Virginia Tech to Build Top 5 Supercomputer?

hype7 writes "ThinkSecret is running a story which might explain exactly why the Dual 2GHz G5 machines have been delayed to the customers that ordered them minutes after the keynote was delivered. Apparently, Virginia Tech has plans to build a G5 cluster of 1100 units. If it manages to complete the cluster before the cut-off date, it will score a Top 5 rank in the Linpack Top 500 Supercomputer List. Both Apple and the University are playing mum on the issue, but there's talk of it all over the campus."

Comments

Re:Macs ?

[damiam]

For certain types of processing (rc5 cracking is one example), Macs completely smoke PCs. For example, distributed.net stats show that a 667Mhz G4 can process more keys/second than a 2.8Ghz P4. Considering how much faster a 2Ghz G5 would be, a 1100-node cluster would be damn powerful if you were doing work that mapped well onto Altivec.

Re:What about latency?

[Glonoinha]

-You win the moron of the article award. Congrats.

Now you are one optimistic AC. The day is still young. I am giving 30:1 odds that there are going to be way better morons than Thinkit3 before this thread is archived.

Re:What about latency?

[Aapje]

It all depends on what you need the cluster for. Some computations need constant communication, others can go on for hours, days or even weeks without feedback. If you're smart, you use supercomputers for the first kind of tasks and clusters for the second kind.

Universities (and big business) often work together and exchange resources. Virginia Tech gets a large amount of bargaining power by having control over a large amount of processing power. They can easily trade CPU time on their cluster for CPU time on a low-latency supercomputer.

Re:AltiVec

[discstickers]

The SSE2 unit on the P4 or the Opteron would have nearly the same performance and cost a whole heck of a lot less.

Uh, no. 2 years ago, my roommate and I were both running the distributed.net client. I have a 500 Mhz Powerbook G4 (100Mhz bus). He had a 1.4GHz P4 with rambus RAM. I got 4Million keys/sec. He got 2MKeys/sec.

So clock for clock, my machine was nearly 4 times faster.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[class_A]

ooops, yuo = own3d!!!!
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/query.php?cputy pe=99&cpumhz=1000&recordid=1&contest=rc572&multi=0
Power PC 7450/7455 G4 1000 MacOS X 10.2 2.9005 RC5-72 10,594,666.00

Re:Poor choice on Apple's part

[runenfool]

You got a link for dual Opterons for 1500 bucks with all the goodies in the G5? If yes, Id love to see it.

(seriously - I can take out a loan :) )

1% of G5 orders

[Viadd]

Just for perspective, there have been over 100,000 G5s ordered, so this cluster is about one percent of the backlog. In other words, assuming that Apple ships all pending orders in about a month, the G5 I ordered will be delayed by about 8 hours.

And 8 hours@12.4GFlops...damn you Virginia Tech, you owe me a third of a quadrilion floating point multiplies!

Re:Another brilliant idea, inspired by Apple

[dbirchall]

With 1,100 machines in the cluster, you'll probably be running into something's mean time between failures pretty darn often, whether it's memory getting a bit wrong, or one of the 9,900(!) fans needing replacing. :)

But... a cluster should be redundant enough to withstand that sort of minor inconvenience and go on functioning without the errant node while it gets fixed, reboots or whatever.

I'll admit that building something smart enough to say "Node 206, you have a memory error. Bad G5, no donut!" is beyond the scope of my understanding.