Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Tech Announces Supercomputer Plans
CousinVinnie writes "Previously noted in this Slashdot story, the administration of Virginia Tech has announced they're puchasing 1100 G5's (another story) in hopes to build a top-10 supercomputer by October 1. Tech will be spending $5.2 million over five years on the project, which should help it pull in more research money." Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site.
Does anyone know who else was considered for this contract? I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
1100 G5's...that should corner the market for about a week...and give Apple a small boost to it's bottom line..
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
Burns: [throws his glass at Homer]
You call this Postum?
[bashes a 5-feet high pile of paper]
Burns: You call this a tax return?
[bangs a CRAY with his cane]
Burns: You call this a supercomputer?
The comparison is like Apples to Oranges. Most people end up asking "Orange you going to build a beowulf cluster of those Apples?"
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Maybe Apple will use this G5 cluster against a single-processor itanium to show that, yes, they ARE the fastest personal computer!
The only problem will be finding a desk big enough to fit the guys...
Yeah, and his story says it was reported earlier, if you read it...
They need the power to play duck hunt, bitch. Shut up.
Overpriced G5s for what? Instead of buying 1 G5, you could set up 4 top-of-the-line AMD processors, cluster it using Myrinet.. and all that would probably cost about as much or slightly more than G5. Apple may have a good processor that is one of the highest performers... but it costs way too much to be worth it.
Not to sound like a troll, but isn't the Apple a bad machine to use for this? It's big, the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud, and it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market. Yes, OSX/Darwin does work fairly well, but I'd think that the entire purpose of this computer originally would make it ill-suited to this task.
Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power, or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis. Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
This just seems like the wrong way to do something thats hallmark has been in being cheap.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So, would this be like 2200 p4s running at 10ghz?
</steve_jobs>
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
So far we've seen that it's a cluster and what the building blocks are. What's the interconnect? What's the OS? What are the nodes using for a network filesystem? Are they at all? Is this intended for parallel jobs or for embarassingly parallel work?
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
There was a lot of inside info from people who work at Virginia Tech or go to school there. Lots of speculation and rumor, too, if you're into that sort of thing.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Hopefully they'll build a nice big window so all the students can see this beo^H^H^Hcluster of macs. Besure to leave the blinds up though because these same students will be working 2 part time jobs just to afford tuition.
hmm, what to name a mac-based supercomputer?
deep-pink.
support microsoft! do it with ten times as many xboxes!
:) But seriously why would they specifically choose g5's....they must have done a bit of research before dropping 5 million on them
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
humm someone have a problem with rednecks?
Maybe a little to close to home? Or is the poster from WVA?
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
... or else you'll be the victim of a drive-by fruiting!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
... is probably equivalent to 1 (well, maybe 2) IBM System/390s.
Slashdot summary:
1) Itaniums are for pussies.
2) Go Apple!
3) Opterons still kick the G5's butt.
4) I can't wait to run doom3 on my backordered G5.
5) People griping about apples proprietary hardware and software, and how this cluster could have been built cheaper from oem parts, and ebay ethernet hubs.
6)Dumb lists summarizing other trolls.
Poster went to William and Mary - which might suck even worse than VA Tech. Virginia is a police state, and its state colleges are underfunded havens for rednecks and trenchcoat mafia style rejects from NoVA.
Here's the article from which the Collegiate Times article has paraphrased: http://www.technews.vt.edu/Archives/2003/Sept/035
Since it's based on a Power4 core, I think you should ask IBM that...
This will obviously be used for the hundreds of thousands of outhouses on and around campus.
Opteron: Still under development.
Now tell me, on the Good/Fast/Cheap curve you design parameters lie?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
How much would you bet that Apple is throwing in some $$ for this try.
Blar.
I laugh every time I see this...truly a classic.
I just installed Acrobat 6 on an athlon 800Mhz we have here and it installed in about 80 seconds.
You have either:
a) a serious hardware issue with the P4 machine
or
b) a tendency to lie in an effort to boost the mac image
Since you say you upgraded from a Cyrix M3/233 you might just be a simple moron since they haven't made that chip in God knows how many years and it was a shit architecture as well.
The whole story is dubious as why would you buy a p4 serial ata to help you at your freelance gig where you "copy a 17 meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder"?
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
It may be true that all dirts roads lead the VPI, but all white lines lead to UVa...
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Post suggestions here!
The comment has already been made. Let's move it along people. Nothing to see here.
From one of the articles "For the supercomputer to break the top five supercomputers in the world, it would have to possess 10 teraflops of memory."
Semper ubi sub ubi
The alumni have other causes to spend their money on, like renovations to the football stadium.
I would bet Apple would gladly cut a fantastic deal to get their model in the news as being part of one of the fasters supercomputers. They likely paid very little for the hardware.
It's a no brainer...
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
Why aren't they waiting for the Xserve update? Rhetorical question, but still...
I haven't seen one, but it looks like the PowerMac G5s are about 4U wide. 1100 x 4U = 4400U / 42 per rack ~= 105 racks.
Not only is this going to take up an enormous amount of room, but the power and cooling requirements are going to be crazy as well. And they don't have rails so getting them in the racks, and working on them once in the rack, is going to be a PITA.
1100 G5 Xserves would need only about 25 racks. Many fewer UPSes and A/C units to power in each rack. Much easier to install and work on.
I know Apple is gung-ho about this validating their "Fastest PC Ever" claims. But it seems a little poorly thought out on the University's part even if they got a sweet up-front price on the machines. Remember: the system price is a small part of TCO.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Pudge thinks their website isn't good enough. What does he want? Some flash? Maybe some pop up ads to spice it up. Whatever happen to simple being good and fancy being woooo pretty but useless. Oh wait, that still hasn't changed.
a Beowulf cluster of..... oops sorry!
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
This isn't really a dupe, as this is a mention of the first official words form the school on the subject. Officials are finally speaking (and in some cases backing off) of the cluster in public.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
Oh, nevermind.
I'm a nature photographer.
For the supercomputer to break the top five supercomputers in the world, it would have to possess 10 teraflops of memory.
I think that they mean 10teraflops of computing power, as opposed to 10terabytes of memory -- since the later would require each CPU to have 10GB of ram in it. Nonetheless, the anomaly tells me that this is a reporter not used to computer issues. (too few computer geeks at the college paper).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
And the next day, Apple lowered the price of the G5 by $150, and doubled the RAM, HD space, and included DVD-recorders.
Anyone get the feeling that Apple might be pulling a Be, Inc and is trying to pull off a focus-shift?
Remember Be, the "multimedia" OS turned "Internet Appliance". Remember the death of Be. (damn, that stings. I miss the BeOS.)
Now witness Apple:
For decades, seemingly the darling of the press-production (DTP) world, catering to artists of all magnitudes, it was the computer you used to create real, bona-fide art. It attracted the freaks, the hippies, the art chicks. For many people, this was unnerving. Different people get "different" looks.
Now who's Apple targetting?
With OS X, I'm thinking geeks. We're different people, too, but in a, well, different manner. Instead of the artists, Apple's going for traditional suits, the realm of IT. It may be a matter of sheer survival that Apple penetrates here, because they don't stand a chance in these days of "homogenous" work environments.. Out with Apple (even if it works) and in with Dell WinXP machines! Linux faces the same dilemna, although Linux has some other benefits/detriments for it's widespread adoption. If Apple can show it's worth in the server room (just like Linux is doing), then maybe, just maybe, they'll start looking at Apple on the corporate desktop (just like Linux is doing).
Now, the idea of catering to suits is somewhat.. frightening. The whole damn market is different. They don't care about "look and feel", they care about numbers (see economic downturn, outsourcing to India, massive layoffs, H1B abuse, etc). This means Apple will have to change from being "cool" to utilitarian. But wait, I think I just painted myself into a corner here... Wasn't that the point of Apple? To be a tool and not an obstacle? Instead of creating computer art, we're now creating databases? Maybe Apple is on to something here...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
because I know that Georgia is buying a 256 node cluster and at least some of them will be G5's from IBM running linux.
well at least my $56k in tuition went to some good
This was also discussed even earlier.... on Slashdot in July in a discussion of grid computing....
I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!
I think the argument for G5 came from here.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
hahaha when has the answer to life NOT been told to us by the simpsons?
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Just the motherboard and chip for a dual 1.6 GHz opteron runs you $1394.99 if you need PCI-X (which is probably necessary with the interconnect you want). And on top of that, you need the network cards, memory, case, hard drives, etc. etc.
You could easily get to Apple prices going with AMD.
these machines for the publicity.
That's the only explanation that makes sense.
Can someone explain the " Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site" comment? It loads perfectly fast for me. It looks pretty good. It even runs PHP, so it couldn't be a "They shouldn't use ColdFusion" type remark.
Am I missing something, or was that just a completely random comment?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Jokes like this can get you put away in the punatentury for a very, very long time.
-----
jonathan barket
Lies. Opteron boxes has been shipping for some time now.
I just graduated from there and that website, while not ugly, is non-sensically arranged and the search comes up with some of the most ridiculous links. The department does have some nice clusters already set up though as well as a sweet 3d visualization studio!
it's not
There are a bunch of people posting gripes that this was a bad idea. But I don't think it's that bad. We should at least withold judgment until we see some data. One thing's for certain, it will outperform YOUR cluster.
Among the top complaints were:
You could buy several AMD's for that.
You might be able to, but the G5's they are buying already have 2 very good processors. As long as they're dividing up tasks among processors, it's nice to have all the memory management and overhead taken care of at a level of two processors per node instead of one. To be honest, I've never seen it done before, and it could have very interesting results.
The Mac's aren't designed for this sort of thing.
We don't know all the details of this cluster because they weren't all mentioned in the story, but my hunch is that Apple might cater to them a little if they are offering to dump $5 mill on a cluster. They might package the cases differently (sans curvy plastic or with shared power supplies).
Anyway, when it comes to speed of high precision calculations, the G* chips have proven their worth. And most High Science applications fall into that range of operation. We all know that clustering and distrubuting is touchy. The cost and speed don't scale linearly. And the cost vs speed ratio definately doesn't scale literally.
There is a possibility these computer science professors know something. So we might want to see how this thing performs before we rush to judgement.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The store I work at has Opteron's in stock. How does product in hand = still in development?
Lots of speculation and rumor, too, if you're into that sort of thing.
This is slashdot! We're all about speculation and rumor. Innuendo, too, especially on the weekends.
Oh, and sentence fragments.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Lots of "WHY?" questions, with lots of pointless trolling on the G5; but none of them actually look for answers. Mostly just more idiots who can't understand that a good vendor is important; that their own time is important; that ease of use is even more important now than it ever has been before. Luckily, these same idiots spend all their time setting up sendmail over their 14.4 modem. As for the G5, here are some strongpoints for it: - A fast memory pipe (1GHz) - Good heat management (9 fans but it's quieter than its predecessor) - Damn good FP performance (To get comparable FP performance on intel, you have to use the -fviolate-ieee flag on gcc, think about that) - Vendor-installed, vendor-supported Unix, with the vendor employing the entire OS's development team. - Fast system interconnects with network & I/O - Easy system setup (this matters a lot when you've got 1100 of them) - Proven apple reliability (and if you're going to fight this one, have something better than "is not!") (again, very important when you've got 1100 of them) Oh yeah, and OS X. Mach microkernel, Rondezvous, and distributed builds in the default toolset. Again, the idiots I mentioned above wouldn't have a clue about this stuff. As for _why_ VT getting this, VT's one of the largest engineering schools in the country. We've gotta simulate airflow over wings, heat propogation over materials, and other stufff this CS major doesn't understand. And we've got big development in bioinformatics. All kinds of CPU to crunch. AFAIK, the cluster's being paid for by federal grants or something like that. And now fools, flame me. Prove me right.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Tons of multi-Opteron systems already being sold, and for some time now.
Homeboy is mega-stupid.
G5: Deliverable today
Well, deliverable this weekend if you order 1,100 of them at a time; everybody else has to wait... but yeah.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
They got a great deal from Apple on the machines, and when it falls of the bottom of the top 10 with the next release,they will have 1,100 machines to sell. Considering the excellent deal they got from Apple, plus a grant or 2 they picked up somewhere, they get great advertising for next to nothing. Of course I'm making this up....
Below is a link to show the noise of g5. (a movie). Apple did something called engineering (imagine that in a pc!), to put in many noise reducing features. So, the boxes may be bigger, but you get less power consumption and less noise. It is almost as if you pay extra money, and get extra features. Weird, I know....
2 0.html
http://homepage.mac.com/aaronsteele/iMovieTheater
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
What will happen next, dogs and cats living together? Mass hysteria?
As it turns out, this is the minimum recommended system configuration to run OS X 10.3 Panther.
Fucking fanboys.
Blar.
Wow, imagine a Beowulf cluster of-- oh, too late.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
You know every time Apple Does something to improve it market share, company have a tendancy to want to do this ... its good buisiness sense, every PC troll comes out and puts em down.
I never really thought PC users were generally self protentious peaople but for the most part they are. after reading this ->
http://www.applelust.com/oped/amc/archives/amc0307 18.shtml
article that goes into the facts, a word pc trolls dont like to hear, about the early dual g5-xeon comparison it made how bad you people really are clear to me.
YES im sitting here running windows xp on my Athlon x86 PC but i , like unlike many i guess, have a mac sitting in the other room.
At the end of the day the G5 is an emensly power full computer. even the dual's are used to genetics can u imagine what over one thousand of them can do? Just except the fact that appple has sold some computers and find more posts to troll
I have a sneaking suspicion that these computers aren't going to be used as a supercomputer for long. I bet they set this up, get on the supercomputer list, and then in six months or a year farm out the computers to use in computer labs around campus. Besides, I haven't heard a compelling reason why VT *needs* a supercomputer.
This means that those of you who ordered your G5 early and expected to get one in early September, you are SOL. Your machine is goint VT. You have to wait another month before you get your machine.
-Matt
As an alumn, I am irritated with the decision. As a cluster developer of 5 years, I'm highly irritated with the rational of the G5. It's one thing to develop a system for the intention of doing research, it's another to base a decision on "..delivered by Oct. 1..". The question you should be asking is, which is more important - getting on the list? or doing the research? Seems to me that there is a more cost effective solution, that provides higher capacity, greater throughput, and more overall compute capability at lower cost... I'd personally suggest VT slow down, rethink the cluster, and buy something that fits the needs of the school and research programs-therein.
Side Note: While Tech has a great football team, the football program is (other than special discounts to students, and using the VT name) completely independent of the school. The football program is a business venture that does not interact with or require school permission, nor is it governed by the school boards that Steger answers to.
Use Linux!
Who would want to go to a school founded by an idiot like Jefferson anyway?
UVA student?
kekekek
Please don't get us confused with the other supposed University in our state UVA.
Who wants to pay for Photo$hop when you can get the GIMP running for free?
Karma is like sex. I can't remember the last time I had either of them.
Read why here.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
All I'm saying is that if I lay out 3 large for an Apple and I *still* fail it, I'm going to be pissed. On the other hand, if I start beating out those GNAA turds for frost pist, it'd be worth it.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
i love reading with "Flamebait +6" modifier !!!
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
Now that we have G5s don't ya think it would be a better idea to use a G5 pic instead of the G4 icon? e.g. http://www.apple.com/g5processor/
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Apparently at least one moderator also has fallen for this one as well. People, please... Don't feed the trolls.
Having actually built a G5 I hope the issue with the springy microphone/speaker sockets has been solved.
a beowulf cluster of dupes from retarded slashdot editors... oh wait.. that IS slashdot
you, sir or madame, have just opened an unresealable can of WHOOP-ASS! prepare to be BLASTED!!!!!!!!!
Yup. He got the roles completely reversed.
By the way, I'll have one of these :-o
<drooool>
How the OS license on those go? I know with OS X you can get unlimited clients with each Xserve but I'm not sure how a cluster purchase works.
:-)
If you seriously think about it, the OS cost is far beyond the hardware cost at time... especially on the Wintel side of things. It's an honest question, not a critcism.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Wrong again... sherlock Thats UVA.. as to VA being a police state or VTech being a red neck campus I wouldn't know I left VA for college, but I don't think one of the top rated science schools in states is all that bad.
DP
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
what about photoshop benchmarks?
::ducks::
char *mySig;
So I read this "The project comes at a time when the university's academic departments are struggling to fulfill students' educational needs in the wake of a $72 million reduction in state support."
and then I wonder why you would spend $5mil dollars over the next 5 years to build a supercomputer? It seems like a better idea would be to reach out to the slahsdot/linux communities and see what kind of equipment they could get donated/free and then build a semi-super computer with that - or hell even just buy a shitload of cheap pc's to do it with....
maybe i'm just missing something...
Ave Molech Setting
Why don't you zip it and please read the facts from the horse's mouth:
["Virginia Tech will have one of the top ranked supercomputing facilities in the world, supporting significant "big science" research. It is anticipated that Virginia Tech will realize at least a five to one return on this investment in terms of annual research grant and contract activity," says Glenda Scales, assistant dean of computing and distance learning at Virginia Tech.]
Let me say that again: Five to one return of investment projected. At least. If they are saying this outloud, I can assure you Ms. Scales knows what the hell she's talking about.
You can find it here
Or so they claim here. It seems they have all their bases covered and don't give a damn about ECC for a reason.
[Srinidhi Varadarajan, an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, and Jason Lockhart, director of the College of Engineering's High Performance Computing and Technology Innovation, initiated the venture at Virginia Tech. Varadarajan is an expert in reliability, a key issue in successfully exploiting terascale computing.]
They keep on going:
[Component failures are endemic to any large-scale computational resource. While previous generations of supercomputers engineered reliability into systems hardware, today's high performance computing environments are based on inexpensive clusters of commodity components, with no systemic solution for the reliability of total machine.]
And now for the solution for your reliability problem.
[Virginia Tech has the first comprehensive solution to the problem of transparent fault tolerance, which enables large-scale supercomputers to mask hardware, operating system and software failures - a decades old problem. It's a software program called Deja vu, designed by Varadarajan. He also integrated the software with Apple's G5s. This work will enable the terascale computing facility to operate as the first reliable supercomputing facility, according to Varadarajan, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award recipient.]
So maybe, just maybe, you and other people could:
1. READ before posting.
2. Then READ a little more.
3. Did I say READ already.
-sigh- Whatever.The moderators are getting so bad, they're making the submitters produce dupes for them in advance...
Q: How many Virginia Tech students does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three - one to change the bulb, and two to discuss how they did it as well as a UVA student.
-1 troll?!
C'mon, that's over 40 hours of keep your pants dry entertainment!
Look, it's really simple. The G4 is loud simply because they didn't put in the engineering effort to make it quiet. The G5 on the other hand, is really really quiet. I was just using one today, so I know whereof I speak.
-Mark
considering the G5's 'smart' airflow design, engineering the case like one big air channel, I would imagine that 1100 of these, if aligned correctly, could sum up to quite a nice breeze...
Why make so much fuss about buying a bunch of Macs off the shelf? My grandmother could do that if she wanted. The fact that they want to be finished "building" it (= connecting the cables) seems to be simply that they want to make it into the Top-500 list with $$$ rather than new research.
What they will find out is that the G5 was never built to be run as a server, despite its server-like performance. And 1100 Mac end users (for whose desktop the machine WAS built) will perhaps have to wait longer until they can buy theirs.
Back in the old days any serious computer engineer would refuse to buy off-the-shelf machines and rather build their own -- I believe research should lead the crowd wrt innovation, not follow it! At least they should hack the Linux PPC kernel or build a new cool software layer to contribute something rather than just consume.
Just my two cents worth...
While I was a student at Virginia Tech ('94-'99, including a year of co-op) as a Computer Engineering student, I was always impressed by the diversity of computing resources throughout the university. Each department generally sided with a single environment (DECstations to FreeBSD PCs for CS, Windows (AutoCAD) for Engineering, Macintosh for Math & English), although all were supported. Even all the way back to the mainframe and its dumb terminals, which students used to sign up for classes. The general student at Virginia Tech learned, by necessity, how to do the basics across a variety of systems.
I'm happy to see Virginia Tech continue its push forward. "Commodity supercomputers" through clustering almost always refer to Intel-architecture systems. Why not Apples as well? It's a brilliant move forward, not only for the computational power this involves but also from a P.R. perspective... would all those high-school techies have heard about this if they chose an Intel architecture solution? And Apple will get good P.R. as the building blocks behind a supercomputer.
The numbers I've seen seem to suggest that a 128-host IB fabric is only slightly more expensive than a Myrinet fabric of the same size, with similar latency characteristics for MPI programs and about 3x the bandwidth per host. Quadrics has better latency characteristics than IB, but about half the per-host bandwidth; I'm not sure about relative cost.
What I'll be very curious to see is how Apple and VT scales an IB fabric out to 1100 hosts. They'll either have to buy a boatload of "backplane" switches or sacrifice bisection bandwidth across the system as a whole. That'll probably depend on whether they have big bisection-bandwidth-bound codes, like parallel FFTs...
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
If you're going to be one, you may as well spell it properly.
The PowerPC 970 shatters the myth that you absolutely need H-1Bs because supposedly there is not enough talented American engineers to do the work. By nearly all metrics, the PowerPC 970 is competitive with the very best processors produced by H-1B-dominated companies like AMD and Athlon.
The Apple G5 may be slightly more expensive than an equivalent system based on an AMD/Intel microprocessor, but the Apple G5 is worth cost. Buying the Apple G5 supports the more traditional American work environment at IBM as opposed to the brutal, cutthroat environment at Intel.
As The Apple Turns reports here, that the supercomputer cluster's main purpose will be to "impress the living crap out of everyone."
Just thought you'd all like to know
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
text
The setup should have been:
the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud
and the punch line (which I did get right) is:
On the plus side, the aeronautics department can use it simultaneously for a wind tunnel!
But who knows! Maybe the incorrect one works, too!
That is all.
Apples total sales for the year to date: 1100
Wonderful: three pointers to Apple's web site, pointing to pages with slick corporate "interviews". Do you actually work for Apple or are you just insanely zealous?
OK, apart from being a nice thing to flame people with, what is this ECC talk?
Why is it so important?
Are there other "supercomputers" running without it?
Is there a good reason to disregard it and go with G5 anyway?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
My boss here at VT is a volunteer for this project... they've been designing and building rackmount shelf-type units to store all these new G5s, as well as helping with the cooling system. Here's some info he gave me.
;-), so there's a chance that he might use some PPC distro at some point.
The cluster will eventually run Mac OS 10.27... he said eventually, and Jason Lockhart, the project leader, is a friend and fellow Linux geek of mine (please don't hammer his inbox
Interconnectivity will be done with Cisco equipment, among the onboard gigabit LANs. Infiniband cards will also eventually be installed for 10 Gbit throughput.
You guys can offer alternative solutions and troll this as much as you want, but this is what VT is going with. In my opinion, it's not a bad choice... the New IBM PPC chipset is balls-to-the-wall computing, and Apple's 'stock' offerings in the G5 (Gbit ethernet, serial ATA, etc.) are all strong selling points. The fact that this cluster is intended for intense vector and matrix-based algorithms is another bonus, b/c of the PPC vector processing unit.
Apparently Apple shifted us up to the top of their production ladder, in order to make the contract, thereby extending the wait times for consumers itching for a G5... I find that a little humorous. Can't wait to see gigaflop statistics!!
May the threads progress competently.
This here poster has answered the question already.
I'd say, mod him up, flog me for not reading this myself and go flame some ECC fanboys... (did I just say that?)
Seriously though, I thought ECC - or something alike - had to be important, reading about it, but OTOH couldn't imagine this university (with quite a track record already) not coming up with this themselves.
It sort of confirms my views on *some* wannabe-scientists on this list.
Having a degree doesn't equal having common sense. I like playing high and mighty like any other guy, but come on... This is largely a repeat article, it should have given some people the time to set their facts straight.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Woohoohooo
:-))))
I always found this post to be absolutely idiotic. It still is of course, but almost pissed my pants laughing
I think, therefore I am...I think.
In talking to the person who is recruiting me to help lug the computers around when they arrive, the OS is to be OS X 10.2.7 on arrival, with plans to upgrade to Panther upon it's release. Straight out-of the box releases, with NetBoot planned to be used to distribute the images to each computer. This contradicts the rumors I've heard before, but is closer to a source who is on the planning team, who is too damn busy to talk to a luser like me.
Those who are possible volunteer recruits, there is an info session in Andrews ISB in the Corp. Research Center at 7:30 tonight and tomonrrow night (same presentation both nights). You *cannot* be on wage for VT to be elegible. I'm not sure if GAs count as this, since I'm not one, I didn't check.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
HERE! HERE! This guy is right on, like his remark on EEC up the thread. It's all in the PR note, damnit.
I guess we all should READ the available information before posting around like headless chickens.
Go Hokies
I was down there last week for the game, and the school is definitely transforming. also the links in the article point to off VT network sites, so is the comment warrented?
If you want, I can let you borrow my ex-girlfriend. Just put her in the corner of the room and she'll solve that cooling problem of yours in no time.
Is that where the magic smoke runs through so the computer can work?
Marcelo Vanzin
Their is one problem with the new 65's.
THEY ARE UGLY!
Berkeley did it on $500 grand with their SETI@home project.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
...while i agree with you, it doesn't pan well for your argument that you sited three pages from Apple.
/. and we, dare I say, are a little more cunning that that.
Remember what site your posting on? That might have worked on n00b.com, but this is
But I want to know...
...will we have to wait for Mac-Doom III on this G5 system to get decent frame rates?
would it be possible to use the machines both as lab machines for students AND as a cluster? I mean does the gear that networks them necessarily prevent them form being used as individual machines? sorry for the n00b question but it sure seems like VT would get a lot more for their money that way.
Dude, look at an old sparc sometime. Sparc 1/1+/2 had 16 ram slots, circa 1990. Of course, you had to fill 4 at a time. The max is 128 MB i think.
:) --M
Not unless you could find a 30 pin SIMM in 32MB/four density, which I've never seen; the biggest being 16MB/four. I still have several Sun 3/80's, Sparc 1s, 2s, 5s, and 20s sitting in my basement. And the 20s I still consider a perfectly usable workstation. They were great computers in their time and I still have many fond memories hacking those Suns. But *sigh* it's time to clean out my basement.
I would advise you to have a little more faith in your alma mater....whoever told you there is a:
"more cost effective solution, that provides higher capacity, greater throughput, and more overall compute capability at lower cost..."
was smoking crack. If it was yourself than I respectfully disagree (and would like to see said solution).
Each PPC970 has two independent FPU, each of which is capable of executing a fused multiply/add instruction. This allows the PPC970 to function as if it had FOUR FPU's when doing all that nifty matrix math that makes up a large part of scientific calculations. This puts the machine's peak performance at over 17 Teraflops. If you don't believe me read the article over at arstechnica, or just look at the PPC970 documentation. Not to mention that the Altivec SIMD unit (for any repetitive single precision calculations) SMOKES AMD & Intel's vector solutions. Also the Mellanox Infiniband communication fabric has ridiculously low latencies and extremely high bandwidth..beats Myrinet on both counts from what I've seen...
The long and the short of it is that a dual-Opteron built cluster would have to have significantly more nodes (== more expensive) to deliver the same peak (or average for that matter) performance, and would take longer to be built.
Apple wins on price.
Apple wins on performance.
Apple wins on delivery time.
I'm sure the decision to use the G5 was not made lightly or frivoulusly, and that all the options were carefully weighed before choosing the one made the most sense.
Come on /. Would you please grab a damn G5 thingie offa something somewheres and quit using G4 thumbnails in Apple stories? It sticks out like a green sore thumb and it's embarrassing for /. Time to roll with the changes.
Seriously though, I thought ECC - or something alike - had to be important, reading about it, but OTOH couldn't imagine this university (with quite a track record already) not coming up with this themselves.
Sigh... let's separate two things.
1. Checkpointing. This means saving the state of your job in regular intervals. It can be done by the program, or automatically by the operating system. The "Deja vu" approach mentioned is checkpointing. It isn't new - SGI has supported it for a decade, and CRAY another decade before that. Checkpointing helps if the CPU crashes or if there is a power outage.
2. Memory errors. These are random, mainly caused by alpha-particles from space. ECC detects and correct this. Silent random bit errors is horrible, since they won't crash your machine - you won't even know the error happened without ECC.
Sorry, it doesn't matter how smart the "Deja vu" program is - It cannot detect an undetectable error. The only way to be sure is to run all your simulations twice and make sure the results match...
Erm, your not paying for it ARE YOU
The PowerPC 970 is based on the Power4. You need to check your facts. (Hint: visit the IBM website)
Thanks.
Some questions, if you feel like answering, that is.
Any reason why Apple doesn't support this ECC memory apart from being a bit over the top for simple desktops?
Can they be custom installed (sort of like "look here, I'm going to build a supercomputer instead of doing this photoshop stuff, so put those ECC thingies in there, ok?") or is it plain not supported, not possible?
Is ECC memory readily supported by other manufacturers (apart from SGI and CRAY)?
And the obvious one, why do you think a place like Virginia U. overlooks this while they - and the people responsible - obviously have firsthand experience in this?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Why didn't they mind missing ECC? My guesses:
1) It's a fuck-up. Perhaps the grant money really really did have to be spent right away and Apple was the only vendor able to deliver on short notice. Maybe the researchers figure they are going to run the simulations twice, after all an effectively 550-processor machine is a lot better than getting nothing if the grant couldn't be cashed for whatever reason.
2) Apple has undocumented ECC support on their chipsets which they figure they can get up and running in time. This case is most likely if the "no ECC support" line is just a marketing decision to differentiate G5 desktops from future G5 servers... It would be insane if they're now trying to make first-batch G5 machines use a feature that hasn't been previously tested or worse, a feature that failed testing and was not documented because of that.
3) The "reliable clustering" software they have does something extremely clever to work around ECC errors. Say, they could run a background memory-checksum process and in case of checksum failure backtrack to the latest checkpoint on the failing machine and on all machines that have used results provided by that machine. It seems unlikely that something like this would be sufficiently efficient and worth the extra complexity, but perhaps they have worked out the details and it does work out.
4) The simulations they run aren't fussy about some random perturbations here and there. Perhaps they even actively add random perturbations for some physical reason. Then, if 99.999% of memory is used for numerical simulation data, the probability of a memory error hitting the OS, application code, or critical pointer data is small enough.
BlastX is sweet with a G4
Why does the G5 say "G4" on it?
I love NetHack.
Better luck next time.
Blar.
...the right number of buttons.. the right number of buttons for a beginning user is one. (1)
;)
I, like many other Mac users, purchased a 3 button mouse almost immediately after getting each Mac I've owned.
Do you think it's time to get your head of that hole and stop with the "number of mouse buttons" complaints?
I don't understand why you just want to chime in and miss the joke entirely..
good luck with that, eh? maybe you'll eventually save up enough to get a Mac and not be so bitter.
Moderated at:
-1 Doesn't Reaffirm My World View
Here's some info about running Linux on Macs:
i d=6918320
/ 0259234&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=126&tid=137&tid=17 4&tid=181&tid=185
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77884&c
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/10
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
As far as I can tell, the press release you referenced wasn't mentioned in the original Slashdot postings. It's not fair to criticize someone for not reading something they didn't know existed, is it? In any case, while I'm sure the Deja Vu software is useful, it doesn't help those of us who aren't setting up clusters--there's still a need for reliable hardware. Check out http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html for reasons why.