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How to get 1.5 TeraFlops from Linux

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the squeeze-out-the-flops dept.

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.

11 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Beowulf cluster jokes... by Kiriwas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Beowulf cluster jokes... by battjt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Bull.

      int a;
      void doSomeCalculations(int i) {
      a = doSomethingElse(a + i);
      }

      Would fail (multiple threaded access to a). It is extremely difficult to detect sideffects in C. I've never seen a "smart" compiler as you put it, though there are systems where the programmers can explicitely parallelize a loop.

      --
      Joe Batt Solid Design
  2. kernel sources? by gladbach · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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,
  3. SCO and Microsoft reactions? by mao+che+minh · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I wonder what kind of FUD Microsft and SCO will cook up to try to thwart this new display of raw power. McNealy seems intent on not only winning the Asshat award, but outright retiring it in his honor.

    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.

    1. Re:SCO and Microsoft reactions? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      And why would Microsoft even care to make a comment? This isn't exactly an area they have been even attempting to compete in. IBM is probably the most direct competition for this kind of power.

      As for your comment on Windows 2003, what qualifies you to make any comment on a system that hasn't been released yet?

      I won't even comment on your incorrect Mc usage (although Scott McNealy of Sun is an Asshat also).

      Oh I forgot. You are just a troll and I am wasting my breath.

    2. Re:SCO and Microsoft reactions? by cgb8176 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      RTFA. They are using this machine for research in the "sciences, clean energy management and production, environmental protection, and homeland security."

      It's not a web server, and it isn't demonstrating "enterprise capabilities." Windows has never been intended for, or used for, scientific computing on a large scale.

  4. SGI: Unsung coorporate heros ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:SGI: Unsung coorporate heros ? by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting
      One thing I've considered for some time is a "league table" of companies involved in "Open Source Software".


      The table would record the number of packages released, the number of patches, and the licenses used for each. Originally, I was going to make a four-way split - open-source packages or patches, and packages/patches for open-source OS'.


      From this, you could create some kind of scoring system, and thus compare the "open-sourceness" of companies. (From the above, it should be obvious that I consider promotion of an Open Source OS to be important, whether the company actually releases any Open Source code itself or not.)


      In every league table I've drawn up - I've just not had the time to complete or maintain such a table - IBM ranks first, and SGI is second. The gap is surprisingly close between these two. No other major corporation even comes close.


      If you want to understand why SGI ranks so highly, look at their oss.sgi.com site, under projects and also under propack. (Propack is the collection of a lot of their Linux-specific code, including XFS for Linux.)


      Between Propack, OpenGL, GLX, Open Inventor, Coin, their OB1 code dump, their Apache 1.3.x acceleration patches (which apparently resulted in a political war between the Apache group and SGI), Rhino, their patches for Mozilla, plus all of their Open Source code for IRIX, there can be no serious question that SGI has done a lot.


      (Patches SGI used to support, but dropped, include AIO - Asynchronous I/O, and Scheduled Transfer Protocol. Both were for Linux.)


      In comparison, Compaq has a patch and a package for clustering, HP has a plug-in scheduler system, and The Open Group now provides a version of Motif for Linux.


      Hmmm. Yeah. Even with Compaq's take-over of HP, SGI are still so far ahead of the game that it's not funny.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  5. Re:lites by CoolVibe · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've experienced it the other wat around once. At some previous $workplace, we had this humongous SGI Origin 3800 cluster. Due to a city-wide brown out, and due to the fact that we were just installing the diesel-powered generators, the thing had to survive for a couple of hours on the nobreak. Sure, all the lights in the building were out, but the behemoth was still churning. We (the venerable sysadmins) were trying to decouple a partition so we could hook up a console to ot to bring down the thing gracefully. Of course, that wasn't that easy.

    Suddenly the nobreak was all out, and the billion dollar machine went *poof* - down. Damage? A couple of SCSI disks, but of course everything was mirrored and had parity so even with the damaged disks, there was no data loss.

    Then (after a few hours) the powerfaillure ended, the lights went back on in the building, but the lights on the big cluster were still off. The other way round than you'd like to see. Although, when the building power was out, and the nobreak for the machine was active, it sure was a pretty sight. Although, with the impending doom, I didn't really have time to appreciate it.

  6. Re:Apple by Umrick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Rendevous will be used in 10.3 with Xcode to discover resources and distribute software builds across available 10.3 machines. If there's a perceived benefit to Apple, do you honestly think there's anything preventing the next version 10.4 from having distributed capabilities?

    You can already compile programs with LAM-MPI support, so in reality there is nada stopping you from building a Beowulf cluster of XServes. There may even be a compelling reason to use XServes over x86 boxes after XServers are updated to G5s.

    Rumor was the original XServes were built to spec for a distributed cluster for a Blast! genome search engine.

    People get hung up on Beowulf = Linux, and that isn't necessarily the case if you take Beowulf to mean a cluster of inexpensive machines.

    OS 10.2+ with Rendevouz autodiscovery using LAM-MPI for communicating could just be a killer configuration. Lord knows cluster management/monitoring would be outstanding, though perhaps the setup would not be as simple initially.

  7. Re:Hey, at least it's not running IRIX by the+gnat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I always liked Irix, and everyone I ever talked to who used Irix liked it. The GUI is about 500x more usable than the horrors of OpenWindows or CDE on Solaris.. bleugh.

    I vastly prefer 4DWM to GNOME or KDE as well. I'm helping a coworker set up a Dell inspiron 7500 (P3-700) with Linux, and he immediately complained that KDE was far too slow. I switched to WindowMaker, and he immediately noticed the difference. This is a three-year-old machine, with tons of memory and a reasonable processor, and it crawls with KDE3. Pathetic.

    Meanwhile, you can run the latest version of Irix on a seven-year-old SGI box (and even older) and it'll still be smooth. My Indy at home feels just as responsive as any PC I've ever used. I wouldn't call it *fast* by any stretch of the imagination, but the OS alone does not cripple the computer. I'm a huge Linux fan, but there are tons of examples like this where it just hasn't caught up to the more polished offerings.