Slashdot Mirror
Fastest US Supercomputer Runs Linux
jgercken writes "The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has brought online a 11.8 teraflops supercomputer based on the Linux operating system, comprised of ~2,000 Itanium processors, and assembled by HP. Touted to be the fastest unclassified computer in the US, its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science."
But does it run Linux?
::ducks::
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Whoa, that's gonna cost them in SCO licenses.
But seriously, I wonder what kind of stand governmental implementations of Linux are taking on the fiaSCO.
If you notice this is based on PEAK Performance, aka Theoretical Max, not the best they've gotten out of it . . .
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
They clearly aren't considering the Powerstack 5000
tcd004
Also after reading the whole press release I'm stuck with a few measly pictures of a bunch of HP rack servers running a processor that I won't be able to buy (let alone afford) for awhile longer. There is no mention about how much heat the thing produces, or how much energy it takes to run it. I hope the Ph.D.s running the whole thing realize that while they are trying to do stuff for the "Department of Energy" they are releasing so many thousands of pounds of junk in the land/air/water to run this giant supercomputer.
Can it run Quake II properly with 200 bots set to godlike abilities? ;)
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Makes you wonder for a second what they're doing with the [SECRET - EYES ONLY] hardware.
My guess is that they're working on NP-hard, but useful problems, like finding ways to crack hard encryption via shortcuts that work half the time.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science.
And the occasional game of Doom III... at a frame rate of 24 fps (if you're lucky).Being the Department of Energy I though they would have used AMD chips so they could use the excess heat to drive a power plant.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The headline for the Slashdot article is a bit misleading. It's the fastest non-military supercomputer in the US; it's the fastest Linux-based supercomputer in the world (at least, it's supposed to be). It's not the fastest supercomputer in the US, though.
sorry to hear that HP had something to do with it.
I used to really like HP, they used to make great laserjets, great ink/paintjets, excellent scanners, etc...
But then they merged with Compaq and kicked out the founder. And now, the most evil of evils, they are sleeping with SCO...
Once again, sad to hear that HP was in on this...
Did HP buy licenses for this setup? Could this be why SCO says HP is in the 'clear'?
wbs.
Huh?
jump up an say "Well smack my ass and call me Sally!"
Imagine the royalties SCO will be demanding here . . .
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Now, let's see if we can /. the world's fastest linux powered unclassified computer.
Got URL?
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
RC5-1024 here we come!
Call me back in about 200 years.
Most likely the #1 Unfunny Meta/Moderator on
IBM's Asci White exceeded 12.3 TFlops 3 years ago!
... is to run Linux on it.
"It's solving complex problems and moving 11.8 terraflops, but the real interesting bit is that it's running Linux!"
http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/mscf
:)
a more direct link to info about the facility. EMSL is a scientific user facility, designed to be a collaboration point and resource for environmental and molecular sciences (Environmental and Molecular Sciences Laboratory).
You can read about what the computer will be used for, what stuff is inside it, even see the job status. It's pretty neat stuff. The folks over there should be quite proud of what they've done. Yes, I work at PNNL
It is a demon of a machine. It's huge. It's very fast. I hope some good life/world saving chemistry comes out of it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
It could recompile its own kernel?
My rights don't need management.
welcome our new supercomputer overlords
FreeBSD, holding the best SMP support, can only support at the moment 16 CPUs, I read the mailing list, and I don't think they work on 16+ CPU set-ups that much, let alone the Itanium port isn't as prevelent as the i386, and/or Alpha.
Wishful thinking, but not possible at the moment, sorry
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I will personally bludgeon to death anyone who posts a "Beuwulf cluster" joke to this story. Let's just get that out of the way...
Gee, I need to get my hands on such a beast. I'll probably have a better Internet experience.
Intel says that a P4-M can achieve 50% greater performance in Internet experience. Cool. With 11.8 teraflops, Internet experience will be what, like 99999% greater ? Gee, that sounds better than an orgasm.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
But according to Apple the G5 is 10% quicker under their latest benchmark tests.
I wonder what kind of FPS they get in TuxRacer...
But how many frames per second does it get on Doom III?
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
why is it that no one takes the example of the earth simulator in japan and puts it to use? the earth simulator uses less proccessors and is three times faster than any other supercomputer yet people still waste money on building 2000cpu systems, i mean shit ive needed a new computer for about 4 years, and u could've given me something...
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
The problem is that BSD is a better OS then Linux but it is harder to use and requires more of that good old do it yourself attitude none of this pre made junk ;-)
Linux is like living in a teepee. No Windows, no Gates, Apache in house.
Sun did.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Well first, your site has that spark of a "I'm a Tesla Alien Abduction Genius Who Will Solve Everythin gWith Cold-Fusion" genius. That frankly make me seriously consider whether I should even click on the next link.
Then you have (DONATE HERE) banners that (NO HERE) make your site really (GIMMEE) hard to read. The more massive projects dont beg like that. If you cant/wont support it, that's what the GPL was for.
And lastly, the style presented reminds me of the magazine, OMNI. There's that feel of spoofery/hokey kind of "I'm code-God" that just makes me want to click that nice xkill on that window.
It may be a good project, but the presentation really sucks. Even the basic Black text on white with simple images looks cleaner/better than that.
machines paid for with public funds do not count as anything of note... ever.
too much politics and not enough "bottom line"
instead i prefer to study all the machines listed in www.top500.org
and then i discount all the sites running clusters paid for using taxpayer dollars
www.top500.org is a fascinating list.
You just never noticed anyone else. In fact about 1/2 of the supercomputer top 500 is comprised of IBM POWER series systems. This was higher about 2 years ago but more comodity clusters are making the list pushing out the older POWER3 based systems.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Like the fastest one in the world, made by NEC, a Japanese company, with no connection to or assistance from HP? Oh, guess not.
HP does have connections to 2 of the top 5, but none of those has been touted recently, AFAICR. Which one(s) were you thinking of?
everything in moderation
The press release doesn't say WHICH HP Integrity servers these are based on but for cost reasons I doubt it is the Superdome variant so these are probably only 4-Way nodes connected together with Quadrics interfaces. In that roll the BSD's should be just as capable. Of course the interface cards may not be supported under *BSD and there may be libraries that would not run flawlessly under BSD's linux emulation layer but those should mostly be flaws that can be overcome.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Wasn't that the plot of Superman 3?
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
WTF? This snake oil is on sourceforge? Your website reminds me a lot of this, but just not as cool (or funny). You know, another poster said it nicer, but I'm going to be blunt(er): nix the ABSOLUTELY AMAZING OUTSTANDING SUPERFRAGILISTIC carny huckster snake-oil salesman copy on that site, please. I couldn't stand it enough to see if you do bring TRUE AI TO THE DESKTOP or not. And now my eyes and head hurts.
everything in moderation
> We've got a related project called 'GridShell' that may be of some interest to the readers. Basically, it gives a slick WebUI as a front-end to an AI Grid Computing interface. As an added bonus, we've included our new implementation of the AWESOME new programming language 'SequenceL', which will AUTOMATICALLY and INTELLIGENTLY PARALLELIZE and DISTRIBUTE ITSELF across pretty much any Grid of Grids or Clusters or SuperComputers or whatever.
Does it automatically decide which words go in all-caps? Could be a useful language for spammers and netk00ks...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hehe, I guess that's what seti@home's *really* doing.
I'm joking, I think.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -i bogo
:)
?
I bet it still gets the weather wrong.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
... welcome our new 11.8 TFLOP overlord.
Hello, HAL.
Error 666 - Satanic SCO code found in your Linux kernel.
It seems that way because it was that way (up until very recently).
Compaq had Alpha, and Alphas powered the fastest computers in the world. They year that HP merged with Compaq, those two companies resources were combined, and HP pretty much owned the top500 supercomputer list. Unfortunately, that didn't last long, primarily because of the long-touted death of the Alpha, the best general-purpose processor ever created.
HP is doing a lot of this work, because they are a big company, and after merging with Compaq, they are the biggest company around.
IBM does a lot, but it doesn't seem like they were even trying to get the fastest number-crunching computers... That is, that's how it looked until the 64-bit PPC processor was announced, which gives them a major advantage (faster than the fastest x86 processors, but using up half as much power).
Other companies have entered the fray, now that HP/Compaq dropped the ball, and HP's lead is falling incredibly fast. They are dropping every good processor they had, and switching everything to Itanium, as if it's the end-all, be-all. No doubt they helped pay for this thing, just for the press attention it would give them. Their support for the Itanium is looking like a very very bad mistake, so any positive press they can get, promises to help them a great deal.
I don't believe their efforts are sustainable however, as AMD has such a lead over Intel in heat, power, tolerances, and price, that it's doomed in the long term if Intel doesn't pull off something amazing very soon.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We all know it is a superior system. And with $1.5M in licensing fees they will collect for this particular installation, they will develop it even further.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Hmm what is the name of this site again, could it be slashdot.?
I think you may have accidentally posted to slashdot when you really ment to post to your AOL buddies on the I LUV Windows list.
Got Code?
Oh my god, I'm literally in tears after reading realultimatepower.net. I haven't laughed so much in ages, thank you!
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
that 10,000 Opteron Cray supercomputer comes online...although I guess that system may not be unclassified.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
There are already two of them. Interestingly, the first one has been modded down to -1 while the second has been modded up to +4. I guess some moderators are as humor challenged as you.
There is also the obligatory "In Soviet Russia" comment as well as expected SCO licensing joke. So far, the only thing that's missing is a CowboyNeal joke but those generally only show up on polls.
But I can make up something really lame concerning CowboyNeal and super computers if you like...
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I'm not EVEN going to look at it until YOU put in more exclamation points!!!!!!!!! and BOLD TEXT!!!!!!!!
The RADICAL NAVIGATION BAR is absolutely AMAZING!!!!!!!!! That kind of NATURAL CAMOUFLAGE of VITAL NAVIGATION ELEMENTS is a SUPER-COOL way to design GROOVY WEB SITES!!!!!!!!!
No no no! You're supposed to say "I'm sooooooooo naked!" to get the first Naked Post. First Naked Post!!!! Remember kids, you don't have to be first to get a Naked Post, you just have to be NAKED!!!!
Un-news
First, how many reboots would it take to install any MS OS?
Second, does MS even RUN on something like that (i.e., is it even POSSIBLE to utilize the processors)?
And, finally, how long would it take for it to be infested with SoBig?
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
You couldn't figure this out from the all-caps boldfacing and suchlike in the post itself? OUR AWESOME NEW LANGUAGE SOLVES ALL PROBLEMS SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO!
I'm just waiting for these guys to shoot to the top of the Seti@Home rankings. Or maybe Folding@Home.
Who would want to do some boring chemical simulations when they can be cock-of-the-walk amongst geeks. Topping @Home would be like having a 12" wang in the locker room, but I guess you'd still have trouble picking up women, as it requires speaking and all.
In light of the SCO case, I wonder if they have released the source for the OS for that machine, as required by the GPL. This may be a case to test HP's stand in that case.
Look at the GridShell sources At version 0.97, the CVS repository has nothing in it but the files that CVS creates. All of that took only six months! To quote the most eloquent Homer Simpson: BORING!
>>>>You couldn't figure this out from the all-caps boldfacing and suchlike in the post itself? OUR AWESOME NEW LANGUAGE SOLVES ALL PROBLEMS SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO!
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. on his sourceforge site, there's some 45 MB tar.gz file there. Evidently his project is something. What that something is, I'm sure as hell ain't wasting a 45 MB on it.
But since I'm not going to see what it is, I can't say for sure it's garbage. I said that HIS site led me to believe that it probably is garbage.
And yes, I did give him the benefit of the doubt, as it doesnt _look_ auto-generated. I figured I'd just point out why "His article wasnt accepted". He deserved that much, if anything.
About a project whose webpage is nearly free of content aside from a plea for donations, whose most significant announcement is "02/17/2003: GridShell website created!!!", and whose demo seems to be hung? Beats me, that sounds like the crap they usually post
You should go easy on the bold, capitals and exclamation marks. They make you sound amusing like a viagra spammer. (Or was that your intention?)
But aside from that, what's "True Artificial Intelligence"? Something that can pass a strong Turing test? Now that would be news.
Here's a clue for free: why not put on your home page a description of the project that is not just a string of buzzwords?
DOes anyone know (as I can't work out from the article) if this is a Single System Image ala SGI Altix hardware or it is a cluster? Would love to see the interconnect spped
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Nuff said!
In the dim times there was one company called Cray that built big, expensive custom designed vector supercomputers. It took forever to build one so Cray could always insure they were profitable because they always new how many orders they had well in advance and could staff and spend appropriately and they were pretty much the only game in town.
One day SGI got tired of doing just fluffy graphics and built the MIPS R8000 which was probably the first really successful CMOS supercomputer on a chip. They completely carved up Cray from the low end up and eventually pushed them into a merger from hell that nearly destroyed both companies.
Around this time the Department of Energy had to give up setting off nuclear bombs to see if they actually worked and got in the business of funding these massive supercomputers mostly to simulate bombs and then some other stuff too. Unfortunately the DOE changed companies and architecture with each new contract. They managed to suck SGI, Intel, IBM, Cray, HP and countless others in to this prestige contest and I doubt its been particularly good for any of them. You see these are one off systems, that require a massive very custom engineering effort and the R&D effort seldom pays off. Its just not a good way to do business spending massive engineering effort when your usually lucky to sell one system. If you get a second one you usually have to start from scratch and do it all over again.
They are great for prestige and maybe some of the R&D effort does translate into the companies product line but, IMHO, I think a smart, well managed computing company wouldn't touch these with a ten foot pole. Microsoft sure doesn't seem interested in pouring any effort in to trying to land one of these contracts.
If the U.S. government had a clue they would find a way back to pouring all their money in to Cray to develop the specialized vector processors and find a new little Cray Jr. company to specialize in building the giant Linux clusters and encourage companies like IBM and HP to get out of this massive distraction from their core business.
The comment was not redundant.
When I posted it there were no similar posts.
Jeez you mods are off base....
..... when I first read the story my eyes played tricks with me - I could have sworn it said "bought online", not "brought online"!
The original article says the fastest open system. If that matters then the title is misleading.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but didn't HP "sell" them that machine, with that OS? From what I understood, the system was not developed by "their-lonesome-selves". Or am I "splitting hairs"? Really, how is PNNL + HP = inhouse? Yes, I sure hope I am missing something essential here.
...developing a Windows system that doesn't crash.
paintball
I wonder how fast it runs in Utah. The Darryl effect of cocaine and higher elevation might effect slow it down a little.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
This seems to be something you run via a CGI server, so multiple copies of itself interact via that route. I think.
Check out EULA.txt in the sources:
SCO (software licensing company)
AOL/Time Warner (media conglomerate)
Disney (media conglomerate)
McDonalds (fast food chain)
Taco Bell (fast food chain)
Bayer (pharmaceutical production company)
DuPont (plastics production company)
Anheuser/Busch (alcohol production company)
De Beers (diamond trading company)
Dell (computer production company)
Intel (microprocessor production company)
Exxon/Mobil (petroleum trading company)
Texaco/Chevron (petroleum trading company)
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
ABSOLUTELY ANY Local, State, Federal, or International LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY
ABSOLUTELY ANY Local, State, Federal, or International INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
ABSOLUTELY ANY Local, State, Federal, or International MILITARY FORCE
ABSOLUTELY ANY Bank, Credit Union, Insurance Agency, or other primarily finance-related institution
ABSOLUTELY ANY Illuminist, Non-Human, Facist, or Evil organized institution
GridShell v0.97, feauturing MORE INTELLIGENCE
... the price of a SCO license for a Beowulf cluster of these?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
McBride: We have learned that your government secret agency is using Linux IP in violation of our intellectual property rights.
Secret Government Agency: We have learned that SCO owes billions of dollars in back taxes, and that you have an affinity for barnyard animals.
McBride: But I havn't been on a farm in 40 years!
Secret Government Agency: That's not what these pictures generated by our new Linux supercompter say.
paintball
Everyone is picking up on the fact that this supercomputer runs Linux, but no one seems to have commented on the fact that it uses Itanium2 processors.
Now I wouldn't consider that point newsworthy, were it not for the constant FUD levelled against the Itanium.
The reason for the FUD is obvious -- it's because the Itanium-ready version of Windows is still mostly 32-bit code, which means that Windows' performance sucks on an Itanium CPU. Linux, on the other hand, gets the full 64-bit boost, with more to follow as the compilers are improved. Thus, Microsoft is afraid that, if the Itanium becomes popular, lots of people will see Linux performing much better than Windows.
That's also why Microsoft-friendly journalists and posters have been working so hard to promote AMD's Opteron. It's nothing against AMD, of course, but AMD compromised, and catered to Microsoft's failings, by dedicating part of the Opteron's real estate to native 32-bit support. As a result, Windows performance doesn't suck quite as much on AMD's 32/64-bit Opteron, as it does on Intel's fully-64-bit Itanium.
This supercomputer should put an end to the "Itanium is slow" and "Itanium is going nowhere" FUD. But I emphasized "should" because it probably won't -- FUD writers have never cared about facts.
Lol, what a site that really was!
:
I actually went as far as his sourceforge site, no mailing lists, but there was one source tar ball... 42Mb! Heh, well, I figured with that kind of web page it's gotta be good, so why not download it aswell. I wanted to see some actual code.
The tar ball container usr/local/lib/site_perl/, 43Mb of 44Mb opened were some skinsets that were definitely worth the peek. They reminded the web pages quite a bit. And understandably there was also loads of perl code, quite a bit of it actually. I did take few quick peeks at various modules, but if you ask me Kernighan was right about perl being a write-only language. Then this jewel caught my eye, the CHANGELOG
08/25/2003:
GridShell v0.97
Lot's new, including JavaScript Scaleable ImageMap Web-based User Interface, and new SequenceL Language Integration!
02/26/2003:
GridShell v0.857
Still working on data command syntax data structures and command execution routines. First public source release!!!
Poor guy, there actually is quite a bit of perl code written there (143 files and 24145 lines including comments that). That's effort wasted since it's quite apparent that he has a bright future ahead as a web designer.
I must have visitided more than a hundred serious sourceforge sites during the years, but I've never laughed this much. Thanks to the parent post for pointing this out.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
... a beowulf cluster of those! Sorry.
I wonder if the important software is compiled with icc or gcc. I guess it could be fortran code (apparently popular still;)) and then icc should shine even more. IA64 is not the easiest CPU to make a good compiler for.
All the FSF nerds would scream their heads off, but I would like to see a scientific release of linux, compiled with iNTELS compilers and set up and optimized only to crunch the numbers (and anything needed because of that. Slow disk access surely can't be a good thing for instance, while desktop smoothness isn't worth it).
and Linux is also running on the slowest computer in the US: my old 486 with 4 megs of RAM.
ha ha
http://cassettefetish.com
How many bogomips, dammit?!
The NSA used to tell its employees to say they worked for the Defense Department, if asked who their employer was.
The NSA has a front organization called the "Maryland Procurement Office" that they use when they buy stuff or request bids on contracts.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Its main duties will be atmospheric chemistry, systems biology, catalysis and materials science.
IOW, studies in dealing with the power consumption of 2000 Itanium processors.
it says here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/32523.htm l - couldn't see anything in the posted article on this) that they achieved this speed by upgrading from 1ghz to 1.5ghz itanium's. What did they do with all those old CPUs? and who paid for the upgrade PNNL or HP? Those things aren't cheap, they cost $800+ each.
You guys are missing the whole point. That web space was created *by* the artificial intelligence. It just happens to have a K-TEL sales pitch personality. This was the simpilist AI model to implement for the pilot. The Dan Rather personality upgrade is in the works. Return to the website later to see how the content and web design improves.
One problem is that Apple does not support ECC memory on their systems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I wonder how much more powerful it could of been if they designed it with Opteron processors or had waited until next summer when the release of XDDR Ram that runs in the 3ghz range would of been out.
Keep in mind as main memory speeds catch up with processor speeds and can easily run in 128 & 256 bit configurations that the signifigance of chip cache will become less and less. If the memory standards commttee's can keep memory speeds in line wiht processors then we can see some great advances in supercomputing. Along with cheaper processors due to the lack of onboard cache's since the processors would be able to use the main memory for such purposes.
Only stopgap into truely fast computing is the hard drive and that is quickly coming into it's solid state future as well.
I would guess at 2006 for 10ghz PC's with the only moving parts left being the dvd player and cooling systems which at that time will probably have to be more advanced than even liquid unless we make thsoe processors run at that speed with todays power outputs.
There is absolutely 0 evidence that HP is "in bed" with SCO, and indeed, the article that prompted that notion actually said something to the opposite effect that was misinterpreted.
From the looks of things, HP has told SCO to "fuck off", and is continuing to roll out Linux installations.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
... that the Department of Energy would use a system based on 2000 Itaniums?
Sheesh, that's 260000 watts for just the processors alone!
I'll bet that thing could be one HELL of a counter-strike server!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Secret labs always have contractors, like Batelle, SAIC, TRW, Northrop-Grumman, and the like. Those folks probably know.
As these things get faster, we'll need a better benchmark. A TERAFLOP??? Come on - can anyone really put into words what this can actually do?
:)
How about running SETI on it for a day (or an hour) and seeing how many units it can crank out? Then we would finally have something comparable to our own lives that we can comprehend.
I doubt that many people know how many M/G/Tflops their own computer is, but many more probably know how long it takes to run a SETI unit.
As a side note, I'm working on a project for my employer to put in a PETAbyte size storage solution. Now I know a petabyte is a million gigabytes, but it's much easier to think of it as seven years of medical images for each of the 30 hospitals we have.
-Mark
does that mean it can crash alot faster?
If they did it would be about 1.4 Million Dollars..
The top intelligence at the NSA is all run by Artificial Intelligence units. People have been deemed too unreliable. The human leadership of the NSA is all just a front to hide the real decision-makers.
Of course, now that I've told you, I'll have to kill you.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Man! I bet you could crunch some mpeg's on that!
-----
Now that'sa nicea computer!
Tru.
--- Nothing is secure.
Is Seti@Home a supercomputer?
--- Nothing is secure.