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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.
"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?"
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.
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?
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 machine has 256 processors for 1.5 teraflops, not 64.
What's that in bogomips?
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.
without SCO's help?
Um..
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.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
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.
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...
the billion dollar machine
What the hell kind of Origin 3800 do YOU have? ISTR ours (512-proc) was roughly $10M.