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How to get 1.5 TeraFlops from Linux
Oak Ridge National
Lab has purchased from SGI an Altix
3000 (flash movie). This
article claims that:
SGI Altix 3000 is recognized as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors within each node and the first cluster ever to allow global shared memory access across nodes.
There is more here,
here,
and here.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
"SGI Altix 3000 is recognized as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors"
SCO will be all over your ass now!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
After all the beowulf cluster jokes, I am still incredibly curious about them. My goal is to build a small 5-6 node cluster by the end of the summer. The thing is, I still know very little about them. Every jokes about them, but no one puts any useful information. Are there specific langauges one must program in to tak advantage of the multiple processors? Or does the OS take care of that? How much speed can you actually get out of them? Is it pure processing power? Or is there more? I'm very curious and want to know.
Oh great... I can see Jobs wringing his hands already.
"Now how am I going to make the G5's look faster than THIS?"
linux on the desktop ... it's a flop.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
they going to release their kernel that allows them to globally share memory? or is it more of a hardware thing, than software?
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
You're better off using mosix. It'll allow for more normal (ie, not beowulf specific) applications to thread across computers. I'd imagine that an open-mosix setup (like the ones using the knoppix boot CDs tailored to it) could probably make for a fairly powerful computing cluster very easily.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
(Inside joke for my ol' friends at ORNL...)
It's funny that Microsoft always tries to downplay Linux's enterprise capabilities, when Linux has been scaled to far more power then Microsoft's best offering for years now. Windows 2003 is a clumsy, bloated, closed source chunk of green crap.
The best part about it is that you can actually run something on it, unlike SGi's older IRIX-based crap.... unless you like re-writing code to blow your nose, be glad this one is running Linux.
...now you get obscene frame rates on quake III while searching for those pesky pockets of natural gas!
1) Buy 100 PS3's.
2) Cluster them together mit linux
3) ???
4) -1, redundant!
damn,ya beat me to submit button
-flyneye from 2 threads down-
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
HPC Wire had an article that I referenced in my journal on 6/30.
It's an interesting machine. I'd love to get one to play with. I'm sure our benchmarkers will have some even more interesting comments once they're done. Expect teething problems, folks. Systems of this size and complexity take time to break in.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
makes me just wanna turn off the lights and look at all those LED's blinkin!
OK, so the moderators are on crack today. What's with all these obviously "funny" posts getting moderated as "insightful?"
Guess it's time to meta-moderate!
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
The israeli biological research center also got one this week.
Imagine running a Counter-Strike server on this!!!
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
The machine has 256 processors for 1.5 teraflops, not 64.
How hard would it be to /. one of these things??
I think the funniest part is that this got modded UP. Wow, was retarded mods.
2) Cluster them together mit linux
3) ???
4) -1, redundant!
5)implement global memory
6)???
7)1, interesting ?!
Or did i miss something? aint like i rtfa...
They enjoyed Jizz cola
Uh...I'm speechless.
WHO THE FUCK MODERATED THIS AS "INTERESTING"? DID YOU READ IT? -1 TROLL, -1 OFFTOPIC, -1 FLAMEBAIT
Posting logged in, with bonus to point out the egregious nature of this posting
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
LTOR !yag si xuniL
Great.. so which option in the .config do I enable?
What's that in bogomips?
Ooh, those poor Palestinians...
:)
SARS is going to look like a field trip to the zoo
will it be bundled with neck plugs?
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Alright, I know its hot on the East Coast in the US (and just about every where else in the US) and folks are going to ridiculous lengths to stay cool, but gaddamn! The moderators must have their heads in their asses and their toes on the keyboard to actually mod this shit up.
HELLO! PAY ATTENTION! I'm being deliberately insulting here in the vain hope that this will never occur again.
In between starting this comment, and ending it, I see the moderators got their act together....'bout damn time. Took your damn time too. Try not to slip up again: we're losing faith here.
Perhaps this will finally get SGI's Open Source Software efforts in the spotlight.So far every other major hardware vendor has jumped the bandwagon making a lot of noise, and trying to get free publicity. SGI however has always quietly contributed large amounts of knowledge but always in a modest or even shy way (sometimes even publicly denying involvement, but working in secret :) ).
In the meantime their additions have contributed quite a bit to open en free thinking in software, take OpenGL and open Inventor, or even to the kernel directly as with the XFS filesystem.
I always liked this approach more than the hyping others have done with linux, but unfortunately this has kept them unadorned within the community. With the Altix cluster (as with their GNU/Linux workstations,which unfortunately failed) I think they have shown that they put their money where their mouth isn't.
I think it's only fair that when we are talking about the large coorporate players in the OSS field SGI at least deserves a footnote for their efforts instead of just hammering exclusively on IBM,Sun etc..as the great backers.
I know, I know. It's a coorporation, so they inherently put money over freedom, it's just something I noticed because of the lack of their name in any high-profile discussions, which I think is unfair.
There's also a lot of stereotypical imagery in your story. Did you know that, yes, lots of people in the Open Source world are gay (Eric Allman is, Alan Turing is, to name but a few). Needless to say, without mr. Turing's efforts, you wouldn't be typing this story on this website. A little more respect for people's sexual preference please. I'm not homosexual, but many of my friends are. And sure, there might be some asshats around, but I can assure you they are in the minority.
Are you sure this isn't just misdirected homophobia? Oh well, we will never find out, since you are an anonymous coward.
(and no, Free/Net/OpenBSD and Linux are not UNIXen, and you desperately need a girl/boyfriend. Or a life. Maybe both)
without SCO's help?
Mod parent +1 Funny!
http://use.perl.org
What I find amazing is that the Cell is supposed to run up to a TeraFlop when it reaches production. That compared to a 64 processor Linux cluster.
The television will not be revolutionized.
So this is what Microsoft developers sit around and dream up all day, right?
Join Tor today!
Great Scott!
What a beautiful advertisement slashdot is running for SGI. Granted, it's an important step for Linux. Still, it's a completely biased write-up. Why not compare it to what Windows is capable of. Who knows, Linux might have already surpassed the SMP ability of Windows.
Looks like the number crunching reliability of intel processors has taken a good boost here.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
1) Buy 100 PS3's.
2) Cluster them together mit linux
3) ???
4) -1, redundant!
5) implement global memory
6) ???
7) 1, interesting ?!
8) ???
9) Profit!
I seriously thought it was funny. . . definetely unexpected
MY OWN SPECIAL HERO!
...except yours was a little too long to fit on the page. Good imagery, though, and way to get those suckers to read your whole post! A good Troll Tuesday special!
A cluster at Oak Ridge?
Better check the rads and the terraflops. Might even mutate into a giant deranged Penguin that eats Seattle.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I wonder what FLOPS benchmark they are using, and what the weightings are for floating point divides, multiplication, etc (didn't see it in the article.)
If you want to really cut a machine down to size, see how many FLOPS it gets with a heavy floating point divide weighting. Using a flops benchmark with light divides can make your machine look awesome.
man tunefs | grep fish
Imagine life in infinite debt.
scales up to 64 processors
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
See this is all wrong. At this time it's modded "Troll" which is a travesty. It's +1 Funny damnit!
No mod points, can't offset rectal moderator, sorry.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
We just got ours installed yesterday. I'm still installing software and am starting benchmarks. It's only the deskside version (12 cpus, 24GB RAM, 1TB disk), but still more powerful than the 4-cpu SGI Origins that we have been using.
It is the first one that the regional SGI reps had actually installed, but since it is almost exactly the same as the MIPS-based origin 3000 servers (with the exception of the obviously different Itanium 2 cpus and supporting chipsets), they ran into almost no problems getting it online. I have also been suprised as to how many commercial codes have already been ported to the platform.
The main reasons we purchased this machine is for the ease in parallelizing code and the floating point performance of the Itaniam 2 cpus. We're computational materials engineers and the less time we have to spend optimizing codes so that the nodes of a cluster are always kept busy and minimizing I/O bottlenecks gives us more time to concentrate on the theoretical issues.
It runs RedHat 7.2 with some tweaks by SGI called SGI ProPack. The Propack modifications come on separate CDs, with the proprietary software on separate CDs from the open source software. So far, from the command line, everything works just like my PC. It's kind of strange running Linux on a >$100K machine, but it sure beats dealing with the annoying differences between IRIX and Linux. Now to see if it performs as well as we expect...
rhyme and metre. learn it.
How the fuck is Alan Turing in the 'Open Source World'?
or, try Quantix, which is derived from cluster knoppix. A self-booting ISO with data analysis software, based on Knoppix. This is geared more for scientific apps; it doesn't come with open office, etc, which cluster knoppix does.
Eat Lamb, 1 million coyotes can't be wrong
I just metamoded someone as "Unfair" who modded this story up, if anyone cares.
Main product page: http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/
and here there are bunch of PDFs to download: http://www.sgi.com/servers/altix/datasheets.html
for example:
SGI Altix 3000 Family of Servers and Superclusters (172K)
Linux Software for the SGI Altix 3000 Family (50K)
SGI Technology Solutions for Linux (48K)
This Like That - fun with words!
a-la Al Green?
What'd Natalie Portman ever do to you?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Shut up you M$-loving lamer!!!@@!$!$!@$!@$!@$
Kernel compile time with make -j?
Hmm, what are some other good ones?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They have a pretty case, and are MUCH faster at Photoshop.
The thing about Mosix is the costs of process migration.
First, you have to understand process migration. In a mosix cluster, a running process can be moved, lock stock and barrel, from one CPU to another. All that is left behind is a "stub" process that forwards all file I/O across the network to the new location. So, if the program was a 3D raytracer that had the source description file and the output file open, after migration all file accesses to those files would be forwarded over the network to the stub (since you cannot guarantee that the remote machine can access those files in the same way.)
Now, this is great for programs that do little file I/O but lots of computing (for example the ray tracer I just described.)
However, the process must be set up on the local node first, then migrated. If the process has a 3 G core image (is taking up 3G of memory), then 3G of stuff has to be shoved across the wire, while the program is frozen. Thus, migrating a process is expensive.
Now, if you have a bunch of long-running compute bound processes this is a net win (for example, rendering a movie might benefit). But something like building the Linux kernel won't benefit, since what you have is a bunch of short running, high I/O jobs.
We have a Mosix cluster at work. I tried using it as a compile farm, and the results were disappointing. Not surprising - I was NOT using it for what it was designed for.
However, if we can ever get the FPGA synthesis tools running natively under Linux, the hardware types are going to be quite happy....
www.eFax.com are spammers
And StarOffice only takes 2 hours to load now!
What do you reckon one of these here suckers will set yall back for?
Want a cookie?
1) Buy 100 PS3's.
2) Cluster them together mit linux
3) ???
4) -1, redundant!
5) implement global memory
6) ???
7) 1, interesting ?!
8) ???
9) Profit!
10) Invest money.
11)???
12)All your base are belong to us!!!
Please post this, I am not familiar with this material.
Thanks,
Trollaxor
How long before SkyNet^H^H^H^H^H^H ORNL becomes self-aware?
Zilla. For OS X. Make a cluster of G5s. C'mon Steve, time to port Zilla to OS X.
2 113)
(more info: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=45647&cid=472
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
'Cause it is surviving a /.ing with a Flash intro even!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Can it recompile its own kernel?
My rights don't need management.
Yes please.
You've got 29 hours and 24 minutes. Long enough?
ANd playing quake 1 on it
Is that a measure of how many 1.44MB blocks it can write in a second? Or the number of bad movies/records it can create?
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
For SGI is the Kwisatz Haderack!
... most of that processing power is used for linear algebra. I.e. big honking matrix multiplication. Grunt work, and relatively uninteresting from an implementation perspective no less.
Then again, I suppose it's a good thing that such an useful abstraction exists in the first place. Matrix manipulation is, after all, rather simple and painless if you're using the right toolkits, compared to writing the message passing or shared memory control stuff yourself...
My gut reaction is that this isn't a cluster. A cluster is a network of independent computers collaborating on delivering some service.
This is a parallell (super) computer. Key difference: all the processors share a single memory space with each other. Programs will run exactly as if this was a single (multitasking) computer.
Most clusters I've worked on are just a bunch of computers with a fast network, using various protocols to synchronize their behavior ("Hey, node 19 isn't pinging, he must have died. Wasn't he running Muckatron? Who takes that job? "Me!" Ok, Joe, start up Muckatron, it's your baby now...)
Also, does anyone know if anyone except SGI makes massively parallell unified memory computers anymore? Those Origins are some kick-ass machines...
Does anyone have a good link to some "official" definitions of cluster and parallell computer?
PS.
Kids today would probably call this a "massively" parallell computer. Hah! Back in my day, we used Connection Machines with 65536 1-bit processors! All the processors had to run the same program (synchronized cycle by cycle), though the data was different at each node. We had to program it in *Lisp, the sickest programming environment then invented, but we were happy with it! We wept for joy, every morning and sometimes at lunch!
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Hi
I just like the word "asshat"
In the flash movie link, the tech specs say that "Linux is a copyright of Linux Torvalds" (emphasis mine). Is his life imitating his art?
Next on Slashdot:
At Redmond, WA, George W. declares Linus Torvalds as a top 10 most wanted criminal because he creates an weapon of mass destruction capable of delivering 1.5 Flops of Terror. Meanwhile, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates offers 1 million reward for the first Linux distro company switching from Linux to Windows.
It knows you're charging by the hour!
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
You guys have obviously never smoked crack... I can tell you from experience that this kind of behavior is more typically associated with meth.
The Johannes Kepler University of Linz/Austria purchased an Altix 3700 (the first one in production use) in April. Here is a link (sorry, German only): http://www.news.jku.at/ARCHIVE/archivnewsroom/2003 maerz-april/newsroom/supercomputer.htm
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
1) Buy 100 PS3's.
2) Cluster them together mit linux
3) ???
4) -1, redundant!
5) implement global memory
6) ???
7) 1, interesting ?!
8) ???
9) Profit!
10) Invest money.
11) ???
12) All your base are belong to us!!!
13) ???
14) In Soviet Russia, Make Money Fast list makes YOU!
$500 for the scalp of anyone who says the words "Beowulf" and "cluster" in the same post in response to this article.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Microsoft might decide to move to Hanford so they can compete, with giant mutated Doggy like reborn versions of Clippy.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Use it to generate the special effects in Ishtar II.
"Screwed Out of a Job"
It seems unlikely that the SGI is the first Linux cluster with global shared memory. There are plenty of distributed shared memory systems in software, some of them open source. You can find a list here. For most computations and most hardware, you are probably still better off with MPI or PVM rather than shared memory.
Note also that there are several high speed interconnects for Linux clusters available from many different vendors, including InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and Myrinet.
You're missing something.
Doom III?
I have one teraflop in my pants
At that time they were working on a Java implementation, but I don't know what happened with that.
It's still loading.
Can you tell me what it means? Some kind of a hat for your Ass, presumably. My Donkey seems to get by without a hat, why would an Ass need one?
That was classic intercourse!
first cluster ever to allow global shared memory access across nodes...
In other words, its not a cluster but a big shared memory system running a single OS image, just like their Origin 3000s. They just call it a cluster because that's the big buzzword in the Linux world.
Figures. Mod this one Offtopic too while you're at it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
There's no telling where some words come from. Like, for instance, who was the genius that one day said "I'm going to invent the word 'fuck' just so people can scream it at each other while driving down the highway."? Well, for the most part, I'm guessing we will never know how some words came into origin. But I have come up with a clearly outlined history of the greatest word ever, along with definitions and a useful synonyms list.
Part One: The Origins and Spread to the United States
From what I can trace back from archived IRC chats, the term 'asshat' was first used in the large European country of Sweden as an alternative for the word 'asshole.' From Sweden, by way of both train and ship, the word found it's way to the shores of western France, where it was used by a software coder named Louis (LOO-ee) in a telephone conversation with his second cousin in Newfoundland. This great man was responsible for sending this fashionable European word to North America for all children to enjoy!
Once on the North American continent, there was no stopping it's spread to the states. In a June 2000 memo to US-Canadian Customs agents, they were warned to not let this word slip across the border. At this point the word had such a Canadian backing that there was no way to stop it's glorious spread. And so, 'asshat' was first used in the US by an Inuit man named Pukkeenegak who slipped across the border in his kayak. God bless the Inuit!
Americans were, at first, wary to this new word. They had grown up using 'asshole,' 'assclown,' (premier in Office Space) and even 'asshead.' What was to force them to add yet another word to their vocabulary? The Internet, of course! Using radiocarbon dating, we have determined that some of the first widespread usage of the word 'asshat' was in several Kevin Smith fan newsgroups, all located in California. Luckily, there are also Kevin Smith fans in the northeast United States, so the word quickly bounded an entire continent and made it to New York City.
Everyone knows that New York City is a melting pot of culture, drugs, and comedians. The Bamboni family of Brooklyn, NY was the first to use the word 'asshat' in common day talk. Donny Bamboni was quoted in July 2001 as telling a cashier at 7-11 to, "put the money in the bag, asshat!" Several scared patrons of this convenience store quickly jumped on planes and flew back home, carrying the word with them. And Donny took the word to Rikers Island, where all the prisoners began using the word in a different context than an insult.
It is feasible to guess that by November, 2001, the word asshat was now in full usage all around the United States. Secretary of State Collin Powell was quoth in early 2002 as saying the following at a State Dinner: (in regards to Usama bin Laden) "We have not yet found that asshat [bin Laden], but we're sure as hell trying."
In terms of an age breakdown, it seems that colleges students between the ages of 18-25 most commonly use the word asshat, but children as young as six have been heard using the word. Current demography predicts that by the end of 2003, the word asshat will be a commonly used word among high school students and among the 35-35 year old working class. It also appears that, through misinformation, the word is loosing it's set definition. The next section will discuss its proper usages.
Part Two: Using Asshat Correctly
Asshat is by no means just a replacement for the word 'asshole,' but at the current state of the economy there is no better word to compare it to.
asshat
n. slang
1. A thoroughly contemptible, detestable person.
2. Tight fitting underwear
[sny: asshole, asshead, assclown, asswad, asshot, assface, prick, faggot, whitey tighties]
Part Three: Why Use Asshat?
Quite frankly, there is no better insult in the world than the word asshat. Think about it.
Scenerio 1: You are once again late for work, and the boss decides to chew you out about it. So he fin
Why the hell not? You have desert maps (some of my favorite), and the oil rig. Might as well find where the coders hid the sweet, sweet oil. You can use the seismic waves put out by the HE grenades, or the terrorist bombs.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/sgi_propack/
Unless there's a parallel compiler somewhere out there...
I asked about this yesterday or the day before. See here
i think i'm gonna buy me one next week. does it come with XP also?
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
pfff. rather weak.
what moron would call the desire to run this computer as a quake server offtopic?
sadly the mentally inferior and unimaginative walk among us because we havent learned to feed on them yet.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Great... so can I finally get rid of my Indigo2?
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70313& threshold=2&commentsort=0&tid=106&mode=thread&pid= 6392800#6393985 ;)
This does not seem to have been mentioned before:
Niflheim at Danish University of Technology
Would a similar configured, AMD Hammer based computer give better specs?