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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.

5 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.