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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."
Imagine a single unit of these...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...Beo...shit - I knew this joke would have to end at some point.
Cue The Sun...
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
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.
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 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
For $294,000US, this has to impress you.
All of the top 10 fastest computers in the world are multi-multi-million dollar machines. This is a breakthrough because it represents another milestone in bringing supercomputing accessible.
$264k one day, $100k the next. 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.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
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!
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
Instead of astrophysics work they should use it to find all their radioactive trees.
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
(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.
"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!
Shit, am I on crack? They never claimed to have the cheapest Beowulf cluster... I'm sorry, I really must have been on crack. I read the website then came back to ./, started to write, got distracted with something else, and then must have forgotten the exact details. Ignore post, and mod down, please.
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."
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!
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
But it's a dry heat.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
he's one of the backseat drivers -- never so much as gotten close to a supercomputer and he thinks he knows how to make one...
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;
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.
Not to mention national security issues. LANL has had many problems with security in the last few years.
My other first post is car post.
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.
Hey, what's with the copy-pasting of my comment? (See above).
.: Max Romantschuk
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!
It must be running the website, too. It hasn't been /.ed yet.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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hey dude, that is cool, and soooooo true.
Until I press Submit that is.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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?
I dont know what you downloaded, but the jpeg "ss1" on the front page is 1,160,721 bytes ... or 1.10MB
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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...
Hmmm..I'll bet they needed this to figure out how many radioactive trees there are nearby!
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.
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?
http://www.top500.org/
.. I have to wait 20 seconds before I hit submit!)
(Dammit
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
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
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.
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."
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
What kind of environmental impact does a cluster like this have over a super computer. Hardware wise it is cheaper to build but what does it cost to power it, cool it, and house it?
'Same speed C but faster'
"294-unit Beowulf claster..."
GAHH! Finally a story where the beowolf cluster is an actual part of the story and you misspell it!