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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.

4 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. 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