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Supercomputing: Raw Power vs. Massive Storage
securitas writes "The NY Times reports that a pair of Microsoft researchers are challenging the federal policy on funding supercomputers. Gordon Bell and Jim Gray argue that the money would be better spent on massive storage instead of ultra-fast computers because they believe today's supercomputing centers will be tomorrow's superdata centers. They advocate building cheap Linux-based Beowulf clusters (PCs in parallel) instead of supercomputers." NYTimes free reg blah blah.
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Just use the google link!
Gordon Bell and Jim Gray are not just "a pair of Microsoft researchers". They are two of the biggest names in high-performance computing. Gordon Bell awards, anyone?
You could at least use partner=SLASHDOT
By rewriting existing scientific programs, they say, researchers will be able to get powerful computing from inexpensive clusters of personal computers that are running the free Linux software operating system
That's pretty clearly mentioning Linux.
By rewriting existing scientific programs, they say, researchers will be able to get powerful computing from inexpensive clusters of personal computers that are running the free Linux software operating system.
"The supercomputer vendors are adamant that I am wrong," Dr. Bell said. "But the Beowulf is a Volkswagen and these people are selling trucks."
All the people who are responding saying they don't mention Linux didn't read the second page.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I saw that it could be google too, but anyhow, I made a username/password for y'all:
slashdot124
slashdot
Be wary however, I registered as a North Korean military R&D official under high salary.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
All this for the price of a few supercomputers every year. And the market for supercomputers pushes several technologies; for example, high speed interconnect and gallium arsenide, and sets the bar for high performance silicon. Pretty good deal, doncha think?
But now the Moron-in-Chief wants to bring back nuclear testing. (pardon me, 'nookyuler.' Bush can't be wrong about something as simple as pronunciation, can he?). Farewell to deterrence. Farewell to common sense...
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Mod this guy up. He's really telling the truth!
Loosely coupled clusters like PDSF are great for work like what the high energy physics people do, like SNO.
However, somethings work better on vector architectures such as climate models and fusion work: there is a reason why the Spanish Met troops bought a Cray. Additionally, some chemistry, many fusion and several other codes work best on vector architectures.
There guys presented their global warming work where at my job. They've developed their climate code though as a parallel one. See here. One of the places that they have been running is on seaborg, an IBM RS/6000 with over 6k and near 7k processors.
Interestingly, the PCM guys presented what they wanted for an uber'puter. While it had massive amounts of storage, it was also a 500 *PETAFLOP* SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE machine.
*clickety clack* That'd be something like 166,666,666 Athlons. IDK of any interconnects that handle that. Can you imagine being an admin? Better hope you're good on rollerblades zipping to and fro replacing those oh-so-reliable commodity disks and CPUs...even if you have a .05% failure rate, that's still too damn much. As an admin, that'd be a huge waste of time. It'd also wreck havoc on the guys running stuff.
Or is that what grad students are for? To attempt such a silly thing and then admin it? ;)
Seriously tho. To get from here to their, we're going to need some exotic techs...not just more 'attack of the killer micros'.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
This poster is wrong on several accounts, and should be modded down accordingly.
Actually, when you say you did you take a look at the top 500 list, you should put actions behind your words. The top cluster is at #5 on the most recent list (LLNL's NetworX machine - http://www.top500.org/list/2002/11/), and is less than 20% behind the #2 spot. Guaranteed that within a year, linux clusters will indeed fill the #2 spot on down.
Second, hydrodynamic problems (which are a class of hyperbolic PDEs), deal with nothing but local communications, and scale quite well even on Linux clusters. The more challenging set of problems are non-local PDEs (elliptic and parabolic -- like Poisson's equation and heat transfer). Because these problems couple every point in space to every other point in space at ever time, they reamin tough to solve on a parallel machine no matter what platform you are on.
The Earth Simulator is a highly special case. The Japanese government made an enormous investment (well over $500 M) to purchase that machine. Even with the support of the DOE and private industry (increasingly biotech), the US just does not have the political willpower to spend that much on a single platform. It is often neglected that the current paradigms of high-performance computing are lacking in many respects -- some refer to the recent move towards very large parallel machines as "a great step backwards". We have to pursue technically innovative solutions which will be both cheaper to purchase than the Earth Simulator, and more efficient to use.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Imagine what a cluster of 700 to 1,000 blade servers running the latest Intel Xeon CPU's can do now! =)
Actually, it would be a very crappily-performing cluster. Blade servers are designed with two major goals - CHEAP and SMALL. Blade servers are engineered for high availability applications (think webserver farm).
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean it's the optimal solution. It amazes me when I see vendors selling blade server clusters.
(Disclaimer: I work as an engineer with a company with builds Linux based clusters for universities and labs)