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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
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
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...
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!"
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.
Dunno about the processors - I dont see any reason why you'd need a power of two for them. Perhaps we've got two arrays of 2^7 processors with a controller processor each (=128+1 *2 = 258)
But I suspect as far as the ram goes that the 258 gigs is 256 - but counting 1k as 1000 instead of 1024. (or possibly 1M as 10^6 instead of 1048576)
Haven't you noticed the difference between what a vendor says is the size of a HDD compared to how many gigs you actually get when you put it in your PC?
they *still* can't get sound to work, and their window manager crashes every time they play TuxRacer.
Management never uses its Head. ;-)
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
The cluster is running IBM Cluster Systems Management, not Beowulf, and is using Myrinet Networking.
nobody says doolally anymore mate. It's all so bloody American nowadays. The word is fuckers.
I don't simulate the Earth, I stimulate it, oooh yeah.
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.
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.
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!