Slashdot Mirror
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!'"
...to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers.
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G_____________________________________naann_______ ________G
N_____________________________nnnaa__nanaaa_______ ________A
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A_____________annna_nnnnnan_aan_aa__na__aa________ ________*
G____________nnaana_nnn__nn_aa__nn__na_anaann_MERI CA______N
N___________ana__nn_an___an_aa_anaaannnanaa_______ ________I
A___________aa__ana_nn___nn_nnnnaa___ana__________ ________G
A__________nna__an__na___nn__nnn___SSOCIATION_of__ ________G
G__________ana_naa__an___nnn______________________ ________E
N__________ananan___nn___aan_IGGER________________ ________R
A__________nnna____naa____________________________ ________S
A________nnaa_____anan____________________________ ________*
G________anaannana________________________________ ________A
N________ananaannn_AY_____________________________ ________S
A________ana____nn_________IRC-EFNET-#GNAA________ ________S
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*_______aaaan_____________________________________ ________C
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first posting dudes
Imagine a beowulf clu...oh, wait.
Sometimes i wish smaller schools had some pull so we could get projects like these...or even quarter, nay, a n eigth the size! problem is we don't have the immense research backgrounds and it holds us back.
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
here.
Oh God.
Imagining each one of those came with just a little bit of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field, someone from NASA might want to head over there and make sure that some kind of tear in space/time doesn't occur right there. With that many G5s, we don't know what level of destruction could happen.
Why are they using G5s? These Macs are for looking good, for style & class, for home or office, not for getting jammed into racks as in the pics.
:)
What's the point? Do they actually offer anything over a similar PC? Do VA's apps only run on PPC? Surely it's a pretty expensive option, and all those good looks wasted...
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.
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?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
These photos are from the Virginia Tech Supercomputer Cluster composed of 1100 PowerMac G5's. These photos were originally hosted at this link but access was removed, presumably due to excessive bandwidth usage.
:P Let's see how much power they really have!
Hmm. Something tells me that they should hook up a T3 line to each one of those G5's
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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?
I have 1.5 billion nodes in my head.
Try again, Apple l4m3rz.
insert all your g5 are belong to us joke here
I can just feel that some admin will get a deja vu very soon.
Probably just a small glitch in some system.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
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.
$2,999 x 1100? 3.3 Meelion dollars? I hope they got Apple's .edu discount.
He had to admit they didn't have any in stock, and weren't expecting to get any from Apple for some time.
I guess I know where the dual-G5 systems are all going. Ah, well, it's all for a good cause. I hope.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If I was working on that project I'd be like "Hey guys you only need 1099 right? I mean, it'll be okay if I just take ONE, right?"
Small mirror with a couple pictures if you click here
Kick in the Head
This G5 cluster will undoubtedly be the world's faster cluster for integer and single-precision floating point operations on vectors, possibly even beating the Earth Simulator because of Altivec.
Just think of the RC5 score this cluster could achieve.
I've heard various rumors that mac's are significantly faster for things such as graphic processing, video editing, and other multimedia type things. Considering the G5 is a 64-bit processor, that would put a dual 2ghz G5 at around 8ghz equivalent. Would a intel or amd based 8ghz machine (quad 2ghz?) perform equivalentely to a dual 2ghz G5? Maybe it would still be superior to a 8ghz i386 machine with multimedia apps? Am i totally out of my realm of computer knowledge? I'm lame.
Hi there
They built a 1000-node cluster out of expensive and yet-to-be-proven G5 systems. I wouldn't expect much rationality out of such a camp, even when it comes to website design.
I think the G5 is an important piece of hardware, it looks to finally compete with the PC market. The usage of the G5 in the newer systems will make the machines more competetive in the marketplace.
I fail to understand why the G5 is regarded as highly as it is, as it is still not on the level of the newer AMD chips (Hammer et al). Perhaps tech geeks are simply drawn to Apple as the new 'en vogue' anti-MS movement to support.
No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea.
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.
It's a bit of a cocktease to post this link right now...Most of the mac community sites linked to the pictures at Virginia Tech's site but brought it down. Try clicking on the "pictures" link on their site and you'll se that they chmod 0'd the whole site so that the bandwidth usage won't peak out again
The pics at chaosmint are a small selection of what was originally on the site.
But to be on topic I'm suprised that Apple didn't get them Xserve G5's for the cluster. While the desktop G5's look cool it's really unneeded to use up all that space.
Thanks for your letter. Being Catholic myself, I know exactly what you're talking about! It has always been our plan here at Apple Computer Inc to revolutionize personal computing with our high-quality and highly gay products.
I'm happy to answer your letter by letting you know that YES we will be releasing an entire hLife ("homo-life") software line. You'll be able to recognize it in stores by the small stylized logo depicting a large cock entering a tight anus with an Apple logo on it. ("Suddenly it all comes together" indeed!).
Anyway, I hope you and other members of our community will join us on our mission, and purchase the exciting new hLife boxed set. Only the boxed set comes with translucent cock rings!
Sincerely,
Harry Rodman
Vice-president
Homosexual Liaison Services
Apple Computer, Inc.
The parent isn't saying hey G5s are barbie computers you have no penises. Get with it, moderators.
Yawn.
Pink at LANL has the following:
:)
1024 nodes
2048 cpus
1024 power cables
1024 Myrinet network cards
2048 fiber cables (8.8 miles)
3072 Myrinet switch ports
4096 sticks of RAM (2 Terabytes)
7168 fans
1 hard drive
1 CDROM drive
Not only do they have pictures of its assembly, they have movies.
Check the web page for more stats and better quality movies.
Oh, yes, it's unclassified
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
Or does this photo look inverted to you guys? Or did they glue those big fan-things to the ceiling?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
If you had the choice of building a supercomputer for your school then would you use brand name inexpensive processor like AMD or expensive chips like G5's or Itaniums ?
I really don't get what you can get out of a single fancy expensive processor when a couple of less expensive chips can do the job .
Good thing VA Tech got their 1100 before all of the full-price-paying customers who ordered these as soon as they were announced.
I have been using both Macs and x86 systems extensively for all manner of purposes since 1998. Neither really holds much of an architectural advantage when it comes to a specific type of function, and any slight advantage that is had by either tends to be so small that it isn't noticable. One thing is for certain: x86 hardware is far cheaper for the same amount of power.
Example: Photoshop 7 runs just as fast and efficiently on my dual 867MHz G4 with 512MB of RAM (booted into OS 10.2) as it does on my AthlonXP 1800 (1.533GHz) system with 256Mb of RAM running Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 Pro SP4, or Windows XP SP2. Video playback is identical (both systems have identical 64MB Nvidia graphics cards). Differences in compiling times are negligable.
Don't buy into the marketing hype. A $2,000 Macintosh system will run just as well as a $900 self-built x86 system. Everyone that has to use both platforms daily knows this. I don't have a preference for either architecture or operating system - just take my word as someone that has had to do extensive product testing on both x86 and Macintosh for years.
I hope they were able to run these without video cards. I can't imagine 1100 brand-new sweet ATI video cards sitting idle for years...
It's rightside-up. The G5's drives are at the top of the case, ports at lower left. I'm curious why they don't face the computers.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
As a Professional * Information Technology Location Analyst and Physical Security Specialist I need to use my professional abilities to make a professional analysis of the situation for my professional collegues so that we may put forth a professional solution to this problem.**
* - I really, really hate people who make gratutious use of the word "professional" as some sort of elitist mark of supremecy
** - I would like to run in there, see if the machines are locked down, and grab as many as I can hold.
(And yes, I'm just joking, I don't want to steal anything from them and I neither have the plans nor the means to do so, it's just a joke people)
All those silvery slick conforming cases remind me more of something from the book 1984. Ironic considering there advertising campaign of twenty years ago.
Interesting project though, and for those wondering what it will actually do: (from VT press release)
Virginia Tech researchers are already active in a number of areas that will benefit from the new supercomputing facilities, says Kevin Shinpaugh, director of research and cluster computing for the university. These include: nanoscale electronics, quantum chemistry, computational chemistry, aerodynamics through multidisciplinary design optimization, molecular statics, computational acoustics, and the molecular modeling of proteins.
And I thought it was going to run something with a cute name like iFiniteElementAnalysis...
think they could part with one?
They could, but they won't.
Looks to me like those racks will eventually be enclosed, so those fans will be probably expelling hot air and drawing cool air in from the bottom... note the holes in the shelves to allow air to pass through.
I'm really feeling for the poor slobs who have to lift 1100 of those beasts onto shelves. G5s are heavy!!!
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I run Contiki you insensitive clod!
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
We once had a 'discussion' in an apple chat channel about errors made by the Apple Calculator. I just hope they are not visible when you want to do calculations on that cluster... 3.083 - 3.014 = 0.0690000000000003 is what appears on the paper tape from the calculator if you try this calculation. The display shows 0.069, but that is only cause it rounds off. I wonder where that 3*10^-x (too lazy to count) comes from, but can imagine that stuff fed to a supercomputer could give really wrong results if even small calculations are bogus!
Don't worry about them. All the lifting will be done by volunteers hoping for a chance to touch the g5s. The sore backs will be worth the chance to brag about this to their grandchildren.
...fork!
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
I, for one, welcome our new 64-bit overlords!
time, money, computers, ...
:o\
Has this university got nothing better to do than try and win some silly "we've got more power competition"??
And Apple, have they got such little regard for their customers that their redirect pre-orders from paying customers to the university for this stupidity??
The world's going to hell in a shopping trolley!
One day Captain Kirk was maiming his cock with a horseshoe when suddenly Mr. Spock ran up to him and shoved his pointy ear up his butt. "What is this for!" the fag captain said. "FAGS FOR YOU AALL!L!!!" the ancient alien howled as suddenly he farted and Captain Kirk twirled around in a daze and his foreskin twisted and his kidney stones turned into wooden beads. He pulled out his pistol and shot lasers at his chastity belt and suddenly he hurdled his dick into Captain Kirk"s bellybutton and it tore his flesh while Spock fucked his stomach. Kirk hollered out loud and Mr. Spock threw his shoes to the floor and wrinkled his penis until Kirk bellowed out to make it stop. A maelstom of shit whizzed around the ship and suddenly a giant fag appeared out side and the U.S.S. Enterprise went up his butt. "Oh what the hell have you gotten us into NOW!" Captain Kirk said as he oozed a condom back on his dick and put his panties back on. "OOH!H!!!!!!" Mr. Spock started fucking him again and shoved his phazer up his butt. He dissolved his glands and exploded his turds and finally a queer klingon hurdled through the door and smashed Kirk with his butt hairs. A maniac sucked his dick and suddenly Mr. Spock fagged Kirk so hard that his intestines burst open and he died.
Dear Apple:
I bought an Apple computer because of its native support for teledildonics. I bought a USB FUFME and MacOS immediately recognized it and installed drivers instantly! As a gay Catholic priest who often can't be at the altar all the time, you can understand how the ability to have sex with children whilst on the airplane with my Powerbook and wireless internet service is a lifesaver.
I just have a single question, will Apple be releasing a firewire version of the FUFME anytime soon?
With much gayness,
Father Michael "Arminass" Sims
Hi, your troll sucks ass. Perhaps you should elaborate on how the CPU is inaccurate rather than one stupid application.
Actually, the site is still up and more bountiful if you happen to be on VT's Campus. There are a lot more pictures of it available on that same link of the entire construction effort.
Dear Father Sims
Thank you for your kind letter! Being a former Catholic priest myself, I know exactly what you are talking about! It has been our dream at Apple Computers ever since we began in the 80's to shape the homosexual experience with the ultimate computer.
I can answer your letter by saying that YES we will indeed be making a firewire version of the FUFME. With the additional bandwidth offered by the firewire bus, we will be able to more accurately record and deliver more minute and subtle movements that the USB FUFME simply couldnt support due to lack of bandwidth. You will be able to recognize our firewire FUFME in stores by the fancy holographic logo of a cock entering an Apple.
We are glad to help loyal customers such as yourself. If you ever have any more questions, feel free to drop a line (or connect to my teledildonic FUFME server on fufme://cockman.apple.com).
Hugh G. Cockman
President
Homosexual Liaison Services
Apple Computer, Inc.
Though those of you who aren't at VT can't see this image, it's still quite hilarious.
a le/images/g5ordering/IMG_0099.JPG
Apparently Tech ordered the G5s through iTunes: http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/terasc
hidden goatse cgi redirect link! beware
I wish I had mod points right now... you sir -- YOU owe me a keyboard, for I have just spit out my Mountain Dew.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Does it run Quake III???
Developers : Remote Root Exploit In lsh
Posted by timothy in The Mysterious Future!
from the harsh-eye dept.
skookum writes "After last week's OpenSSH patch-fest , a lot of people suggested GNU lsh as a replacement. Unfortunately, it seems that the lsh team has recently discovered a heap overflow bug of their own that can lead to compromise. An exploit was posted to BugTraq two days ago. Happy patching. "
SCO Sucks
read the fucking article
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
It is quite the fashion statement :)
(Excuse the blurriness and poor lighting - crappy cam and crappy dorm lighting)
Macs appear in films because of price, Apple pay for Macs' to appear in films.
Maybe VA got a 'special deal'?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Configure one machine, use that one to produce a dupe, repeat with all currently configured machines as parents until out of unconfigured machines.
Still a huge job.
god I wish I could go there with a big block of cheddar cheese I bet I could shred it in like, 10 seconds!!!!
That nigger in the photo must be a prop - I can't imagine him even holding a damn crimping tool correctly, much less building a CLUSTER.
LOL
http://saveie6.com/
It appears Apple is gasping for breath with this latest stunt. Negotiate the price of their hardware to build a giant cluster, please. Apple's welcome into the computing world long passed and their stay is growing intolerable. Luckily commodity pc hardware and widespread audio/video software is squeezing Apple out of their own game. All of the things people bragged about doing on their Mac's for years can now be done on PC's, for cheap.
I for one will be delighted to see Apple hardware disappear like the commodore's and amigas of yesteryear.
The boxes were purchased at the standard academic discount price from Apple. Not even a volume discount. It's said so in at least two of the articles I read about this story.
But the truth usually doesn't stand very well against the 'obviously true', does it?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
...after a good ten minutes of googling, I can't actually find anything out about it.
Basically, he made it up, because he doesn't like the idea that something like this might be possible.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Funniest thing I've seen all day.
And I'm a Mac guy, too. I wouldn't mind wandering through that room for a while myself... though I probably would keep my pants on.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Never mind that Apple is one of the very few consumer computer companies making money right now. The G5, whether or not you're a Mac fan, is a very nice processor, and it will continue to drive Apple sales. Apple has a niche market, and they will probably always have the niche market. It's doubtful that they'll ever gain more than 20% market share, but they'll always be around. Maybe you should use that dessicated brain of yours before spouting off.
That's the whole point of the PPC970's Altivec unit, isn't it?
Here, scroll down a little to see the CPU performance on RC5, and note how a dual GHz G4 is 2x as powerful as a dual 1.533GHz Athlon.
Extrapolate then to a dual 2.0GHz G5 vs a, I dunno, dual 2.0GHz Opteron... why wouldn't it be, if not 2x faster, at least as fast, if we want to be generous and assume that AMD somehow managed to figure out how to increase the performance of the Opteron over the Athlon by more than 2 (in order to take into account the fact that the G4->G5 increase is 1.0GHz, but the Athlon->Opteron increase is only 500MHz...)
GPL Deconstructed
So they reimage about 5gb worth of OS + Applications per machine, and assuming it's a decently fast FW drive at 20mb/s means about 5 minutes per machine.
So an iPod with 30 eMacs in a lab should take about the same, since an iPod clocks in at 16mb/s (I own one) but there shouldn't be nearly as many applications/software on an eMac as on a G5... so 150 minutes, or a little over two hours a night.
And at standard lab-rate of $5/hr, that's $10 to reimage the entire lab.
GPL Deconstructed
The only thing I found of interest is some BONUS apple pr0n pics:
Look at the rack on that one!
Even bigger rack!
What the G5 sees
Looking in.. notice no nose prints/drool marks on the window(yet)
Or do you just want to bitch?
The real answer is that the problems that are going to be solved with this cluster are easily parallelizable. That's the IDEA, right? 1100 machines, each running one chunk. Well, the G5, and more specifically the Altivec vector processing section of it, is SO MUCH better for processing big bites of easily parallelizable data at a time than any of the alternatives that it can run rings around any Intel or AMD machine you care to name with fewer than double the number of processors. (And in the cases of some particular kinds of calculations, it beats those, too. But you can't count on that for all your problems.)
We've seen this before a number of times... I seem to recall a gene sequencing program that was running five or six times faster on a G4 than it was on a Pentium IV of the same speed. And then there's SETI@home, which runs much faster, cycle-for-cycle, on the Mac, and doesn't even USE altivec. (Though I believe it does take advantage of the 'multiply-and-add' instruction of the PPC, which is another nice little feature.)
Altivec is an astonishingly clean and usable interface for an amazingly powerful vector processor that is, in 99% of the Macs out there, underutilized to the point that if it suddenly disappeared, most people wouldn't notice any difference at all. It's kind of a pity, really.
Basically, Intel came out with MMX (and all the later developments) in order to have a talking point on a slide presentation about their processors, about the time when competitors like AMD were starting to come forward: functionally, an awful mess, and impossibly difficult to program. (In fact, for the first few years, Intel would send programmers out to work with companies to implement MMX, because otherwise none of them would bother.
AMD came up with something that was a little less hacked together in a very short period of time, as a response to Intel. But it still wasn't pretty, at least partially because of the limitations of the archetecture, and the performance wasn't *that* much better than just doing without.
Apple (who really designed a lot of the basics themselves when it comes to Altivec, so don't think this was a Motorola invention) said, 'Hey, wow, we need something like that, in order to compete.' First they decided on a coprocessor, but that didn't fly any better with the PPC than it did with the older Macs (840av, 660av) with DSPs in them. So they sat down and came up with a really *good* spec for a set of multimedia extensions. And they've only gotten better since.
I've toyed with altivec code, and I can tell you that in one application that I wrote, one instruction (vector permute) did the work of ten or more non-altiveced instructions on four times the data per cycle. Mind you, I just did it for fun, I don't know enough about parallel computing problems to come up with anything useful... but there's some interesting stuff under the hood.
Of course, nobody is going to believe this, because as fashionable as it is to like MacOS X on slashdot these days, nobody wants to admit that, for *some* subset of problems, Mr. Jobs's reality distortion field might not be quite as much of a distortion as you might think...
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
np: Aphex Twin - On (Reload Mix) (On Remixes)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
I know it's nothing as impressive but we have a small cluster of 40 dual G5 at ISU (Illinois State University). We made a webpage that details how we set it up.
Well, kick down then! Surely you know how to set up a mirror =]
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I'm still bleeding from the adds and cookies zinging by on that page that had three poorly-produced photos.
Unless you want to look at a disgusting picture of a girl in a bathtub eating her feces. No, I'm not kidding, that's one of his links, and it's quite possibly groser than goatse.cx.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
17600 FANS!!!!!
May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For now.
[notices "HAIL 64-BIT" sign taped up, tears it down]
Oh, yes, by the way, the spacecraft still in extreme danger, may not make it back, attempting risky reentry, bla bla bla bla bla bla.
We'll see you after the movie.
Between the on-campus nuclear reactor and the supercomputer cluster, I'd keep an eye out if I were Tech's cross-state rival, University of Virginia. I'd say the Hokies are just one diabolical dean away from becoming an evil university bent on world domination. And five bucks says they start in Charlottesville.
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
When I first heard about this I thought these would be custom boards that would contain a minimum of components, SBC style that plug into a back plane and net boot, with tens of nodes per rack, etc.
Never in my wildest imagination did I think these would be the full Apple G5 desktop's, cases and all.
Those fans in the G5 switch on when the system gets hot. Imagine the noise when this cluster is pegged at 100% CPU occupancy!
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If you believe 100mbits is too slow why not use IP over Firewire. I use it on my MacOSX server and it is screaming fast. You get 3200 mbits.
There is really nothing to do just daisy chain your mac with Firewire cables and configure the new network. On MacOSX client you will need to install IP over Firewire manually.
This could be multicast... provided the network is setup correctly. That makes it a lot easier.
Also, in this kind of setup you often keep a copy of the master image locally on the dive of each machine, on a separate slice / utility parittion... if done properly this lets you re-image in seconds or minutes,
They're going ot cluster with ethernet cards? Dude, this thing is going to be hampered wiht that ...
for windows users do as follows
1. Set up 1 machine how you want it.
2. Use Ghost / Drive Image or what ever your favourite drive cloning utility is, to image all the drives in no time at all
3. Go in and change HD, Network, etc names.
4. Smile because you just did something in 4 steps that took a mac user 6
I was one of the hordes of CS majors who helped setup the super computer (grunt work is fun!). VT is using inifiniband cards w/extremely low latency copper cable (forget the name) which acheives the same bandwidth as fiber optics.
Loads of cisco catalyst switches are involved also.
Dave--
I don't know how fine a point I can put on this, but...
He's right. You're wrong. The reason why really shows up here: "What throws most people is that although they are used to 1/3 being a repeating decimal, they think 0.1 should be an exact number in floating point."
No, they don't. Most people don't have a clue what floating point means. They are quite blissfully unaware that there's any mindset that would find 1+1 to equal 2 but 0.1 + 0.1 to only sort of equal 0.2.
And they're right not to. 0.1 is fundamentally a nonrepeating value in the standard, Base 10 Arabic numbering system -- it is not a range, it is an edge. That computers don't use Base 10 internally is not an excuse for them to be providing inaccurate answers to relatively simple problems, it's only an explanation. Intel's FDIV bug couldn't be explained away with a detailed technical description of the bug("Oh yeah! That's because we forgot to set that bit! What? There's still a problem? We told you its cause..."); neither can the use of floats be forgiven in applications that are expected to operate on discrete values.
I am, of course, not the first to point this out. More than a few systems -- usually for the financial types -- operate using BED(Binary-Encoded Decimals), which are quite slow and horrifyingly inefficient but do not suffer from the artifacts mentioned. Fundamentally, while floats(and particularly doubles) can be munged into being "accurate enough" for most discrete computations, ultimately their use is very reminiscent of the classic quote by John Von Neumann:
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."
--Dan
One quote for the power consumption of a Power Mac G5 Dual Processor stock is 800 watts. Now 1100 of these - 880kW! 880kW at 120 volts is about 8000 amps. Mind you, this is not including all the glue electronics... I am glad I don't have to pay THIS electric bill!!! :-)
i could but i dont want to spend the huge amounts of money from the slashdot effect again.
I thought VA Linux was changing their name again.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This gives them 1101 good computers - a kickass cluster now, and 1100 workstations later.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I seem to recall a gene sequencing program that was running five or six times faster on a G4 than it was on a Pentium IV of the same speed.
It's called BLAST, and it's up to twenty times faster, according to the tests that were run at the time. You know the drill: fastest available Power Mac, fastest available whatever from Dell.
The mirror has been removed, and now redirects to the original page.
But when it comes to web designers these days, I suspect they've either got major stock in adobe (pdf), in microsoft (IE specific code) or in macromedia (flash).
So I'd be tempted to rewrite it as "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stock ownership."
Though, I do know enough web designers that I suspect few own stock and I know just how lazy and incapable many of them are. So, more sensibly it should be written as "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by a complete inability to learn anything more difficult than 'Dick and Jane do Power Point'."
And the fact that so many of our educational institutions are on all fours for the convenience of Microsoft and other corporations helps not a whit to alleviate the general witlessness.
AMD has been making Intel-compatible processors under license from Intel since the 8088 processor.
2+ million BTUs of cooling capacity using Liebert's extreme density cooling. This system uses rack-mounted heat exchangers with R-134A refrigerant and an overhead chiller unit
(R)Traditional AC systems would have resulted in a wind velocity of over 60 mph under the raised floor
Holy hell, that is quite mad.
I am NaN
At our school, we have developed an ad hoc solution with ASR (Apple Software Restore), it comes in 10.2 (client): try "man asr" on the command line.
ASR is damned fast ! We restore from scratch 2Gb system disks in 5 minutes. The image file is stored on a standard AppleShare server (100 Mbit/s switch). The speed is due to ASR ability to restore using block level disk access instead of file level, and from compressed images so less data has to travel on the network.
Each client has 2 partitions: one of them has a minimal system so we can boot on it when we want to restore the "main" partition. Everything is done automatically with ssh.
All us Geeks afflicted with interminable penury should merge our truly meager resources and nearly infinite technical skills to build a massive supercomputing cluster!
Hell with the unemployment rate at 30% for techies here in Silicon Valley we could use something to do!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
We use it in our lab here at work and yes it is very very evil
-ravan_a
I don't know what era you're from, but I doubt that most people would agree that 11% is "heavily discounted".
Also, please explain (I really want to know) since you apparently know so much about it, why Deja Vu will neither detect nor correct memory soft errors.
http://www.chaosmint.com/mac/vt-supercomputer-2/
"Project started back in February; secret with Dell because of the pricing issues; dealt with vendors individually because bidding wars do not drive the prices down in this case"
BLOW ME DELL!!!!!
HA HA HA HA HA. Jobs must really love reading that.
Just blogged it. It's a quality quote.
This is exactly what I did with my G4 Cube, and we all know how that went over.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
According to you, then, Apple, when it sells direct to a customer through the Apple store, is making less than a 15% margin on its machines. Because that's the typical maximum discount they give, except in cases of clearing up back stock to make way for new models. Even then, I suspect that Apple's margins are 'healthy' enough that they're not selling below cost, but I *know* their margins are more than 15%. It's one of the things people like you complain about, that Apple makes big margins on their machines, 'overcharging' their poor, hapless consumers.
Basically, grow up, There are plenty of nasty, awful things that Apple has done in the past, and a number of them they still do. When you make stupid accusations with no basis in fact, just because it's Apple and you hate them, you make it harder to have a reasonable dialog about what's really going on.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Talk about the lowest density (modern) cluster I've ever seen. 12 nodes per rack is complete crap; even if each node is dead-sexxy.
But they didn't become popular, didn't become a common replacement for Intel chips in the real world, until the K5 and K6, and the 6x86 (from whoever made those), etc. Before that, Intel didn't have to worry about them; they weren't much of a threat.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
That cluster is probably capable of compiling Gentoo from source in only 2 days!
Using full size boxes is nuts. Ask Apple for blades. But perhaps they got money to burn.
But it doesn't have to be that way. It is really a user-interface issue.
It is clear that what the user of a calculator program wants when they enter 3.083-3.014 is the mathematically correct answer, not the closest approximation to the difference between closest_floating_pt(3.083) and closest_floating_pt(3.014). So the program should do the extra work to make it so whenever possible. In most cases, it is possible.
And the original poster was talking about the fact that the rounding error (from 3.083-3.014) showed up in the paper-tape printout. That would seem to be a bug, pure and simple.
What operating system will they be running on these things?This is not a troll, I'm geniunely concerned to know if they will be wasting these lovely resources on OSX ? (Which is not truly 64bit)
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Just curious, one thing I haven't been fully able to understand is what they mean by 100 nodes? Since the G5s they installed are dual processor, does that mean 1100 Computers/2200 Processors, or 550 Computers/1100 Processors?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Well, I guess they weren't the same speed then, were they?
And it's Pentium 4, not Pentium IV.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
They were not a threat at all because they made the chips for ... wait for it ... Intel. They were a third party manufacturer. They made identical chips to the 486 and 386 and 286. Why? they had the exact same masks as Intel. Belive it or not Intel could not make the chips fast enough. They were that popular. So they licenced it out to several other companies. Intel got a slice and the company making it got a slice. But Intels name went on the chip.
When Intel started to get capacity to make enough chips and didnt need AMD. AMD started making their own chips based on the same thing. Intel was about 1 gen ahead of AMD for a long time. But Intel basicly milked the ppro series for too long. That is why AMD caught up. In the last few chips AMD has blown by Intel. But MHZ is king in the marketplace. Its a place for people to compair. Its not a good indicator but people do notice. If AMD can scale it newest chip up to the same speed as Intel, Intel will be in a bad position. It does not have the next gen chip ready yet and it will be rushed.
AMD was making pin compatible chips for a long time. Intel noticed this and tried a lock out using a differnt socket design and copyrighting it. It didnt work too well. Which is why we are back at a chip grid array instead of the slot.
Where is motorola in all this? They want out of the chip busness. They want to sell IP. But they can not figure out if they really want out or not. Otherwise you would see the ppc chip running at 3ghz and running circles around intel and amd.
No way dude, the G5 pulls are 70Watts at 2Ghz. Where did you get those numbers?
TY for not being a karma whore.
They should've hosted on thier beowulf cluster of macs....
http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/
I was one of the volunteers and yes the sore back was worth it.
Actually, we didn't spend more money for physical space to keep these systems. The whole thing fits into about 3,000 square feet. We have over 10,000 square feet of machine room that we built back in 1989 (sized to hold an IBM 3084 and an IBM 3090-300J plus all the disk drives that went with them). Good thing our director at the time spec'ed out "all the floor space we're likely to ever need".....
Nobody cares about the noise. It's in a machine room, not office space. All the offices are on the other side of the atrium.
And I doubt that it can be much noisier than the printer room was when there were 2 IBM3800 printers going full-tilt (400 pages a minute each. No, that's not a typo. Four Hundred. Feed it a box of 3,200 pages of fanfold, and you *might* have time to go pee before it ran out again).
Well.. the processor itself is 70W. There's 2 of them, that's 140W. Then there's memory (4G of it), a 180G disk drive, all the support chips (yeah, things like disk controller chips and PCI driver chipsets and memory/cache interface chips are nice to have if you actually want to do any computing), the PCI card for the Infiniband... and pretty soon that 750W power supply isn't as much overkill as you thought.
Nobody cares about the noise. It's in a machine room, not office space.
Yeah, I know. I've worked in many a computer room, including huge rooms full of DEC big iron.
I wonder if they'll drown out the air con.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
It's just VT. It's not VA Tech, VTech, it's just plain VT damnit!
http://www.maximum-cars.com - My little hobbie.
Hate to say it but.... you probably won't have that much noise. Just saw my first G5 in the flesh and..uh...well...mmm
I couldn't tell it was on til I put my ear ON the case.
The Apple System Restore tool can erase a disk and copy a configuration onto it from a compressed disk image. This is what Apple uses for setting up machines on the production line.
"man ASR' ion Terminal.app to get started.
-Mark
Same image canvas size, but lower image file size:
http://technojunkie.org/berniec/VTpr0n/
Total images filesize before were around 61MB; now down to 17.5MB.
For those interested in a lot of FAQs about the project, I'd recommend a visit to Your Mac Life, the weekly net radio program about Macs. Their Sep 10 show has a half-hour interview with Hassan Aref, the Dean in charge of the school and the project. Much useful info.
Having seen this cluster in person last week (I work right across the street), I can say that it is very awe inspiring to walk through. The woman that gave my friends and I the tour mentioned all of the logistical problems that were overcome to house that many computers in one room. I guess I am naive but I had never considered how fast the temperature would increase in that environment. She said that if the AC were to fail that the temperature would increase to around 150F in about 10 minutes. That is incredible. Because of the an extra phase of power was brought into the building to just for the AC units. There is a room (larger than my computer room at home) just to house the UPS batteries. And the UPS is designed to run only long enough for the diesel generator to kick in. The rows of computers were designed with hot and cold isles to help with air circulation. One thing that I did not expect to see was out of the box G5s sitting on the shelves. I thought that they were just using the processors. The woman giving the tour did not know the answers to all of the technical questions that we started asking about file storage, back ups, process management, but it was still an experience that I will remember for the rest of my life. It also puts the ~24 node Beowulf cluster that I have been working on to shame. :)
I couldn't tell it was on til I put my ear ON the case.
Curious. Was it being placed under stress for long enough to fire up some fans?
I imagine in the showroom, people will be very impressed with the noise, but when they get it home and push it will some games, 3D rendering or 2D filters, it might suddenly be a lot louder than the user bargained for.
BTW, I'm not trying to put shit on the G5, I'd love one. I'd also love to know how it sounds when the fans are going hard.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
for all those G5s, or signed them up for .Mac?