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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."
Nahhh, that's not a computer. Now this, this is a computer.
Mike
as powerful as "the Gibson"?
"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
more appropriately:
Crikey, mate! Imagine a beowolf cluster of these doolallies!
Mike
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
A spokesperson for SAPAC in a recent press interview has stated that the intent is to create the largest SIMS server on the internet.
--Pat
be very, very careful around this one mate.
It is very, very dangerous.
Look at the size of the heatsink on that one!
And this buggers attck fast. And I mean real fast.
Crikey!
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.
42.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I would have thought there had been a T-Mobile Sidekick cluster running Linux by now? ::sigh::
Dolemite
____________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
They are still going to have to upgrade when Doom 3 comes out
At least now there is one thing that goes fast in Adelaide.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Here's the museum peice its going to replace.
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.
they *still* can't get sound to work, and their window manager crashes every time they play TuxRacer.
So what's the difference between the Head Node and the Management node?
IBM reports that the Univeristy of Adelaide has returned its recently purchased IBM 1350 Linux cluster.
According to Mr. Ian B. Myers, an IBM technician, the cluster landed on the doorstep at White Plains, NY with a note attached reading "This bloody thing doesn't work". On testing, it was discovered that every node had been named bruce...
The cluster is running IBM Cluster Systems Management, not Beowulf, and is using Myrinet Networking.
How far third-world countries like Argentina are from the real world. Or what I want it to be the real world. Chord.wav, the sound of innevitability.
nobody says doolally anymore mate. It's all so bloody American nowadays. The word is fuckers.
For those outsode Australia:
The state government where this is housed has decided that anyone doing over 3km/hour over the posted speed limit, is fair game for speed cameras and fines.
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...)
Either that or they're loaning it to New Zealand to study and see if banning intercourse with sheep increases their country's population.
I somehow suspect the latter.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I wonder what kind of frame rate they are getting for Unreal Tournament...
$DEITY bless $NATION
can you image how many data units this thing could process a day?!! Would get Australia right up there in the country rankings
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
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.
An American cartoon makes a joke about the Australian government booting a kid in the arse.
Yet, Australia has outlawed any form of corporal or capital punishment, but the US still lets teachers hit kids and kills people with death sentences. This isn't the pot calling the kettle black, it's the pot calling the fine cutlery black.
Australia has sane, civilised laws. The USA kills people, hits people, and arms its citizens to the teeth with guns.
Ah, the irony of it all.
Almost forgot the all-important supporting link.
Kevin Fox
Coming in second is being the first loser, so what is coming in third?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Isn't that what an impotent Bin Laden would suffer? Or is that any impotent person? Maybe its fear of 'flopsy'?
*sigh*
its the end of the week and I'm going home in four minutes. What is this crap? In other news, Germany has built the 90th largest ship in the world, the US has finished construction on the thirteenth smallest... you get the idea.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Did anyone else misread that as SPARC unveils new supercomputer?
HA!!
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
no, it would be 'buggers'. still the all-purpose aussie vernacular swear word that can range from very friendly to fairly hostile.
-A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed-
...when you multiply 6 times 9?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Put Apache on it and we'll /. it in mere seconds.
it's cooled by beer.. and is powered by splitting the beer atom
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Aww that's nothing. Last place I worked everybody - including the janitorial staff, had their own robotic assistants modeled after Natalie Portman, and the personal computers everyone used for were liquid nitrogen cooled Cray with 295 GaAs based processors, and just over half a TB of memory pre system. That and the computers were connected to dual 40" OLED panels capable of 3640x2400 resolution each at 1500:1 contrast. Every system had neurological with supplimental eye-tracking input systems so you can think about moving the cursor in the 3D desktop and it would be done before you finished thinking about it. And that's only the computer for just reading and writing email! you should see the stuff we used for application development and integration testing. Pff.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Ask the postgraduates, who have Mac LCIIs and 486-DX33s on their desks (I kid you not). Ask the academics, who have been retrenched in recent years (in some facultis, 25% of academic staff lost their jobs because of the university's financial problems), ask the users of its library, which has HUGE funding problems.
Whilst the new machine may be very nice and have some power, the University of Adelaide really sees it only as a PR campaign (hell, it even made it to Slashdot!), rather than anything significant for the sake of scientific advancement - okay, the researchers, who will use it may have a different opinion, but not the University iself.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
is the APAC Alphaserver SC located at the Australian National University in Canberra and is 63rd on the top500.org list at 825.50 GFlops Rmax http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/
Well, I live in Australia, and note the confusion caused by the number 258, so here is why...
The number between 5 and 7 may not be spoken here because of its similarity (when spoken with a New Zealand accent) with a certain act often carried out between mammals.
In fact a whole new mathematical system is being developed (based on pictograms) to avoid political insensitivities in the Land where legislation has been passed to the effect that children access the internet, and so the internet must not contain content (including numbers) that might corrupt the young.
The pictogram for the number that dare not speak its name is an image of two trees. (tree and tree is s.x).
Similarly, three trees with 'watermarks' (evidence of the recent passing of puppydogs with full bladders) represents the number 99. (dirty tree + dirty tree + dirty tree = 99).
The same pictogram with underscores (here called doggy doo-doos) represents 100.
(dirty tree and a turd, dirty tree and a turd, dirty tree and a turd...)
Besides, our new supercomputer sure beats the 286 we've had to share for the last 10 years! Them Y2K problems are getting to be a real pain!
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?
What would Slartibartfast say?
Aim high, we build this whiz bang thing and its only No. 80 in the world. What happened to Aussies innovation. We used to be able to build these things out of old fosters cans.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Being from Sydney I agree. What a hole. But they do have Coopers on tap everywhere.
Hmmmmm Coopers Red...
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Oh yes, I'd like to tickle that baby with my MPI calls.. Or maybe some HPF hanky-panky with some nice loop vectorisation. Uuuuh..naughty.
Back to topic, though - is this thing even close to Weta's cluster performance?
Oh and for the "uneducated" the obligatory reading is Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" :)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Supercomupters and Olympic Arnold Schwarzeneger stadiums (in Graz).
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
I am sure you were somewhere else - there's no traffic in Christchurch.
I'll tell you why, the guy who posted is a troll, a slashdot troll, who posts shit on Slashdot in the vain hope of increasing his google search rating (front page slashdot story anyone??). He honestly did not expect it to get posted, in fact I just got off the phone with the bastard, he did not tell me he had access to this beast, well he doesnt really :(, and I was thinking of converting my DVD collection (and all of video-eazy's to DivX ($12-15US/month unlimited DVD hire, max 3 per time or something like that).
Dont believe me? Ask the man yourself. Find my resume on da net and give his mobile a call!
Max props n shout outs to da peeps in dah hood and dem in da node!
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Hmmmmm Coopers Red
Dude its called Sparkling Ale.
Pesonally I am just as happy drinking pale ale as sparkling, the sparkling I find leaves a more potent odour in the small room at some point in the morning if you follow my drift.
Im referring to taking a dump btw for people who will think hurling, Sparkling just reacts with people down here, maybe its the weather, but bugger me!
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Most Ausies and Kiwis do. It is so common nowadays that hardly anybody finds it offensive. Apart from some morons from NZ Consumer Protection something... who wanted TV ads for Holden utes, in which word was used repeatedly, banned. Ads were quite funny and quite a reflection of everyday living down here.
Fuck the number of posts I've had to correct tonight, i dont care about speeling or grammars, hehe, please people get your facts straight, the company in question was "TOYOTA" advertising the "HILUX" not the holden ute, Holden advertised a "storm" GenIII V8 ute doing circle work (doughies) in a paddock, they wanted it banned because it promoted dangerous driving.
No go have a beer and get your shit together before posting again this week!
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
CDAC of India already has developed 1T flops super computers based on SUN Ultrasparc-II cpus. The system has primary storage capacity of 5 TB. The communication backbone can be any of CDAC's own PARAMNet at a peak bandwidth of 50 MB/s bi-directional, Myrinet at 160 MB/s, ATM at 155/622 Mb/s, or Fast Ethernet.
Currently work is going on to make a 10T Flop grid across country linking all premiere research and educational institutes and industrial establishments.
- mritunjai
Yep, I know. We just refer to them as Red and Green as its easier.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Heathens! ;^)
:)
Who am I to talk, I'm no longer a uni student, I can afford Guinness and Kilkenney's now
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
I've never heard of it. SPAM is spam to me... Its more likly Aussies like myself would adopt whatever Americans use. The reason is that the internet was formed in America, there a many more people who use it, and when something new terms come downunder (internet wise) i'd guess their gunna come from the US. So :) we speak what you speak!!! :)
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
really really really fast!!!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I agree. This is a big deal. If you upload that crap you should be penalised.
Well done.
>In Heaven music is English, girls Australian, beer German.In Hell beer is Australian, girls English, music German
I think in Hell the beer is American (Budweiser), girls non-existent, and music is Japanese pop.
-B
and should not be called such.
The record holder is 35 teras Japan Earth Simulator. IBM ASCII-Q will be 100 teras soon. NOAA turned on a 7.3 tera compter today (NY Times). Last week the DOE hooked together a bunch of game-cubes to make a $50K tera computer.
What flavour is it?
There's no flavour! It's bloody albatross flavour!
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
Linux is too good at this stuff. It only has this advanced clustering capability because it jacked all the hard work over at SCO, right? Imagine a SCO Unix cluster of these things!
All seriousness aside, isn't that part of SCO's claim, that a bunch of suposed part-time amature hackers and script kiddies could never have produced a product that would work in this environment without stealing the "real" works from a big company?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Bruce: Yeah, Bruce - how about this bonzer cluster of Xeons over here?
Bruce: Nah - it'll never work - it's only 1.2 teraflops, and the cooling system sucks.
Bruce: Yeah - you're right there, mate - we'd better go with the Cray again. All that Freon sure keeps the tinnies cool.
Bruce: Now that's what I call a sheepacomputer.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Please. That is totally deserving of it.
There are a lot of assumptions made about Australians, and our country, by those outside of it. In fact, many of us like to help things along, just for a laugh.
:-)
Your friend would be one such person
It's a made-up name :) Do a google search, like everyone else :)
Gee... it's not like this wasn't covered on Slashdot several times. I can't find it in the Slashdot articles, though, so here's a reference to the EFA.
http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/sabill.html
Don't forget the floppy drive RAID array!
South Australia is a farily weird place. Lots of churches (and I mean lots of them) and really weird stuff happens there. But it also produces some of the most brilliant liberal thinkers in the country.
Salman Rushdy was there when he was in exile and he described it as the sort of place that Stephen King would set a novel. Really strange vibe, lotsa churches. THe sort of place where bad thing Happen.
As an Aussie i think we need to be constantly embarrassed about this issue. Generally speaking we are a fair country, at least compared to many others, but the current policy towards refugees is inhumane and unpopular here.
So keep up the parodies, pressure and insults until this government is embarrassed into fixing the arcane mandatory detention system.
BTW if there are any BETTER ideas for controlling the infulx of illegal refugees i would love to hear them. The best one i know is to support the countries of origin so that people do not feel the need to leave in the first place.
m