Slashdot Mirror
SAPAC Unveils New Australian Supercomputer
Sean Burford writes "The South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) has unveiled its new AU$1.7 Million supercomputer
named Hydra. It is an IBM 1350 Linux cluster with 126 compute nodes (xSeries 335), 1 head node (xSeries 335), 1 storage
node (xSeries 345) and 1 managment node (xSeries 345). Hydra has a peak theoretical performance of 1.2 Teraflops, and has currently benchmarked at 682 Gigaflops. The current benchmark
places it in the fastest three supercomputers in Australia and equivalent to the current number 80 in the world.
The cluster has a total of
258 2.4Ghz Intel Xeon processors and 258GB of RAM. SAPAC expects to achieve a benchmark closer to 700 Gigaflops with further tuning. Hydra is hosted at The University Of Adelaide, who already host a
40 node cluster of Sun e420 machines."
"The cluster has a total of 258 2.4Ghz Intel Xeon processors and 258GB of RAM."
258, hm? Izzat metric or sump'n? Maybe it's like that feet/metres thing with that Mars probe. Or is it like how AMD numbers their chip speeds? Is it a Southern hemisphere localised effect perhaps?
When someone explains this to me I'm going to feel mighty small. Possibly 1/258 of my current stature.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Not to flame or troll, but considering that over 90% of the top 80 came out in the last 30 months, how big a deal is this? Third fastest computer in Australia? Sheesh.
A computer faster than this is born every two weeks.
Kevin Fox
Is it me or anyone else misread it as "256MB"?
Actually, misreading it lead me to think about a mainframe at my college, which was an SGI with 12 processors and 512MB of memory.
The thing is, though - when I first went in the college, we were all like "WOW that's a lot of system resources." When I got out four years later I was carrying that much memory on my laptop...
breakneck speeds, man.
However, regardless - (with all due respect) why is this such a big deal that australia limped to #80 on the fastest computer list? didn't other linux clusters break teraflops quite a long time ago? EarthSim was neat because it put THAT much more distance between another country and the US (and nearly nobody saw it coming) - but this seems to me hardly news, besides the possible "one of the fastest computer in australia runs linux," or something...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
It really is too bad they can't use Athlons.
The per-clock performance on an Athlon is much better than what you'll get from a P4 based Xeon, and that is just on integer. When it comes to floating-point performance a lower clocked Athlon will meet or beat the performance of a higher-clocked P4.
Right now the only SMP chipset for the Athlons is the 761, which is several years old and lacks dual-channel capability. It also requires the use of registered ECC memory. If the Athlon's had an SMP chipset comparable to the NForce2 or Intel's 775 then it would be a very different story.
Right now the going rate on pricewatch for an Athlon 3000 is only $10 more than a 2.4 Ghz Xeon, and it would spank that Xeon on floating point which is exactly what is important for a supercomputer.
I hope that the clustering technology they're using makes good use of SMP systems because if it doesn't then they may very well have misspent their money.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The cluster is running IBM Cluster Systems Management, not Beowulf, and is using Myrinet Networking.
It's 3 stories tall over an area the size of 4 tennis courts. When you fit that much computing power into a notebook, let me know.
Jason
ProfQuotes
They didn't mention which ISL interconnect they were using for the (presumably) Linpack benchmark number of 682 Gigaflops, but it would be interesting to see a full description of their equipment. I run an identical 1350 system, 126 x335's with 2 x345's for management, with a Myrinet (http://www.myri.com) switch and I've been averaging in the low 600's. And IBM signed off on that as being the "practical" maximum for the cluster. Hmm. (Reaching for the phone...)
an even more interesting supercomputer!
Japan's Earth Simulator Center has 10 TB of main memory and the theoretical performance of 40Tflops!
quite a system and definetely worth checking out.
You mean to say my university has a super computer and I knew nothing about it!
:) ). On top of that, random server crashes are not uncommon, and computers which don't bring back a login prompt when they've been logged out are not fun when you've already got 2x more people than computers trying to finish off that ambiguous assignment you were given.
The real issue though is the uni has a super computer, but yet the Computer Science department's computers are still so crap they are virtually unusable.
It takes a good couple of minutes to log in with the macs, and If you use one type of mac, it stuffs up your settings for the other ones.
The Sunrays run painfully slow, and the available programs are so dated it makes doing any serious coding a chore (unless you're the vi type
The CS Department as a whole is simply crap, but the hardware is unadequate to say the least. That's why I do all my CS work at home. At least the set up SSH properly, which brings me onto my next beef with the Engineering department....
JC
When will the speed stop mattering?
What is the theoretical speed of 0 latency for computations?
This may seem like a stupid question, but I never heard once in star trek them saying our computer is such and such fast. They must have reached a limit that allowed them almost instant computation.
So what would that be in our measured terms however primitive they might be in the longterm outcome of our computers?
10000 Ghz? 1 Million ghz?
I dont know,
any biters on this bait?
The truly funny thing here is that you're taking offense to a very thinly-veiled assault on Singapore. The Simpsons episode in question was, if I remember correctly, a direct response to the caning of Michael Fay in Singapore for vandalism. So there was no insult to Australia implied; they were just a convenient beard for a nation with some interestingly draconian laws on vandalizing cars.
As far as the death penalty goes, it may not be a deterrent to others (I can't say really), but it's certainly a deterrent to the criminal who received the sentence. Sometimes, no matter how great a particular society or gene pool is, it produces a person who simply cannot or will not stop himself or herself from killing other people. In this case, the safest recourse is the permanent removal of this person from any and all societies -- execution is simply the only way to be sure of it. Pathological recidivists aren't the only people who merit death, of course; offenders whose crimes are marked by a particularly heinous brutality should also pay the ultimate price.
Is this valuing retribution over justice? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, I would rather end one life than endanger an unknown quantity of other, innocent, people.
They that would sacrifice their
Geez, it was a cartoon. A parody. A caricature. The great thing about the Simpsons is that no group is spared from their biting satire.
Remember this is the same cartoon that shows that all nuclear workers are inept and cause meltdowns all the time. The same show whose police force can't find sand on a beach, where the male father character spends most of his time drinking in a bar, and school children eat exercise mats for lunch because the school is so poor.
This is a world that makes fun of Americans. All Texans are gun-toting cowboys. New Yorkers are unapologetically rude. Southerners are incestuous hicks. Californians are beach bums that say "Dude" a lot.
Other countries are not spared: Europeans are all pony-tail wearing Euro-trash. Canadiens are nice people who will do anything for an American dollar. Koreans are slave driving animators. British people are both rigidly proper and trash-burning soccer hooligans. I mean does anybody really take any of this as fact. No one really believes that Australians punish people by booting them.
It's unfortunate that you take offense to it, but your generalization of Americans is just the same as the Simpsons generalization of Australians except that theirs was meant to be a parody.
By the way, American doesn't arm its citizens. We do that ourselves.
especially in Texas.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.