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."

Comments

if I didn't, someone else would have....

[sweeney37]

Nahhh, that's not a computer. Now this, this is a computer.

Mike

Re:if I didn't, someone else would have....

[deadsaijinx*]

ooooh, and it even comes in designer colors. Sexy

Is this news?

[KFury]

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.

Re:Is this news?

[PerryMason]

Its really nothing huge, but you also need to consider the cost involved. AU$1.7 million is about US$1.1 million. So for about a million US$1 you could get in the top 100 supercomputers in the world.

Looking at the latest top 500 list this would put it as the third most powerful 'self-made' system in the world. For that reason I think it deserves at least a mention and add the relatively low cost and you've got a /. story.

By crikey mate this specimen is enormous...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

How long...

[Esion Modnar]

...til somebody asks it, and it replies:

42.

Re:How long...

[jerde]

I'm sorry. This just canNOT go unanswered. Nay, we must resort to blatant copyright violations to cure this NOW. The quote is from the late Douglass Adams's book, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Geeks around the world resonate with Adams's humor, such that a good number of /. references are to his work.

So go read the book! Now! Meanwhile, to whet your whistle, and explain the 42 reference, here are the pertinant excerpts from Hitchhiker's guide:

Chapter 25: There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pan-dimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.

And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.

It was the size of a small city.

Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic pot plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.

On the day of the Great On-Turning two soberly dressed programmers with brief cases arrived and were shown discreetly into the office. They were aware that this day they would represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they seated themselves deferentially before the desk, opened their brief cases and took out their leather-bound notebooks.

Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.

For a few moments they sat in respectful silence, then, after exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and touched a small black panel.

The subtlest of hums indicated that the massive computer was now in total active mode. After a pause it spoke to them in a voice rich resonant and deep.

It said: "What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have been called into existence?"

[...]

"O Deep Thought Computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us ..." he paused, "... the Answer!"

"The answer?" said Deep Thought. "The answer to what?"

"Life!" urged Fook.

"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.

"Everything!" they said in chorus.

Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.

"Tricky," he said finally.

"But can you do it?"

Again, a significant pause.

"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."

"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement."

"A simple answer?" added Lunkwill.

"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

[...]

Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.

"How long?" he said.

"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.

[... skip ahead to chapter 27, seven a

yeah but

[toddhunter]

They are still going to have to upgrade when Doom 3 comes out

Life in the fast lane....

[MrCreosote]

At least now there is one thing that goes fast in Adelaide.

Re:Australian rules powers of 2^38B or what?

[sould]

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?

Re:Why aren't they using Athlons?

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be worried about Global Warming.

Re:imagine

[cyril3]

nobody says doolally anymore mate. It's all so bloody American nowadays. The word is fuckers.

Re:Why aren't they using Athlons?

[sjames]

Actually, Athlon is not faster than the P4 Xeons at double precision floating point. Double precision is frequently required for scientific computing and is used in the Linpack benchmark for the top500.

The current dual Athlon chipset is the 760MPX. The Intel i7501 is the preferred chipset for dual P4. It supports dual channel ECC DDR ram and the 533MHz FSB. These days, nobody wants non-ECC ram for a top 500 cluster. It's not that much more expensive these days compared to decently rated non-ECC ram.

Then there's the cost of air conditioning 258 Athlons...

I'd say they made the right decision.

Re:Why aren't they using Athlons?

[MetricT]

We're just a few days from bringing up a 300 processor cluster of the exact same type of computers they are using, so maybe I can shed some light. There are several reasons for picking Xeons over Athlons at the moment.

1. If your app uses double precision floating point, and you can recompile your app using SSE2, an Intel will easily beat the AMD. AMD does scalar floating point operations faster per clock. Intel does vector flops faster. Most interesting real-world problems use vector flops.

2. Memory bandwidth. Most chipsets can only deliver a fraction of their theoretical bandwidth. I've seen speed differences of 25% running code on identically configured machines, one having Intel E7500 and the other with a ServerWorks GC-LE (the ServerWorks smokes...) And those are *good* chipsets. I have yet to see an Athlon chipset that wasn't crap.

3. Managability. The x335's are pretty damned slick. I *love* the built-in KVM switch and remote diagnostics. You can daisy chain north of 21 nodes together (I think 35!) and you just have one cable coming off of them.

4. Total cost of ownership. Our previous p3 cluster was assembled (before I arrived) from Pricewatch parts. We initially experienced a 25% failure rate on memory, and spend an inordinate amount of time fixing random problems. 40 of the p3 nodes takes more than three times as much administrator time as 160 IBM x335's. Spending an extra $50,000 on good, quality parts is cheaper than hiring a competent sysadmin. Don't "efficient" yourself to death.

Having said all that, I'm *really* looking forward to Opteron. We're getting some in a week or so. 64 bit + SSE2 support is going hard to beat.

compensating for something?

[lingqi]

Last place I worked, each developer got his own personal 16-processor machine with 8 GB of RAM for application testing. These weren't servers. They were workstations, individual workstations for individual developers to use.

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.

The University of Adelaide...

[CaptainPotato]

...will do almost anything for a bit of publicity at the moment. As the eighth university of the so-called 'Group of Eight' premier league institutions in the country, the University of Adelaide is a mess at present. There is little leadership, poor strategic planning, a recent Government survey that slammed it in many areas, and so on. The announcement of this new system is meant to show how technologically advanced the place is, and how it leads the way.

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.