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Drooling Over VA Tech's 1100-Node G5 Cluster
Mr. Slurpee writes "Virginia Tech's 1100-node dual 2 GHz Apple G5 Terascale Cluster is getting racked up and ready to roar. If you're a penniless geek like me, at least there's some tech pr0n for us to drool over. There's 1100 of them ... think they could part with one?" Update: 09/22 02:55 GMT by T : Matt submits a link to this full mirror of the photos, writing "The page owner's comment on the original mirror being taken down due to bandwidth? 'Bring it on!'"
Using full sized cases seems like a rather inefficient use of space to me. But I guess those cases are all fairly full - the heatsinks in those things are enormous. Wish PCs had heatsinks like that, then maybe mine wouldn't be so noisy.
-kidlinux.
do you think it would take this nifty cluster to correct the barrel distorition from their wide angle lesnse?
FooGoo
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
They've got 1100+...where's mine? I ordered a Dual 2.0 GHz G5 in July....still no sight. Supposed to ship on Tuesday....but online time will tell....
Sigh...Maybe they'll loan me one if mine gets delayed!
PS--anyone got the rest of these pics? There were a TON of them...Mirror? COMPLETE?
$2,999 x 1100? 3.3 Meelion dollars? I hope they got Apple's .edu discount.
I haven't actually tried it yet since I don't have access to enough Macs, but I imagine it's something you would start and let happen overnight... I mean, that's more or less how Apple does it in their own stores, wipe and restore overnight, I think. Or at least after the store closes and before the next opening day.
GPL Deconstructed
Good thing VA Tech got their 1100 before all of the full-price-paying customers who ordered these as soon as they were announced.
Reliability.
No one in their right mind would try to argue that one couldn't build a home-grown system for less. But with optical ports? FW 400 and 800? Gigabit ethernet? USB 2.0? And with said home-grown machines, when the NIC goes bad in one, or a memory slot goes bad in another, who do you call? The NIC or mainboard manufacturer? So you what, keep a list of all your machines, give 'em i.d. numbers or whatever, itemize the guts and who made what (mainboard, NIC, RAM, CPU, HDD, etc.) of each, and hope to make sense of it all when stuff starts to fail? Me, if I was in charge of it, it would make sense to me to farm it all out to one company, and then when something breaks there is one number that I have to call.
Also, lets not forget that this is probably going to be used for research, and if it involves vectors, then AltiVec is the SIMD for you.
Of course, being human, my opinion is suspect.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
That's because there is no such thing from Apple yet. Given the serious engineering that obviously went into the G5 case, I don't think we can assume that they can just drop a G5 into a current XServe and sell it.
Plus, these guys were on a pretty strict deadline, the cluster has to be functional by November IIRC. So, they wouldn't have wanted to wait any longer than they did.
It doesn't take pull... it takes money. Small schools have other significant advantages.
When you choose between going to a large, research-oriented school and going to a smaller school, you're essentially making a trade-off between resources and personal attention. Bigger schools have more and deeper resources, but it can be tough for undergrads to have much significant interaction with professors, particularly in the first year or two. Smaller schools may not offer the same variety of courses, or get huge research funding, or field a championship football team, but as an undergrad your chances of not just interacting with but really getting to know the faculty members (and not just the ones in your major department) are much better.
Most schools are happy to collaborate with others, so if you've got an idea that you think is well suited to Virginia Tech's cluster, talk to your advisor about submitting a proposal to VT. If it really is a good idea, your advisor may help you refine it and ultimately turn it into a research project.
I have no idea what you just said.
SCO Sucks
Except VT isn't going to be running SPEC[int|fp]+[_rate]*2000, so optimizing against those benchmarks isn't sufficient.
When all is said and done, it's been shown that for many vectorizable programs, Altivec still spanks SSE/SSE2/3d!Now, and anything else offered in the commodity market. Couple dual 2GHz G5s with Altivec and IBM's XLC autovectorizing compiler, and I think VT probably does have quite a powerful machine, more so than SPEC scores can quantify.
GPL Deconstructed
Hrm, this same logic should apply to medicine, cars, houses, and just about anything else that we as people have access to Original Source... yet notice how as a society and culture we tend to specialize and rely on experts?
I would be that, due to economics and division of labor, it is more productive and cost effective for VT, and many other places, to rely on a third party (IE Apple or Red Hat) to support their OS, while they themselves support, say, their business/product/venture... in this case, VT's research, while Apple supports the hardware/software. Makes sense, doesn't it? Each party does what it does best, so that the end result is more spectacular than if VT decided to, I dunno, devote resources to replicate what Apple already knows. Or at least has the resources to know.
GPL Deconstructed
Why make a website "optimized for IE", when the content of the said website is of interest to people who are probably not running IE or Windows?
Well, it appears that whoever made the website is either too lazy or too fucking stupid to make a decent webpage. <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft PowerPoint 9">
Either way, lazy or stupid, they deserve to be taken out back and all shot in the head with a glock at point blank range. We need to start ridding ourselves of these worthless life-forms.
Webdesigners with no integrity deserve nothing short of death due to the fact that they are wastes of flesh and they do nothing but harm/annoy/fuck with/etc. the rest of us.
I fucking hate idiots.
As mentioned, in 3-4 years when they cluster is no longer used, they will then have 1,100 desktop machines for use in labs / offices. I have a strange feeling they will be used then, and the fact taht VT will be able to remove 1,100 machines from it's needs that year will probably save them a couple bucks as well.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
actually, IIRC, they're promoting the video cards as a *benefit*. i think they're working on using those GPUs for more processing.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Nope.
The *management* net is gigabit ethernet.
The actual clustering will be done over 10-gigabit Infiniband. (For a good time, figure out what the maximum bandwidth of a PCI-X slot is, and compare..)