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Virginia Tech Announces Supercomputer Plans

Posted by pudge on from the i-got-dibs-when-they-are-done-with-it dept.

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.

2 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. FIRST reliable supercomputing facility... by TekkaDon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Specs from an involved student... by Coocha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    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 ;-), so there's a chance that he might use some PPC distro at some point.

    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.