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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."
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
and a "heat pipe" instead of a fan!
Actually, the heat pipe doesn't replace the fan, it just lowers the number of fans used in the system, since the case and processor fan can be combined.
Tom's Hardware has a review of one of these things (not the same model though)... have a look.
.: Max Romantschuk
I sincerely hope that soon small-to-medium enterprises can own supercomputers. With all the low budget physics stuff going on at Universities around the world, cheap supercomputing can only be a good thing.
Actually they can with software like that from Dauger Research, Project Appleseed and Wolfram Research with gridMathematica
The cool thing here is that this code can be run on all of the desktop computers that already occupy companies and universities world wide allowing for easy access to supercomputer level computational speed (for those problems that can be attacked using parallel computation of course) using the same computers normally used for productivity.
Very cool.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
http://www.top500.org/
.. I have to wait 20 seconds before I hit submit!)
(Dammit
I really like the picture on the sites frontpage.
:)
:)
:)
.au dollars for all our procs (and maybe switch - I don't know the details) - half the performance, half the cost.
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".
Up until 3 hours ago, we said we were the only machine in the top500 dedicated solely to astrophysics. Now we are one of 2
But we use 180 processors, @ 2.15 GHz, and get about 0.90 Gflops/processor, whereas they get about 0.88 gflops/proc, getting us in the top 180th.
The difference being they have faster memory, and we have a big badass switch. They have two switches, with something like only 10 gigabit between the switches! We have 250gbit within our one switch. a third of our nodes have 2 gigs RAM, and we also have room for upgrade to more nodes on our switch, and they don't. So, in the words of Nelson "Hee haw!"
When they say $1000 per proc, they are not factoriing in their two switches. This will bring the price up to about $500,000, unless someone is donating a switch or 2
We have about the same cost ratio - something like 250,000