Supercomputer Breaks the $100/GFLOPS Barrier

Hank Dietz writes "At the University of Kentucky, KASY0, a Linux cluster of 128+4 AMD Athlon XP 2600+ nodes, achieved 471 GFLOPS on 32-bit HPL. At a cost of less than $39,500, that makes it the first supercomputer to break $100/GFLOPS. It also is the new record holder for POV-Ray 3.5 render speed. The reason this 'Beowulf' is so cost-effective is a new network architecture that achieves high performance using standard hardware: the asymmetric Sparse Flat Neighborhood Network (SFNN)." Because this was a university project, KASY0 was assembled entirely by unversity students, which while being a source of cheap labor, is also a good way to get a lot of students of involved in a great project.

Comments

Re:Asymmetric Sparse Flat Neighborhood Network

[flymolo]

Due to "creative" (computed) wiring, if all switchs are functioning, no node is more than one hop from each other node. This requires a routing table written for each pc. It could be used for redunancy, but it is being used to minimize latency, and collisions, which are both killers in clusters.

Cooling

[bengoerz]

I toured the previous cluster these guys did (KLAT2) and was very impressed. However, using AMD Athlon Thunderbirds last time, it did get quite hot. I remember standing by the cluster looking at all the wiring and being bombarded by an overhead cooling vent. I'm also assuming that these cooling issues is the reason that each case has two blow-holes. I'd also like to see these guys post in-depth specs of each machine. Being a hardware nut, I'd like to see how they got so many machines so cheap, and maybe even what vender they used. As I remember, they worked REALLY hard on their last cluster to keep costs to an absolute minimum.

Re:University students

[panda]

Having worked there, and knowing what Hank Dietz and his students are doing, I can tell you that it is different from just slapping PCs together, stringing wire between them and installing clustering software.

Dietz specializes in networking and all the wiring that you see in the photos is charted out by custom software that he's written just for this purpose.

He works in the realm of optimizing communications among the nodes to avoid network latency and so on. If you read the POVRay benchmarks, you'll notice that the author comments that several clusters' CPUs spend most of their time idle due to network latency. Dietz is researching the best ways to eliminate much of that latency so that the CPUs in the cluster can spend more of their time crunching data rather than just throwing off heat. To my knowledge, he is succeeding at this and better than most other researchers in the field.

As for what his students learned from this, I don't know exactly which students helped him on this. For KLAT2, there were several undergrad volunteers who helped with wiring and assembly, mostly from the campus Linux Users' Group. I know his grad students and research assistants are learning a lot about how clustering and network tech works, and a couple are doing their Ph.D. disserts in this very subfield of E.E.