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Coolest Cluster Ever
sw155kn1f3 writes "Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory built a cheap (less than $1k per unit) 294-unit Beowulf claster dedicated to run astrophysics calculations. According to their website it's 85th fastest computer in the world. Seems cool and promising as it made with cheap components and off the shelf hardware."
if only machine-making like this became mainstream. what would we use the computing power for? SETI? i say we can never have enough power. *insert tim the toolman joke*
Imagine a single unit of these...
-)
Astrophysics calculations eh? So basically it's an ugly R2-D2...great. Really fantastic.
remember, no matter where you go, there you are
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...Beo...shit - I knew this joke would have to end at some point.
Cue The Sun...
Must really have some neat features since they are using these.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
I'm sure using this cluster, we will finally be able to get decent fps on the leaked Doom 3!
....Strange days indeed....
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Astrophysics.... 85th largest in the world... Call the department of homeland security, this could be terrorism! Yeah, okay.. it was stupid :P
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
They didn't even use a rack mount solution, they used regular Shuttle XPC SS51G Mini-PCs
;)
I thought Shuttles Mini-PCs were cool before but this really resets the scale... Now where is the HOWTO for this thing?
.: Max Romantschuk
They use small cases (see site) with only 200W power supply and a "heat pipe" instead of a fan!
I don't really think you can really quantify coolness in general, but I fail to see how the fact that this thing is cheap makes it all that cool.
Perhaps if it was going to run simulations of ultra-low temperature physics... get it? haha. I kill me.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Maybe it's just me, but the "85th" fastest computer in the world just doesn't do anything for me. I mean, sure, it's cool and all, but... Really... 85th?
Ack!
It would be possible for a group of people, not necessarily a small group, but not necessarily huge, either to repeat this. 100 people, each with $3,000, could do it. The group would need to find some space to house the thing, and would probably have to do it in a climate where it could be relatively naturally cooled, which definitely rules out Phoenix. The computer would then be one of the fastest machines in the world.
Granted, I don't know what the hell they'd do with the computer, but it would be kind of cool to be on the list.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
And, just for the record, I would like to say that I know these guys and they're very nice, too. They work in my Dad's building. Nifty. Go T-Division!
Why build one when they could more easily have just leased the processing power from Intel?
ie. where each beouwulf cluster is set to solve a particular problem. once done it sends the answer(s) to other beouwulf clusters, in accordance to the master plan by the Big-CHEESe beowulf cluster, the BRAIN, if you will. In this way, the entire package of beouwulf clusters can work together as a super Beowulf Cluster, or Super Bluster for short.(more on that later)
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Now if there was ever an advert for Shuttle XPC systems, the image does that just nicely.
If I only had 1 Shuttle XPC, that would be great. I suppose Shuttle ought to add this site to their news section. Hopefully their web server runs off these systems and a fat internet pipe... just to test the /. load.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
If I throw a calculator at 90 MPH, who has the faster computer then?
Take a look at this room A 1000-Pentium Beowulf-Style Cluster Computer half way down the page.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
Imagine a radioactive beowulf cluster of these!
I don't know how they can claim to be the cheapest Beowulf cluster at $1k/unit. That is $1k UDS per unit I assume, which is $1500 CAD (actually more than that due to bad exchange). Okay, let's say $1550 CAD. Well with that I could buy a pretty sweet computer, actually a REALLY sweet computer, considering it doesn't need a monitor, or a fancy video card. I mean, we're just talking mobo, CPU, fan, RAM, network card, case. I could easily make a small cluster. In fact I was using small cluster at work in the summer. It has about 3 or 4 to begin with, and I bet the cost about $1500 CAD, but I'm pretty confident they were less. They were just 1.2 GHz Athlons. We ended up dismantling it (reducing it to only 2 units!) but still, it is cheap. I just don't see how they make that claim.
I'd like to say USC has a machine in the top 100, but we don't. :(
Can they be powered by nuclear power derrived from the trees they're warning people about?
Instead of astrophysics work they should use it to find all their radioactive trees.
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
I still think that my 60Mhz 8mb/Ram 800mb/HD is "cooler" you insensetive clod.
I'm so, SO sorry for this, in advance.
Sung to John Lennon's "Imagine":
Imagine this great cluster,
Searching the 'net for porn.
You may say I'm a pervert,
But I'm not the only one.
I found that pic on your hard drive, of CowboyNeal's naked bum.
(create much less heat than bulky p4's! I'm sure that lab is hotter than an african rainforest)
So much for it being the coolest cluster ever.
Two LANL postings in a row.. are we up for a third?
"New LANL Beowulf cluster found radioactive; gained consciousness and posted to slashdot announcing its existance."
-M
"According to their website it's 85th fastest computer in the world. Seems cool and promising as it made with cheap components and off the shelf hardware."
I'm guessing the story submitters ran out of anti-MS ammo tonight. Heh.
It's satire, laugh.
Although if I recall correctly they ended up quite a bit higher on list.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Since these are the guys that did most of the original work on LinuxBIOS, does that mean that they have ported linuxbios to the Shuttle XPC SS51G motherboard? I would love a P4 2.5GHz PC that boots into linux in about 3 seconds!
Last modified: November 15, 2002
:P
We are the last to know about it
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
... and boot off LTSP.. Saves power, less noise, easier to manage, etc etc ;)
2. ???
3. SLASHDOT!
Laugh, it's a joke.
As much as I am a fan of cheap 'beowulf' custers, there is a certain issue which troubles me. In this case, the cluster in question cost less than 300,000$, a healthy sum, but much less than a large cray or sgi server would cost. Such clusters can be used for an array of activities, such as nucular bomb tests (one of the driving forces in pushing supercomputer technology is nucular weapons), or cracking encryption.
Supercomputers are controlled by USA export laws, but powerful beowulf clusters can be made by anyone with a reasonable amount of money and knowlage. Since the software is free and of the shelf components can be used... wouldn't it be possible for terrorists to use open-source software to create their own supercomputers to test nucular weapons, crack American law and millitary encryption, ect... ?
I believe this 'beowulf' techonology, as great as it is, could be possible dangerous to American interests. It is my hope that this software will soon be controlled by the American millitary and not be spread for free because I fear for the safety of my family and country (bless them both) if terrorists have access to supercomputing technology.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Yeah, like a story about a Beowulf cluster is going to end all the jokes about Beowulf clusters... If that were true, a story like this one mentioning "profit" would have ended all the Step: 1,2,3 jokes long ago.
If anything, I think it will have the reverse effect... bringing Beowulf clusters back into everyone's mind will lead us to a dawn of a new Beowulf cluster joke Era... This is merely the beginning!
Nice try at reverse psychology though...
That the JPEG on the front page is 1.1 megs?! some of my websites are smaller then 1 meg!
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
They could spend their $3k on something actually needed by 100 people thinking about spending $3k to share a spot on a fastest computers list.
Like a prosititute.
You go to your high school reunion, what's, more impressive, the "Hugh Hefner" 100 $3k prostitutes that come with you, or the "Bill Gates" story about the 300 1k computers in your mom's basement?
paintball
I don't know about you cluster folks, but these new Beowulf clasters I heard about sound pretty cool.
A Beowulf cluster of those Beowulf clasters would be sweet!
you are a gigantic fucking tool.
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Plan to take over the world, oh wait, we have homeland secutity now. Damn.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
But it's a dry heat.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
after taking your quiz
Proves the shuttle isn't a novelty PC, it's an innovative, competitive PC form factor.
Stuff like this really appeases the Apple lover in me.
You are clearly mistaken. The coolest cluster undoubtedly lies in Honey Nut Cheerios® with that delicious cluster of wheat, honey and the all natural taste of nuts! Now, THAT's cool. Now, I don't know this new-fangled "Beowulf" cereal, but I'm sure it can't be the old-fashioned taste of Cheerios!
Stanley Feinbaum is a troll. my guess is that he is actually PhysicsGenius, but i cnat prove that. mod accordingly.
I do not believe in trolling, if you are a troll please do not respond to my posts.
How can you have that as your sig when your entire post was one big troll against Intel, Maxtor, and DDR SDRAM? It's not ironic, it's hypocritical.
My other first post is car post.
The photo alone is worth surfing over to the article. As Socrates once said, "what a rack!"
:-)
But now that they've got the 85th fastest computer, what will they have to do to maintain that coveted position? I imagine the people who are running 86th are rushing out to buy more nodes. My own computer is the world's 27,385,422nd fastest, and I'm battling like crazy to get to 27,385,421.
Astrophysics? Pfft! How bout a LAN party? Does 10 billion fps on UT2003 sound good?
live(free) || die;
You can build a AMD2Ghz with 1G of ram for less than 500$ (granted, only 20G if HD, and 100BT, but with 500$, you can buy a 300$ GB card, and a 200$ 160G+ HD.
Now, what i'm interested in, is this:
How much for the network equipment to connect all that crap together..
(i have to admit the wall looks awefully good.)
Raise your hand if you've put together a 300-node cluster before. I'm sure the guys at LANL, one of the most respected technical supercomputing labs in the world, have done the price/performance/stability trade-off thing.
An armchair critic on slashdot doesnt hold much weight compared to the site that has 2 of the top 5 supercomputer clusters.
The P4 has issues when you can't keep the pipeline full and with some stalling on branch misprediction. These PCs will be running simulations, meaning brutal amounts of linear algebra for the most part, most likely only a thread or two of computations per machine. You're certainly not going to get much performance out of the Crusoe.
Never forget that the most important part of a Beowulf cluster is that it relies on no single hunk of metal in its operation. A cluster is intended to break gracefully. A good RAID-5 solution is the same way, you expect at some point to lose a disk; thus the reason that RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
Also don't forget that you've got 3 years warranty on those Maxtors, and you can just reload the OS on the bare drive from a copy of one of the other 280 someodd. Sure they suck, but are you really ever even using them? I bet they just got a special on a whole box of em and 80's were all there were.
RAM is exactly where these computers need in large, fast quantities. RDRAM, while arguably faster, is a money sucking wench, and 333 is just perfectly fine if you actually do your homework and buy the right chips. Sure, if you go and pick up the deal of the century at the lowest priced vendor online then you can expect to get some odd results. But if you are buying 300 gigs of the stuff you can get a pretty sweet deal out of a reputable manufacturer and get the nice chips to boot. And don't forget that those come with a warranty too; so you just send the dicey ones back....who cares if you lose a few boxes for a day or two?
It's the coolest because it puts off less heat than most, using the head-pipe feature off the cpus. Run a big HVAC and hook it up to those pipes, and all of a sudden you have A/C cooling directly on your chips, and its more quiet to boot.
This thing is built out of parts that are in *your* computer. It's built from the parts that are moving the fastest thru the vendors. Every single part of this cluster could be purchased in lot quantities at a very reduced cost due to slowdowns in the last 9 months.
Not including the network backbone, you can build the very computer they are using for much less than a grand per node and have it rate; I think that was the point and I think that they made it.
Imagine one of these!
My deviantArt site
At the semiconductor company where I work, I'm finding most of the EDA tools are being ported from expensive Sun Ultrasparcs to P4/Athlon-based commodity platforms with Linux OSes. And guess what? The processor clock speed has a direct correlation with performance compared to the slow-poke Ultrasparc 3s. You can reach a memory limit for some operations, but tools like Magma and our internal tools that are ported are running at least twice as fast per processor. Particularly with hierarchical designs, the only time the Sun Servers become necessary is for all the back end physical verification, parasitic extraction and signal integrity analysis, where less users are interactively spending their time anyway versus the floorplan/place/route anyway. So, whether I go out and buy an E4500 with 6 processors and 20GB of memory and use LSF, or I buy a dual Xeon 2.4GHz with 4GB of ECC and a Seagate HD, I'm getting a hell of a lot more mileage out of the dual Xeon and a huge cost benefit too for 10% of the entry cost of the Sun.
Sorry, but commodity PC hardware really does have a place in real computational work on the design of multimillion-gate standard-cell ASICs like the ones going into the latest Nvidia and ATI cards. The Suns are, for now, necessary, but it won't be long until commodity hardware usurps its place for a fraction of their overpriced niche monopoly in EDA tools.
You might want to read it again. It said each node was LESS than $1000USD. Didn't specify how much. Based on info from price watch I'd say they got a rippin' deal. I didn't use a calculator, but they saved about 150 per node if they paid exactly 1000 for those parts. Another thing you need to consider...size does matter. That is a quality that is hard to quantify. It took about have the space of a cluster with less than half as many nodes.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Each of the $3K hookers are surely to be better in reality than anything you could imagine in your WILDEST fantasies. $3K is one hell of a hooker... She could make you forget computers even exist!!!
AND THERE'S 100 OF THEM!!!
*SMiLE*
"Hand me that jar of mayonaise, I'm goin' in!"
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Hey, what's with the copy-pasting of my comment? (See above).
.: Max Romantschuk
... once people come to ship it to china (i mean, recycle it), the lab will have to release a press release that the machines are actually radioactive, and shouldn't be cut down, er, i mean used.
---How can you have that as your sig when your entire post was one big troll against Intel, Maxtor, and DDR SDRAM? It's not ironic, it's hypocritical.
Turn off every SIG.
out of it...
..fucking lame retarded beowulf cluster joke.
Quit Slashdot Today!
Imagine that everyone stop saying, "Imagine a beowulf cluster." just to sound cool and hip because we all know that you don't actually understand what one is.
my dick inside your girlfriend. Which would only exist in the realm of imagination since no one here has girlfriends.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
slashdot filtering out any post with the word "beowulf" in it to mod to -1. while we're at it any post wtih "first post" or "version 3.1".... then we'd be good to go
-1 : troll
better a/c this one
A cluster of /. trolls all wetting themselves with excitement whey they loaded slashdot, and saw this story.
Now imagine a cluster of Beowulfs, electrocuting those trolls.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Best idea I've heard in a while.
They are getting double slashdotted! ...one more link and they might need this cluster serving their pages up! :)
Since the headline reminds me of the Comic Book Guy, I will dedicate this post to him. Besides, if this cluster, supercomputer, beo thingy is only 85th fastest in the world, you would think that they would use it to figure out the Comic Book Guy's rating scale (or something of equal importance) as opposed to some physics mumbo jumbo.
An excerpt:
[BABF01] Treehouse of Horror X: Desperately Xeeking Xena
(The Collector, slowly, strikes a dramatic pose)
Collector(CBG): Lucite hardening ... must end life in classic Lorne Greene
pose from "Battlestar Galactica." Best ... death ... ever!
but can someone describe what a gigaflop is?
It must be running the website, too. It hasn't been /.ed yet.
Why not just have one server for
storage? Seems like a waste of power.
On a side note, what's with the cheapo racks they have em on? This whole thing looks to be one seismic wiggle away from disaster.
God bless you if you think IBM IDE's are more reliable then Maxtor. Or any manufacturer. You're wrong =/
"Maxtor is one of the worst hard drive vendors out there. It would have been wiser to use more reliable drives for cluster work such as seagates or ibm's. I have had the displeasure of using maxtor drives and they never lasted more than a few months."
cough, coughIBMdeskstar
Dumb ass.
as opposed to being a troll. sarcasim doesnt convey as well in text as it does in speech. i could be wrong, though, but lighten up.
I really like the picture on the sites frontpage.
i can imagine the small size of the Shuttles being an advantage, not to mention the "coolness" factor looking at it. (i assume the "cool" in the intro refers to emotion and not teperature!!)
But getting computation done cheap is no longer the challenge. It's getting the data from one node to the other. They still need "custom" expensive equipment for this.
I see they use 3com gigabit ethernet. having this 300+ gigabit switch capability is not "cheap".
Until one can buy this kind of networking equipment for really cheap, we shouldn't mention things like "of the shelve Beowulf super computer in the top 100".
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
I'd ask how hot is the room. The heat pumps move the heat from the CP ... into the room.
What nobody's spotted so far is you have 294 boxes each with 80GB drives. That works out to a nice little side effect to the tune of around 20TBytes of networked storage. NICE! :)
Disclaimer: I have never built a cluster before.
What is the advantage of having a hard drive in each node. Can't you boot each node off of a networked image and load the OS and whatever "work" into memory.
thanks
Journal
I have one question. What's the advantage of using a beowulf cluster in a situation like this. I mean, sure it looks cool, but, wouldn't it be a lot better to use a blade server system. It seems that blades are a hell of a lot more reliable and economical, if you look at the long term. It's not like the Los Alamos National Laboratory doesn't have alot of money. Why did they choose shuttle mini computers, instead of something a little more suited for the purpose.
Has anyone ever written a Slashdot culture archive? Slashdot has a pretty rich and entertaining culture, and I hate to see things like Natalie Portman, Beowulf, and goats.cx...well, maybe not goats.cx....vanish forgotten into the mists of time. I've tremendously enjoyed cultural archives of USENET, where various trends or customs were explained, with links to example text.
I'd love to read something like this, if anyone ever gets around to setting up a website to archive these.
It's very difficult to identify trends (like, say, what the meaning of hot grits is) long after the fact -- you're looking at hundreds of thousands of old tech posts. But if someone is thoughtful enough to make a note that this is happening...well, five or ten years from now, it could be quite a fun to read little work.
May we never see th
Seriously, assuming that you had the resources to build a large cluster, what would you do with it?
And I'm hoping I won't get the obligatory "pr0n collection" jokes.
Get your own free personal location tracker
it seems to me like one could build a much cheaper cluster from parts... i do see a definate advantage however; in 6 months when they're only 90th place on the list of fastest computers and they decide to sell each individual machine on ebay :)
1.) Run astrophysics calculations
2.) ???
3.) Profit!
Good night...
1.Read the sig. :-)
2.Think about the sig.
3.Think about what a troll is.
4.Repeat untill you slap yourself in the forehead.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Wow, havn't seen one of these before. Quick, quick, someone tell slashdot about it. It's coming in 85th in the world! Look out, one day we might here about the 8th fast computer in the world. That would have to be 10 times cooler than this one!
The network switch is composed of a Foundry FastIron 1500 switch trunked to another FastIron 800 switch, which provides a total of 304 Gigabit Ethernet ports using the 16-port JetCore modules.
What's the bandwidth of that trunk? Also, what's the capaity of the connections between each 16-port card and the backplane?
Just curious... suppose all the units on a 16-port card have 1Gbps each, but only 8Gb total to the backplane. Then the backplane, in turn, has only 8Gb to the other switch. These are just made up numbers, but how would beowulf handle it? Can it group jobs requiring higher communication throughput onto the nodes which are closer to eah other? Does it have to be told the topology, or does it figure it out?
Where can I find a list of the fastest computers? Is there some sort of regulating committee on this? My department just got a 256 node Beowulf cluster. Where does that fit on the list?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
Why didnt these guys post a HOWTO?
.. but it would be cool if they gave a little more HOWTO stuff in there.
Using Linux and all, yeah we appreciate they posted at least SOME info
Especially how the Foundry stuff is connected, it didnt seem clear to me.
Also, what kind of software do they ran to manage the cluster environment.
Enquiring minds want to know.
So I spend the weekend tweaking my Shuttle w/Mandrake and my G4 w/OS X as a MySQL/PHP/Apache server and slave, and I feel pretty good that I have this tiny little image server straddling two boxes and working away...then this article about 294 Shuttles comes out and I've suddenly got a bad case of cluster envy...rats.
:)
Kind of like owning a hot rod Pinto (not), and taking heat from your friends until one shows up in the top ten at Daytona...
*cough* Hungarian fabbed DeskStar 60/75 GXPs, which are now obsolete and no longer being made, and irrelevant when talking about the quality of disks from any specific manufacturer *cough*
Hmmm..I'll bet they needed this to figure out how many radioactive trees there are nearby!
.. world peace?
Nah, didn't think so.
I think you mean "effete". I don't think a translator droid has the equipment for that sort of thing. Must be the English accent. Still, you'd think a geek would cut a droid some slack for not coming off like a storm-trooper....
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
How did those bastards manage to get so many SS51Gs, especially as the rest of us are having to wait (probably after that /. article last week).
Ok, modern LANs, especially this one is a lot faster, but you still don't want to burden your cluster communications bus with disk I/O requests.
Anyway, that 80 gig Maxtor does not add much to the cost of the node.
awww I gota raise my threshold
wtf
It would have been wiser to use more reliable drives for cluster work such as seagates or ibm's.
Yes, they should have bought IBM deskstars instead. They are cheap and they know exactly what they are going to get.
Last year I bought a maxtor harddrive, only thing it ever did for me was crash my BIOS. So I got it replaced with a deskstar, at least I knew that one was going to work. It did.... for half a year. And BTW since then I have only bought seagate drives.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I'm not sure what you were doing with your Maxtor drives. I've personally had two 80 GB Maxtor drives in my TiVo, running 24/7, for over a year. At no point is the drive idle, since it constantly buffers a half hour of live TV.
Looks like they fit 55 shuttles per rack, so 6 racks of space. Very small in terms of size. My Sun 10K's take up 3 racks each.
Not sure who makes those plain metal racks, but I picked some up at costco(brown box), and they are sweet. They have big caster wheels so you can get to the cables. I use them in the closet, tv rack, and my server rack.
Setting up the hardware is easy, I'm curious about the clustering software. Wonder if any 3d rendering packages exist (opensource/free) work on a linux cluster.
-
"Marijuana? Cocaine? I'm not going to talk about what I did as a child." - President Bush
What disturbes me the most about this is that every single one of these mainboards have built-in parts like sound, video and tv-out that are never ever going to be used.
Well, unless they send'em to me when they're finished.
\begin{rumor}
I actually heard that when a section of los-alamos became contaminated beyond "healthy" doses, they level it and build a public park and/or a hotel. The thinking is that people spending only a few hours are not at risk. I guess no one has thought about the hotel employees...
\end{rumor}
used openMosix instead. Better performance.
So let's have some flame here...
When it will be the time M$ reaches the top 500 on supercomputing? Linux has been for long there. And it is getting nearer and nearer the first places. However, till now, Redmond couldn't manage to gather even a humble supercomputer made of crappy Windows. What is strangeas there are libraries for parallel computing on Windows.
So it seems that Windows is not ready for the bleeding edge... And no one knows when it will be...
Imagine a raven-cluster of these.. er.. uh.. imagine a rhyme-of-the-ancient-mariner-cluster of these.
Take all of our fun away by using a beowulf cluster... damned scientists. Everything else just sounds lame.
The-tyger-cluster? Sounds more like some sorta lame attack. Bah, ferget it.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
they use ethernet. Ethernet latency is horrible. At best 40 microsec vs 5 microsec with Dolphin. Costs for Dolphin setup is about 10x compared to a ethernet solution.
He used un-modded xbox for extra evil, but he can only run the simulations for 3 to 4 hours at a time before he has to take a break.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
When xbox live goes on line and MS secretly moves forward with phase 2, harvesting 5 to 10% of cpu cycles of their subscribers, which they then sell.
Yeah, I know it's not true, but it definately seems like it might have been a good idea.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Yeah really snappy....only 400 grandish from a supercomputer. These things are a bargain.
I'm reminded of Seymore Crays thoughts on clusters.
quote.
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
Cheap is cool, small is cool, A supercomputer for nothing, that's really cool.
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
I've followed Mike Warren's earlier Linux clusters with interest: Loki (x86), mid-90's, and Avalon (Alpha) a few years ago.
The free software and low cost supercomputer are not so much news anymore since every intelligent consumer of compute cycles has at least one of these clusters available. No one has to "imagine" them anymore; they are real and commonplace.
What's a nice development here is that the Los Alamos team has not only brought down the ratio of
but they've started looking to bring down the ratio of as well.It represents an uncharastically appropriate use of resources at the Department of Energy and it also helps point the way for businesses looking to further minimize operational costs of racks of computers in air-conditioned rooms.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Way to go!
I'm curious to know what SiS's involvement was in this project, seeing as to how all those nodes use SiS chipsets.
They should have used RLX Blade servers, they could have fit the whole thing on 2 racks with 336 blades in each.
built a cheap (less than $1k per unit) 294-unit Beowulf claster
So all I have to do is sell my house, truck, car, computers, tv, piano, and (most) clothes, and I can build this?!?
Umm.. I'll be right back.. gotta call my wife..
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
Wonder what a Beowulf cluster of these things would be like...
hahaha, I'm so funny. Laugh at my stupid played-out beowulf cluster joke...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
But does it run on radioactive trees?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
A company made boxes designed to be cheap beowolf components. You could get very cheap, very cool boxes, running in a small space, and have only the min essenetials for clustering.
Could be really useful for research with limited initial funding.
-Rob
As older clusters become obsolete when does the price/performance ratio become such that the computational power of the machines is worth less than the power required to run them? Is this a signifigant problem?
"294-unit Beowulf claster..."
GAHH! Finally a story where the beowolf cluster is an actual part of the story and you misspell it!
Have a look here: http://www.dcsc.sdu.dk/index.php?id=1
.13ì, i845G, 400 MHz FSB, 1 GB, 40 GB
Conceptual overview
512x computing nodes
25x 24-port fast ethernet switches with gigabit ethernet uplink
1 30-port gigabit ethernet switch
4 front-end machines
1 server
2 disk systems with each 1.56 TB capacity
1 firewall
1 UPS
Hardware
Computing nodes and front-end machines
HP EVO 510, 2.0 GHz,
Switches
HP ProCurve switch 2324
HP ProCurve 4108gl modular switch with 5 HP Procurve 100/1000T gl modules
Server
HP Proliant ML530g2 with 2x 2.4 GHz Xeon and 2 GB DDRAM
Disk systems
Zero-D X3i IDE-SCSI with 1.875 TB raw disk capacity.
Maxtor D540X-4G (160 GB UltraATA-133 5400 rpm) The 12 disks are configured in one fault tolerant RAID-5 setup with one hot-spare disk.
What's the cost if each of the 294 nodes doesn't have a cd, doesn't have a floppy, and doesn't have a hard disk?
Wouldn't that mean you could get the same raw cpu power with 1/2 the cost?
So what would be the best motherboard to use to optimize a Beowulf installation. Processor, memory, bios, n/s bridge, 1000 bt interface. What is the footprint for Beowulf in a nominal installation. Could the hard disk be tossed and use a large flash? Currently PC133 memory is dirt cheap - 512MB per board.
Then what is the best and lowest price way to switch all the nodes together?
Can you imagine playing a game of Unreal Tour, Quake 3, or any of the other games out there?
DANGGGGG
After the obligatory Beowolf cluster reference, couldn't you actually have a cluster of clusters?
What is the uptime of this cluster? 5 9s? Probably not given that if it's using cheap hardware. You get what you pay for.
How come the headline refers to coolest cluster ever when there is no mention of the temperature? ;)
sure is ugly, its sickening to look at all the dam pc's and all the @#$@ing cables.
pc (including shuttle case) and g4 clusters look like sh#*!
"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,
365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365". He [ten-year-old Truman Henry
Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the
tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes
smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more
than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!"
An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be
as much fun to watch.
-- James R. Newman, "The World of Mathematics"
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