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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.

5 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"?

  3. 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

  4. 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.

  5. 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