of perspective from others in the Slashdot community would help to show some objectivity here.
I've been hanging out at SC2002 all day, and I can tell you that nearly every booth on the show floor is showcasing Linux. Of course all the Linux cluster vendors have it, but so does sgi, Sun, IBM, Intel, AMD, HP, Compaq (separate booths - guess the merger isn't *really* done yet), and all the smaller vendors, to say nothing of all the research labs, etc.
Large linux systems and clusters are really all the rage right now in SC circles. I think the only booths I saw here not using Linux were the Apple booth (though they did have one gorgeous brand-new G4 running Xfree and twm, the sick bastards!) and the Japanese manufacturers NEC and Fujitsu (off in their own worlds, as always).
Linux isn't a big surprise to the SC set, though - this is a group that's used to UNIX. Hell, Microsoft doesn't even have a booth here, and they were at the last LinuxWorld conference.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
You pay a lot of money to get a very large computer that can do very large tasks very fast.
Wasting 20-40% of the resources of your $2k desktop on your OS's feature bloat may not be too bad, but wasting 20-40% of the resources of your $5 mil supercomputer is a lot of money.
Or put another way, Linux is used in supercomputers because it can be set up to do exactly what you want it to, and ONLY that - which for most HPC applications is compiling and running custom code to solve Big Problems.
You're not going to use a 512 processor supercomputer to Save Christmas by being able to get those pictures off your digital camera without spending 3 hours trying to download the drivers.
paintball
- No royalties. They can use it, hack it, sell it. Whatever they want, and never have to cut a check to anyone.
- The resources. The Linux development community is unlike any other. Using Linux means you have access to all sorts of development and product resources for absolutely free. The newsgroups are friendly, the documentation is deep. And if you're doing something weird, do it with Linux and chances are someone will help you.
- The name. If you need to impress the suits and get funding, Linux is a name you want to include. For a lot of people, Linux=cutting-edge technology. They don't understand it, but they know it's powerful, and they know it's gaining ground fast.
- The power. There's no two ways around it. Linux is a powerful and flexible system. You can push it, pull it, tune it and tweak it to do just about anything. Unlike some other OSes, the kernel was written to stand on its own, not necessarily part of any prefab package. There's no GUI code in the TCP/IP stack, and it's just as happy in a PDA as it is in a supercomputer.
Could you honestly immagine LLNL buying a Windows-based clustered supercomputer? Yeah. Me neither.
Using Linux helps companies keep from having to re-invent the wheel while at the same time keeping their options open and their money in their own pocket. It works so well it's a wonder more companies don't use it.For those afraid of the GPL, BSD presents a tempting alternative. But again, you lose a bit of the development resources and don't have the name to use to get your funding. For most people, though, GPL isn't a problem.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Three reasons:
Recall that SGI is a platform vendor. You buy a package of hardware and software from them. If their software costs are lower, that translates directly into higher margins. Apple made a similar "don't reinvent the wheel" decision in the choices that led to MacOS X, which left them time to focus on their true focus of applications and system usability.
It's funny, I talked with an SGI rep there and he said "We haven't annouced this yet, so you don't see it sitting there." To which I replied "Why don't you not tell me about what's not sitting there." "Sure, I won't", he said, and proceeded to tell me all about it. :)
Seriously, it looks pretty sweet, but I was more excited by the Origin 3900 -- 16 processors in one C-Brick (4U).
The current generation of SGI NUMAflex based machines use a mesh of full duplex 3.2 GByte/sec interconnects. That's 25.6 Gbit/sec.
:)
That's way more than 3 times. Plus the latency is several orders of magnitude less.
The tradeoff is cost. A fully populated rack (32 Itanium2 CPUs or 128 MIPS R1x000 CPUs) starts at $1M can can easily run upwards of $4M. If your task is CPU bound, then a homebrew cluster will be almost as good. If your task is I/O bound, you can't beat the Origin. Until the Cray X1 ships, anyway.
Also keep in mind that while an Origin system can be partitioned, they are typically run as one single image system. The beasts easily expand from 2 CPUs up to 512 (even 1024 with special support from SGI). The cross-system memory latency increases with the larger configurations, but the net cross-section bandwidth/thruput increases linearlly with the CPU count. Very efficent design.
Pretty sweet machine. Again, until the Cray X1 ships!
WTF are you talking about? SGI does not own the original UNIX trademark. The Open Group owns that trademark. SGI has gotten various versions of IRIX certified by The Open Group as conforming to various UNIX standards, and that's why they're entitled to call IRIX "UNIX."
I write in my journal