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!'"

Comments

I try to look at the slides and what do I get?

[Xpilot]

This presentation contains content that your browser may not be able to show properly. This presentation was optimized for more recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

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?

Hm.

[ixt]

What I really would like to know is how they install and configure all those machines. Their method of doing that will be very useful for even the (relatively) smaller networks that don't necessarily have to be clusters.

For example, I've yet to figure out a way to effectively get a computer lab with 30 eMacs installed and configured the same way. DHCP/Netboot is slow because we only have 100mbit switches. Split CD images are slow, and Jaguar doesn't yet have free software that does that yet (besides the dd of course). I'm not sure how to keep them all updated either.

I really hope they describe how they maintain the operating system on them.

my first tech pr0n

[morcheeba]

Ah, vivid memories of the cover of Softtalk magazine, with a picture of the Apple II assembly line with hundreds of machines. Just imagine... 200 * 64k = 12.5 MEGABYTES! That would take 90 floppies to store all that data!

Now some statistic pr0n:
There were about 5 1/2 million Apple IIs sold, so at an average of 64k each (just a guess), that would be 343 GB of memory total. Adding up the couple of computers in the office (it's a 4 person company), we're about 1/70 of the way there. Assuming 2 140K floppy drives per computer, that would be 1.5TB of disk storage -- that would be 6 hard drives, and they would occupy less space than a single pair of old floppy drives.

Re:Expensive processor vs. inexpensive processors

[WasterDave]

IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available

Y'know, I saw this presentation a few days ago. I wasn't there, I saw it on the net. Anyway, this bullet point stuck out then - like, what are they talking about?

For one, how come it required twice the number of processors? From the benchmarks I've seen Opterons normally whup the G5, or are at least very competitive on paticularly G5 optimised code. Certainly not out by a factor of two, anyway.

And no chassis? What the hell does this mean? You can get 1U, 2U and 4U beast Opteron boxes from the likes of, well, IBM for one. As mentioned above.

It's not even like the kinda ropey nature of 64 bit Linux comes into play either because, well, there is no 64 bit OS X - unless VT know something we don't (which is always possible).

So, yeah, I think someone decided to buy all the G5's made for a month and just set up the project to make it happen. This "achitectural options" thing is horseshit.

Dave

Re:Expensive processor vs. inexpensive processors

[gerardrj]

- It's pretty clear to me that Apple didn't divert anything. If you look at the numbers, the VT order accounts for about 1% of all Dual G5 orders. That's hardly enough to cause the delays that people are seeing in their ship dates. Notice the slide states Apple offered an "early september" ship date, but Apple initially promised customers a mid-late August date. Given when those talks between VT and Apple were likely taking place, that means that Apple had intended to fill other orders first, and had a special allotment for the VT order.

- I don't know a whole lot about a blade center, but there doesn't seem to be a place to plug in the high-speed interconnects. Also, it runs on Intel chips that run hotter and do less work than the G5, especially when AltiVec gets involved, which is usually why you build a computer this size; vector processing. I'm also guessing the required configuration needed resale value to students at the end of life for the project/system.

- That's absoloutly true. When you need technical details about Linux you have to dig. When you have a question about OS X's guts, I'd guess you call Apple and have a conference call with all the coders (at least at this level of purchase/prestige). Could you imagine trying to get Linus, and all the other code writers for Linux and the supporting libraries and utilites on the phone at once?