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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."
why PowerMacs?
A couple of things make them suitable for clustering:
* There's heaps of processor-processor bandwidth and memory bandwidth.
* On board gigabit ethernet.
* Monster fast execution of properly written vector code.
* Well designed cooling.
Of course, the bang/buck ratio could be an issue for some debate but there's little doubt that in comparison to other commercial unices it's an absolute bargain.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The grant money that flows into a public research and occasionally teaching institution can be stagering, and absolutely dwarf the money students pay in tuition (sometimes by a factor of 10!). A better question might be, why don't the gradstudents donating their labor, possibly to patents that will be controlled by the university, recieve more consideration, and fair labor law protections.
But I would bet this will be not too dissimilar in use from the HP Itanium2 referenced earlier on slashdot. I would bet one of the paramount concerns this cluster would look at is the effect of farm runoff, and probably climatology too among other things.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
With 1100 machines in the cluster, there must be _at least_ 2200 DIMMs. Since these must be 400MHz (PC3200) DDR, they can't be on a large 0.15 micron DRAM process, but most likely between 0.11 and 0.13u.
d /d imm_results.htm
Who cares?
APPLE G5'S DO NOT SUPPORT ECC.
The random bit error rate for 2200 DIMMs with 0.13u cells is roughly one '1' bit dropped to '0' every 9 hours. In other words: good luck getting any reliable, large-scale computation done with this cluster. (And I do mean "good luck" - they might get a run of two or three days without any problems once in a while.)
Now if only Apple would support PC3200 ECC DIMMS, which certainly do exist:
http://www.intel.com/technology/memory/ddr/vali
this cluster might be a bit more useful for real work.
I wonder if any universities have tried to write a distributed computing app along the lines of seti. Require it to connect to the university network, it grabs itself maybe 50 megs of hd space, and a fraction of all the new computers people bring to campus, in addition to all the computer lab gear belong to their massive number crunching problems. Make another version available to alumni, or even institutions as some form of corporate sponsorship.
Then if it got popular, and they were really clever, they could sell off a part of that computational power they amassed to solve other peoples problems providing for funding for new versions and new supercomputing clusters.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
i would take this story to imply that a G5 powered Xserve is not going to be shipping anytime soon..... the Xserve is made to cluster and run in situations like this. i guess the rumor sites can speculate if it's G5 parts available or some other holdup on a G5 Xserve.
/. a year or so ago about a group that went from building a rack and unboxing their G4s to a running cluster in part of a day. i really don't remember the specifics but i think it was something like 30 G4s? i would guess the G5 is not that much harder... and they seem to have Apple helping. maybe they hooked up the optical cards from the Xserve...... we'll see i guess.
unless there is some reason the desktops are better for this project that i did not pick up on?
as for the above question about Macs.... depending on what they want to really do with this, Altivec is really efficient for some computations. all flame wars aside there have always been people clustering Macs for certain uses. i do not know how much of it was user preference or the software they wanted to run or the simplicity of getting the cluster running.
it is supposedly VERY simple to cluster Macs. there was a story on