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Supercomputer Breaks the $100/GFLOPS Barrier

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the new-kid-in-town dept.

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.

12 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Also I wonder by HanzoSan · · Score: 5, Interesting



    How much electricity will these super computers use up?

    All those wires, it looks like it takes up alot of juice.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
  2. Asymmetric Sparse Flat Neighborhood Network by FreeLinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Obviously, I don't get it. This doesn't look any different than redundant backbones or what is frequently done with VLANs. Multiple paths between hosts is what I see. How is this "new"?

    1. Re:Asymmetric Sparse Flat Neighborhood Network by FreeLinux · · Score: 2, Interesting

      no node is more than one hop from each other node. This requires a routing table written for each pc.

      Admittedly, I understand that no node is more than one hop away. But, how is this different than all nodes plugged into a large switch like a Cisco 6500 or a Nortel Passport 8600? These switches can have ~128 ports and can switch 256Gbps aggregate throughput at wire speed. Add another switch and then add a second NIC to each host and you increase the capacity even further. Additionally, this does not require special routing tables or software on the hosts.

      The technique that was used seems to be more of a mental exercise in making spaghetti, I don't see it reducing latency or increasing performance beyond the currently used techniques.

  3. this is nice by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 2, Interesting

    but super computers as in giant iron are becoming more specialized and as such would woop the pants off a Beowulf cluster when competing in the specialty.

    of course, if you just need a lot of general purpose super computing, it is obvious that you cannot compete with this.

    --



    I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  4. cable management by HBI · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What a mess of cables! I understand they were hitting a price point, but would it have killed them to spring $500 or so for a cable management system?

    There's something professional looking about having the cables look neat. On the other hand, maybe i'm just anal about things.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  5. Re:Why do you always call it slave labor? Its not. by Toby+Studabaker · · Score: 1, Interesting
    So you can be a student slave, or a corperate slave, which one do you prefer?

    Where I live you can also sit on your ass on government welfare and do nothing.

    Which, I think, is perfectly OK. I'll happily pay taxes to keep these people housed and above the poverty line than have them begging on the streets and mugging people for a living. People who don't want to work/won't work are, after all, a minority and will never bring a society financially to its knees.

    And before the libertarians jump in and start spouting crap about how they should not be made to pay for these freeloaders, let me remind you that you are free to leave the society. You can take your business and live outside it, all tax free, but you'll come crying back when you realize that you'd have to fund your own law enforcement, health care and rescue services.

  6. How many university have larger clusters? by SilverSun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder which universities/institutes have larger and maybe cheaper clusters, but just don't bother with running benchmarks. I for one are sitting next next to a tiny cluster with 40 dual-cpu nodes, which is connected (GRID like) to a 340 dual-node cluster in a nearby town. Non of us high ernergy physicists bothers with running any benchmarks on our clusters, other than our own applications. I wonder how many "linux-cluster-supercomputers" are out there which would easyly make it into the top 500, but noone has ever heard of....

    Cheers.

    --

    KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing

  7. why not DSP? by mike_g · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Why are not DSPs used in configurations such as this. The TI 67xx series are able to perform about 1 GFLOP/s running at only 150 MHz and cost only about $40 per chip.

    This price/performance ratio seems to make them very attractive compared to general purpose CPUs. According to the NASA G5 Study, the P4 2.66 GHz is only able to achieve 255 MFLOP/s. And the P4 costs about 4x the price of the 6711 DSP.

    It seems that DSPs should be the clear winner in supercomputer applications, what are their disadvantages and why are they not used? Granted there is a lack of mass produced hardware such as motherboards for DSPs, but that alone should not exclude them from the supercomputer realm.

  8. Mckenzie Cluster, faster, cheaper per TFlop by prof_bart · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Hmmm...

    Nice machine, but this January, CITA and the astro department at the University of Toronto brought a 256 node dual Xenon system on line: "1.2 trillion floating point mathematical operations per second (Tflops) on the standard LINPACK linear algebra benchmark." Total cost: CDN$900K (including tax) (in January prices, that's $600K U.S. or $0.50USD/GFlop.) It's being used for some very cool Astro simulations...

    See http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/webpages/mckenzie

  9. New network architecture? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Not to downplay the fantastic accomplishment, but there is nothing new about this network architecture. Not topologically, as Dietz has been claiming for years now. When did a mix of full and partial mesh suddenly become new?

    Sweet cluster, though :D

  10. Re:Can't hook ps2's together? by alienw · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Good luck getting a beowulf cluster with that crap. Ethernet is not a good interconnect technology. It's not even a good networking technology. And interconnect technology is the main performance-determining factor with a beowulf cluster.

    Anyway, if you think you can do better with PS2s, why don't you do so?

  11. Re:Way to miss the whole point by pclminion · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It depends what sort of cluster it is. If you have a standard network of workstations, and you're running something like PVM or MPI, then each node can run at a different speed. In fact, they don't even have to be the same kind of nodes (you can have different platforms, say Solaris and Linux, both running in the same virtual parallel machine).Usually you will have to adjust your algorithms to account for nodes running at different speeds. But it doesn't make it impossible.

    MOSIX is a parallel cluster operating system based on Linux that can run on nodes of different speeds. They all need to be the same platform, though -- you can't mix Sparc and Intel for example.

    Other supercomputer applications are written specifically under the assumption that all nodes are the same speed, they are linked together a certain way, etc. It all depends on the application.