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More on Virginia Tech G5 Cluster: 17.6 Tflops
daveschroeder writes "BBC World's Click Online has a video report (with text transcript) on Virginia Tech's new 1100-node dual 2.0 GHz G5 Terascale Cluster. The report quotes the performance as 17.6 Tflops. As a point of reference, the cluster would be number 2 on the most recent June Top 500 list, behind only Japan's Earth Simulator, and considerably more than doubling the performance of the current number 3 1152-node dual 2.4 GHz Xeon MCR Linux cluster. Assuming the performance figure accurately reflects the LINPACK score (which it should; since the deadline for submissions for the upcoming list of Oct 1 has already passed, one would imagine VT would quote that figure), and depending on new entries for November's upcoming list, the cluster should almost certainly rank in the top 5 - all for only US$5.2 million. The video report is available in Windows Media 9 and Real formats; the relevant portion starts at 13:00."
http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonli ne.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=3
imagine a beowulf cluster of beowulf clusters :P
This cluster has a lot of RAM, none of which is ECC.
Can the results be trusted?
Surley they only need 1099 G5s.
But its 16:10 over here! Please state what time zone it is!
Posting video to slashdot, isn't that a bad idea?
can it defeat an iMac in Apple's Photoshop benchmarks ;-)?
Sir Haxalot is a karma whore troll. He is currently trying to gain Karma by posting google cache links in various articles all over slashdot so he can later use his karma-enhanced account to post trolls later on without worrying about killing his karma and having the added bonus of posting at +1 or +2 while doing it. :)
The sad thing is that when he posts links, he posts the same links that were in the article summary and violates copyright law by copying the article text verbatim. He even posts links to outdated Google Cache copies of the articles, even when the article links STILL WORK!
So moderators, I ask that you review his Posting History and see that what he does is nothing more than plagarism, trolling, and blatant karma whoring.
I'm honoured that you care about me enough to even post that, thankyou
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
...considerably more than doubling the performance of the current number 3 1152-node dual 2.4 GHz Xeon MCR Linux cluster.
If I understand this correctly, it's saying that a G5 is more than twice as fast as a dual 2.4 GHz Xeon? (1152 dual 2.4 GHz Xeons vs 1100 dual 2.0 GHz G5s -- there are fewer G5s and they run at a slower clock speed.)
This is a pretty staggering statistic. I hadn't really believed the hype about how fast the new G5s were.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I care about the quality of slashdot - where posers like you get lumped in with real trolls and where people who blatantly karma whore get moderated up as being actually 'insightful' or 'informative' when you don't deserve it.
- "That's kinda fast.."
- "Kinda fast? It's FUCKING FAAAAAAST!!!!!"
please send me one of these for christmas.
Thank you
From the article:
"project involved 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers"
and
"uses the same amount of electricity as 3,000 average sized homes".
So each G5 consumes almost as much as 3 houses? Surely a G5's power requirements are more like 5~10% of a house, so the rest must all be going on networking and cooling? I think someone's got their numbers wrong...
Well, the G5 has certanly stirred the pot. First all the anti mac crowd say it's not as fast as Apple said it was and that Apple used cooked Spec_2000 benches. Then PC Magazine comes along and says that it's faster or as fast as anything available on X86. Now this. I dont think anyone expected this cluster to place second in the world - further proof that the G5 has what it takes. I kinda almost feel sad for the appple bashers. One by one they are losing all their tired outdated reasons to bash Macs. About all they can come up with now are lame troll posts.
The BBC page of the devil!!
(look at the link URL)
For all the people involved in it's construction. I helped in the construction. Wouldn't have known about it if not for the Slashdot article. I don't doubt the Linpack score. Allthough the e-mail I got about the reception said the score wasen't supposed to come out for another week or so. Anybody know what went on in the reception?
mck
That is the true test.
Windows Media and Real Player about a G5 cluster? Don't you mean a nice Quicktime movie? (yes I have both players on Mac, sans spyware and other undesirable "system integration". But Apple will be sad)
I watched on BBC World.. they are using MacOSX, so this will implicitly run FreeBSD. They also mentioned they are going to document everything and put it up online.
2 thumbs down = 1 raspberry
1000 raspberries = 1 critic
1000 critics = 1 magazine
1000 magazines = 1 flop
100 flops = 1 Oscar
100 Oscars = 1 Hollywood
So Hollywood runs around 20 trillion flops.
...how many BogoMips does it do?!
I don't wan't to start a holy war here, but what is up with you G5 cluster zealots? Ive been sitting at my freelance gig of a G5 cluster (1200 Dual G5s) for twenty minutes as it attempts to copy a 17 megabyte file from one folder to another! Twenty minutes! At home my Beowulf cluster of 100 Celerons running Linux, the same operation takes just 2 minutes, if that. While this is happening, Itunes won't work, and everything else grinds to a halt. Even vim is struggling to catch up as I type this.
Yes, I do have DMA enabled, and I am using 25K SCSI disks. My old 3.2 Ghz 64 way xeon runs faster than this G5 cluster at times. G5 zealots, flame me if you like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why I should use G5s over faster, cheaper clusters.
oh wait.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The new "top 500" list will be announced right before SC2003 and discussed in detail at a session of SC2003 on November 18.
Look for another (less speculative) story on Slashdot around then.
What's been left behind is wether or not these systems are using Panther as the OS. It would seem that with this kind of performance, an Apple supplied OS -- as opposed to Yellow Dog would -- only be capable of performing well on the G5 since Panther has processor optimizations for the G5.
If the original XServers were too costly and low performance (since they came with a G4) wouldn't a G5 server (since the performance is apparently much better) be a great option for small/medium size businesses for a web/mail/database server?
Humm, isn't the second fastest ASCI Q at Los Alamos has now been measured with 13.88 TF/s?
As mentioned here: http://www.top500.org/lists/2003/06/top5.php
MCR uses Quadrics - What does this cluster use?m e.nsf/ DisplayPages/7C18E51DBC215D3E80256D5900535959
http://doc.quadrics.com/Quadrics/QuadricsHo
!. funny.
Could someone who knows the going rate of these top 5 supercomputers please tell me how much less expensive 5.2 million is? I know that it sounds like a lot of money to me, but I'm guessing that it is orders of magnitude cheaper than the other top computers.
10 Gbps Infiniband from Mellanox
Each machine has a PCI-X Infiniband card, interconnected with several 96-port switches.
The video is available for either Windows Media Player or RealOne Player -- but not QuickTime!
Ouch!!!
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Really. who the hell wants to watch the story about how G5's kick major ASS on Windows Media Player????
Who cares?
You'd figure that with all of those G5s, that they might buy one Mac to make Quicktime movies.
I didn't see anywhere the source of these benchmarks - I believe what they have done is multiply the SPECfp_rate_base2000 for a dual processor 2GHz G5 (which according to Apple is 15.7) and multiply it by 1100.
The thing is, that only comes to 17.27TFLOPS, and in addition it does assume that the original spec scores were accurate.
Would anyone care to shed some light onto this?
Quoting one paragraph out of context of the contract tells you jack squat.
The section could start off with "The following will not apply". Unlikely, but I've seen one contract that flipped negatives 3 times.
In most of the contracts I've seen, the key section would be the one on termination which outlines what survives and what doesn't. And the definitions section is usually pretty important too. Like the definition of SOFTWARE PRODUCT. I'd expect that to be the Unix source code that AT &T provided to them.
All this says is that they could terminate the contract.So, excuse me if I don't take the word of a public relations dude.
(No, IANAL, but I've had to deal with some of that stuff).
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Ok, each G5 is able to do 2 fused 64 bit mulAdd instructions/cycle.
Now.. counting mulAdd as two floating point operations, you get 4 flop/mhz... The dual G5 is running at 2 Ghz...
2Ghz*4*2, since you got a dual.. Thats 16Gflops for each Powermac... you got 1100 of those..
1100 * 16=... 17.6 TFlops
There are rumors moving around campus of big problems with the infiniband and are instead having to use the regular ethernet connections on the boxes. As you might have guessed, no one is talking about it except behind closed doors, but the people I've talked to are intimately familiar with the problems...
I have also heard that the the numbers were taken for the Oct. 1 deadline, but that there is a 2 week "revision" period that is allowed, so VT is now working to get everything back up to par so that they can have a place in the top 5. My best guess is that the numbers quoted to the BBC are extrapolated from the benchmarks that were initially run for the first deadline.
I suspect the 17.6 Tflops figure is produced using Altivec, which (if true) is certainly misleading.
But then again, what else would you expect from Apple?
The project leader, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, will be speaking at a session entitled Building Virginia Tech's G5 Supercluster on Oct 28 at the upcoming O'Reilly Mac OS X conference.
He'll probably reveal some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used, at that session.
Also, according to a blog at O'Reilly:
Next year, all the little known details [about the cluster] will be revealed in a new book. By that time we'll know what the project means for supercomputing and for Apple.
How many seti packets can it do in an hour?
there's some reason to believe its not altivec since the LINPACK may not havewritten for it explictly and if it were it probably would have been written for the g4 edition. but evenif it were, speed is speed.
what the frames per second would be on Q3A...Has anyone tried it yet?
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Easy: you yourself point out that 1100 * 15.7 = 17.27 ... not 17.6.
Since the call for papers for the new Top 500 list was Oct 1, and the BBC show aired on Oct 9 with a companion BBC News story dated Oct 12, you'd hope that VT was simply regurgitating the figure that has already been sent to the Top 500 organization.
And why are you trolling around with one of those super-old benchmarking stories? We've already established that every manufacturer does what they can to show their products in the best possible light. At least Apple documented their test results and methods in full.
So acually, your logic doesn't make any sense: you jump to the conclusion that it's not real results - even though real results already exist and have been submitted, and the entire story is pretty much about that process, making performance figures a critical piece to get accurate - and that they must have just multiplied some benchmark number by 1100. Then, even though the subject of your own post indicates your recognition that "it doesn't add up", you still apparently assume that the results are somehow doctored, this time for the worse, and you manage to weave in one of the stories that tries to make it look like Apple lied with its benchmarks - which it didn't - which is unrelated to the current issue! How does it "assume" the original scores were accurate?? YOU are assuming that they're just multiplying. You might have been onto something if the multiplication actually came out, but it doesn't, meaning that is NOT what they did.
Bravo, +1 Troll.
http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonli ne.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=20
Skip ahead to 13:00
Since the freakin' Windows Media files won't play on OS X.
simon
home page
The power supply was another huge challenge. The Supercomputer uses the same amount of electricity as 3000 average sized homes.
How do 1100 dual G5s end up using the same amount of eledtricity of 3000 average sized homes? Even with the cooling and networking, this number seems way too big.
Am I the only one that finds it funny that the BBC, which normally utilises realaudio, has decided to make this report about Apple Macintosh computers available in a Microsoft only format?
Hmmm...
The benchmark is the SAME BENCHMARK that everyone else on the Top 500 list uses. So it's valid for everyone else on the list, but not for Apple? Nice.
As I've asked before, what will they *do* with it once they've posted their performance benchmarks?
Japan's Earth Simulator will be used for climate studies. What will VT use it for?
Chip H.
This will certainly have a big impact for Apple, they'll try all they can to hype this up. Since now the most powerful computer in the US is a Mac running MacOS X, I'm expecting this to show up anytime soon on Apple's website.
Also, it is fairly obvious that this will help Apple make its way back into researchers' labs. The Terascale team stated they'd release an "Howto - supercomputer building" soon, so we will probably see more of this kind of supercomputer in the near future.
1. The results are not from Apple. They are from Virginia Tech, the operator of the supercomputer.
2. Everyone on the Top 500 list uses the same benchmark. Whatever the benchmark (in this case, LINPACK), if it's fair for the other 499 people and architectures on the list, it's fair for Apple.
3. It is not misleading at all.
Nice troll, though.
QuickTime
Apple: Superior Computing for Superior Minds. Think different, think better, think Apple.
1 Hollywood = 100 Oscars 1 Oscar = 100 flops therefore 100 Oscars = 10,000 flops Therefore 1 Hollywood = 10,000 flops
0. Zero. Fuck the other 1083. Ha!
In fact the heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60 mph winds
Help fight continental drift.
The VT cluster cost about $5.2 Million and get approx. 17TFlops - The NEC Earth Simulator gets 35TFlops and cost one billion dollars. That makes it 192 times more expencive. So you can build 192 VT Clusters. And then in theory get. 3.2PFlops for the same amount of money. If you detract performance for cable lenght etc. - You will most definitly get around 1PFlops.
So, you supercomputerusers out there - build a 1PFLOPS cluster NOW!
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
The 'project' uses the same amount of electricity as 3,000 average sized homes. There are many more devices deployed than just the 1100 G5s. The cooling system alone is a major power eater. Read the articles :)
Supercomputer is #2 & Football team is #3
-Go Hokies!
The awful truth about Filipinos:
As we've all come to notice, in the past few decades, Filipinos have
begun to infest the United States like some sort of disease. Their extensive
involvment in the U.S. Armed Forces is proof of the trashy kind of qualities
all filipinos tend to exhibit on a regular basis.You can see this clearly by
studying the attitudes and cultural Icons of most Filipino Americans.
PART 1: Origins of Pinoys/Pinays: Are they really asian?
Well we've come to accept the fact the filipinos come from a part of the
world known as South East Asia. But the term "Asia" is used in the wrong way.
You may notice that contemporary filipino americans try very hard to associate
themselves with groups that we know asasian. I cannot count the number of times
I have seen a 'Third World' Filipino try to connect themselves to the Chinese
or Japanese people. There is no connection and here's why. The Philippines is a
Third World country. Nothing respectable has EVER been created by filipino
people during our entire human history. Young filipino men in america have
become obsessed with "import racing". They have an enormously perverted
affection for Japanese cars. It's a common phenomenon. In their minds, these
filipinos somehow, believe that they are asian and that it somehow connects
them to japanese people and japanese cars. They often take credit for the
ingenuity of Japanese people and say how it's an "asian thing". This
term..."asian thing" derived directly from African American slang "black
thang". "It's a black thang." "It's an asian thang." You can see the
connection. It's even funnier that, in Japan, Filipinos are heavily
discriminated against. The only filipinos that can live successfully in Japan
are the filipino prostitutes. But that's the case for most filipino people no
matter where they live in the world.Now we've come down to this fact...and it
is a fact. Nothing in Filipino Culture can be seen as asian. They have no
architectural, artistic, or cultural influence which is in ANY way,asian.
Thinking of the great countries in Asia such as Japan, Korea, and China there
is no way you can possibly connect the Philippine Islands. This assault by
filipino americans to connect themselves with the great, peoples of North East
Asia is foul and disgusting.
PART 2: Young Filipino Americans: The Disease of Society.
See for yourself and go to any young filipino's website or chatroom, and
you will be able to see kind of attitude that's stinking up america! Some
things you might see: Dialouge such as the following (taken directly from a
chatroom in IRC): (please keep in mind that most people in these chatrooms are
young filipinos between the ages of(13-25).
AznGuRLie: Wzzup EvErYbOdY!!! RhEiNa IsH In Da HoUsE!
(Translation: Her name is Asian Girly. This young woman obviously thinks she is
somehow asian, but we'll adress that later. She's simply saying that she has
arrived in the chatroom but she's saying it in the most immature, ghetto, and
baby-type way possible. I'm suprised she said "Rheina is in the house" rather
than just "Rheina in the house".But notice how she spelled the word "is" as
"ish". The way a baby would pronounce it. The AlTeRnAtiNG CaPiTaLs is also
very common.)
AzNRacr_X: SuP Wit U RhEinA GuRL???
(A filipino male...he's obsessed with japanese cars and masturbates frequently
to Japanese Porno Cartoons, known as 'Hentai'. His response, is based on the
fact he listens to way too much Puff Daddy and thinks that he's some type of
"Player". Player is a concept invented by Black Americans. It simply means that
a young man has good luck with women. A "Player" often has sex with numerous
females and has more than one girlfriend at a time according to the Black
defenition. If the, filipinos have a different definition for this term I'm
not sure. But I think if you apply this term to a filipino male it usually
describes a young man wh
Yep, the numbers must be wrong.
And if not, they have a 6 megawatt coal-fired power plant within spitting distance of the engineering buildings. That's 5 kilowatts per computer; plenty for either a house or a computer.
Incidently, after years of putting up with coal dust, I thought we would finally see the benefits of living next to a huge coal pile. We had a severe ice storm and most of blacksburg lacked power. but so did campus!.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I see no link at all for the Real One Player version of the video. Will someone post that link or just reply to my post.
Then there's only the need of coming up with the applications to use it (besides research), apart from gobbling up seti@home data snippets for breakfast.
However, XCode and Rendezvous enable something in this front, enabling distributed seamless compilation of big projects.
So, they are just going to junk this setup in 3 years and start over? Doesn't make sense to me. The PowerMac is always had the better processor upgrades then PC's. I'm sure PowerLogix or Sonnet would love to make 1000+ CPU upgrade cards for them. Sure, the bus speed would be slightly behind a new system at that time, but the cost of buying an upgrade versus a whole new machine is worth looking at. Maybe after the first round of upgrades they should consider scrapping it.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
And the title of the first research project using this? "The Environmental Impact of Meeting the Power Requirements for an 1100-Node Dual-G5 Server Cluster: A Simulated Model"
Finally I'll be able to play SimCity 4!!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
does it run windows?
Simple equation: 4 FPops/cycle (IBM-PPCs) * 2GHz * 1100 G5s * 2 CPUs/G5 = 17.6 TFLOPS!
No *real* Rmax linpack scores are known yet, and from what i figured the submissions on Oct 1st are just for *inclusion* in the list, real Linpack scores can be submitted till shortly before (or even on!) the conference mid-November..
This article is BS and should be removed...
P.S.: 4 FPops/cycle per clock with 2 FPUs i hear you scream - Impossible! - That's due the Multiply/Add FMAC thing that counts as 2 FPops!
It's amazing what a bunch of turkeys can accomplish when we set our minds to it. This makes us #3 in the nation in football and #2 in the world for computing power. Dont mess with the Hokies ;-)
I'm glad someone out there thinks these things through...
BTW, an acquaintance told me of her ILLIAC IV days. With 64 independent processors it was the fastest pre-Cray machine, but sometimes did produce wrong values. Standard practice was to have 3 processors run the same problem and compare the results at the end, deciding that the 3x performance hit was worth it, if the results actually meant something...
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Your point has already been refuted by other posters.
why imagine? it would ruin it. Linux doesnt have nearly the capacity and capability for multiprocessing Darwin (Core of OSX) has.
OSX is far more suited for this application than linux would. Beowulf is good if your time is worth nothing and you are building a cluster of single processor boxes.
why does everyone here just jump to the conclustion linux is the best answer for everything? if it was im sure Microsoft would be in a pretty pitiful position.
I had this pointed out to me in May of 2002 when Apple introduced the Xserve... in this Slashdot thread.
Apple's page about the G5's execution core states that its two FPU's are double-precision, and that it can thus "complete at least two 64-bit mathematical calculations per clock cycle." That's obviously an improvement over the G4, but let's see...
They've got 1,100 machines. Each has 2 CPU's for a total of 2,200 CPU's. Each CPU has 2 FPU's for a total of 4,400 FPU's. Each FPU is capable of doing a 64-bit (double-precision, I presume) floating-point calculation each clock cycle. The machines are running at 2GHz, or 2 billion clock cycles per second. So... 4,400 * 2 billion = 8.8 trillion 64-bit floating-point calculations per clock cycle.
To me, that's 8.8 TeraFlops, which is conveniently precisely half of the 17.6 figure. Did I forget to multiply by two, or did someone else multiply by two an extra time? Or... is the situation (most likely) that there are situations under which the G5's additional mathy bits can actually turn out a couple more FLOPs per cycle, but that's not going to be the case most of the time, and probably won't be the case running LINPACK?
Of course, it is important to point out that this is a theoretical maximum, and that things like interconnects, RAM limitations, chip failures, entropy and unauthorized use of the cluster to render hot babes in "Poser 5" will detract from it.
So... I don't think this will be the second-most-powerful machine in the world. Even relative to the previous list. I would not be at all surprised to see it in the top 5, though, and would be surprised if it didn't make the top 10.
Cool post. This is almost always what goes into numbers
quoted by IT groups that don't know anything about the machines they're running (I know; it's a redundant sentence). Just take the marketing drivel from the manufacturer, multiply by how many you bought, and quote it! Everything I've read from VT appears to have been synthesized that way.
I'm running a G5 at home now. I'm still wondering how a machine with a 32-bit OS "breaks the 4 GB barrier", given that it can't do anything that a 32-bit Xeon with more than 4GB of RAM can't do.
But it hasn't quadrupled my home energy bills, at least, and that include air conditioning.
I suppose I should mention that the pageid for this thing is '666' :P
BSD unix. It shares a lot of code with NetBSD and FreeBSD.
1 /12/5 0/7404507/
For instance, the TCP/IP stack is FreeBSD 3.2
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/165/200
A lot of the PPC code was derived from NetBSD PPC support.
There has been plenty of code sharing between Darwin and FreeBSD. Running Mac OS X does not mean running FreeBSD, but it means running a substantial amount of code from FreeBSD. In the kernel.
It's a good day to be a Mac man.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
The G5 is able to do a fused multiply add in one instruction. RegA+RegB*regC
(Of course, there may be other fused 2-operation things it can do in one cycle... but it seems unlikely that code would consist of them so completely as to attain that theoretical peak.)
Right...
17.6 Tflops is a marketing number. Even 100% Altivec code and only using fused-multiply-add you "only" get 35.2 TFlops, but then you are stucked with 32 bit precision.
So, in short.. the 17.6 TFlops number is something we all could calculate before reading this Slashdot story.
The dual G5 that should be arriving soon (are you listening, Apple?) has, if I recall, a 600 watt power supply. 600 watts * 24 hours = 14.4 kwh per day.
Yowza.
Um... yeah, I think I had better leave all the power-saving features turned on, and put it to sleep at night and all that other good stuff. Don't want to have to explain to the wife why the electric bill is suddenly double...
Anyone have any idea where he was standing at the end of the video and mentioned a building would be built to house a new supercomputer? I go to VT. I know all the MACs are over at the corporate research center but I can't figure out exactly where he's standing at the end of the video.
http://www.maximum-cars.com - My little hobbie.
blimey ... someone got hold of some cheap speed, didn't they?
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
You did forgot a factor of 2. First you say
Each processor can do 2 fpu instructions/clock. So each computer can do 4 fpu instructions/clock.
if you have g5 and mathematica, can you guys go here
http://smc.vnet.net/timings40.html
http://www.scientificweb.de/mathstef3.html
download the benchmark file and report the result?
thanks.
Xah
xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html
Each computer can do 4 fpu instructions/clock.
(and those are double-precision 64-bit flops).
There are 1,100 computers. Times 4, that gives us 4,400 flops per clock.
(Note: given 1 DP flop per clock per FPU, this ties in nicely with my use of 4,400 as the number of FPU's, in my comment.)
4,400 flops per clock * 2 billion clock cycles per second = 8.8 trillion flops per second.
I'm still getting the same number. Where's the factor of two I missed?
"As evidenced by Virginia Tech's cluster, the combination of industry standard servers, Linux, and InfiniBand creates a new standard in clustering and is changing the way computer power is deployed."
s ca le/pressrelease.html
http://computing.vt.edu/research_computing/tera
Think different. Think crack.
Seems to me what matters most is simply how fast is it and how much did it cost?
$300,000 per Tflop - I doubt any other on the list is even close...
I think he just missed that the computers have 2 cpu's, and each cpu has two fpu's, and each fpu does one instruction. (maybe a confusion between cpu's and computers..?)
That is because the operating system is Linux, but the hardware is supplied by Apple. It is yet another Linux supercomputer cluster.
"and considerably more than doubling the performance of the current number 3 1152-node dual 2.4 GHz Xeon MCR Linux cluster"
Why is it whenever Apple has a slight performance advantage, they round it up to double the performance. They did this before a few years ago when the found one benchmark where the PPC was twice as fast as the Pentium at the time, but overall was maybe 20% faster. It seems to me that dual Opteron systems would have been cheaper, and would have outperformed the Apple G5 systems, so I'm not sure why Va Tech chose Apple.
Check it out.s =&post id=530369#post530369
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?
Read the article...they don't just plug them in and turn them on.
"The Supercomputer, unofficially nicknamed Big Mac, was built in just three months. Right from the start there were major hurdles that could only be overcome with significant construction in and around the building. Running 1100 computers in a 3000 square foot area sends the air temperature well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact the heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60 mph winds. So specialized heat exchange cooling units were built that pipe chilled water into the facility."
yeah, but scientific computation *does* consist entirely of multiply-adds (ish). How do you computationally solve a problem? You find approximations in some convenient linear space - you reduce the problem to a whole lot of linear algebra problems. And linear algebra problems are solved by a whole lot multiply-adds. i'm being incredibly simplistic here. really mindbogglingly simplistic. and anyway, why bother to speculate when there will be real numbers in a month?
See this slide presentation.
That could also by why Dr. Varadarajan is speaking at the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference about the cluster.
Its running Darwin
Do you really believe that VT spent 5 millions based on a myth???
Apple cheaper and faster, that's so hard for you to accept!
Apple article
By the way, even though it is a 64-bit CPU, it has a 42-bit physical address space:
CPUplanet article on G5 and its memory
2 CPUs in each Mac!
FYI: The formula FPops/cycle * MHz * number of CPUs is the formula for all Rpeak-Values in the Top500! Try it yourself by dividing the listed Rpeak-numbers down and you'll end up with the FPops/cycle for each CPU-Type!
This 4 FPops/cycle "FMAC-feature" (besides the price and Altivec!) probably explains why they went with G5s in the first place!
To all the ones who like to scream "cheating" and "lying" trying to blame Apple:
;-) Intersting: IBM-PPCs (Power4, Power3, G5) have 4 FPops/cycle, Itanic dito, x86 has 2 FPops/cycle and Alpha (!) aswell! Yes, Alpha, the FPU-Monster! ;-)
;-)
The formula FPops/cycle * MHz * number of CPUs is the formula for all Rpeak-Values in the Top500! It's the way Rpeak is calculated! Try it yourself by dividing the listed Rpeak-numbers down and you'll end up with the FPops/cycle for each CPU-Type!
This 4 FPops/cycle "FMAC-feature" (besides the price and Altivec!) probably explains why they went with G5s in the first place!
P.S.: Did you know that test by the german Magazine C't using IBMs XLC/XLC and P4s/Xeons with Intels ICC basically proved what apple claimed with their GCC comparison? That the G4 is faster than a 3Ghz P4/Xeon Dual 3GHz in FPU but slower in Integer? And the IBM-Compiler is still in beta, mind you!
So much for cheating lying Apple, hehe! Ofcourse, Slashdot, The Register, the Inquirer, Wired and all the rest would NEVER write an article about that, a supposed "Mac-User" who's accusing Apple of cheating without having the glance of a clue is just so much better, and who are they to admit they made a mistake?
weeoooeeeoooeeeoooee
What a majority says is not right per se, it's just less likely to be questioned...
But really, how different need the voters to be, to get the same results independantly?
The best way to popularize Open Source Software is to support the BSA.
Damn. Beaten to it.
So, VT built a 17+Tflop cluster for a little over 5 million bucks. Meanwhile, down at the University of Texas, Dell built a $38M cluster that cruises at a cool 3 Tflops.
Of course, with a return rate of over 20%, they shouldn't have a problem taking it back. I wonder if the UT faculty kept their receipt.
Now can I please stop hearing about how much more expensive Macs are?!?
is it snappier?
True, but Rpeak is not how the top 500 is sorted, they use Rmax which is the result of the linpack benchmark. So we still don't know where this machine will be in the top 500.
(Gosh... it's almost like they designed it to be really fast, or something!)
So... hmm. I guess like everyone else, I'll have to wait and see what the numbers are on the TOP500 list. That's an interesting formula you've got there, by the way.
(I wonder how fast it'll run The Sims?)
A buddy of mine is hosting a clip he re-encoded in Quicktime for those of us who don't want to use WMP or RealPlayer. The link was posted earlier on the Accelerate Your Mac website. The direct link is here.
I'll keep my eye out in 3 years. I wonder what the price of a used G5 will be... Macs tend to keep their value more than other PCs, but will the fact that it was part of a famous supercomputing cluster further inflate the resale value?
If you do a search for Apple on the top 500 supercomputer list you will see an entry for Apple back in November 1993.
It lists Apple as housing a Cray/SGI supercomputer. Ranked back then as 425 in the world.
What on earth would they have used this for? Any ideas?
Below is the link and details from that page.
http://www.top500.org/dlist/1993/11/
425
Cray/SGI
Y-MP2E/232/ 2
0.60
0.67
Apple Computer Inc.
USA/1991
Industry
Electronics
Cray Vector
YMP
The slide-show says MacOSX which sounds more likely, They could even mean just Darwin(The command-line totally open source part of MacOSX). I imagine that the press people meant GNU software. The slide-show also says that they are using IBM's compiler that was just released for MacOSX.
http://don.cc.vt.edu/tcfslides.pdf
page 13 of the slide has the interesting stuff.
On a side note, without ECC Ram this thing can not be trusted to give the right answer all the time, I wonder what the researchers will do about that.
Hassan Aref, Dean of Engineers at Virginia Tech, answered a lot of questions about the setup of the computer during a 20 minute interview last month. Go to the Your Mac Life archives page and pull down the MP3 or AAC archive of the Sep 10 show. The interview itself is 1:15-1:35.
"Your Identity is Filipino. Think about what that means.... " I SAY IT MEANS AWESOME!!!!!!
You little, pathetic, ugly, piece of shit. Filipinos requested NOT TO BE CLASSIFIED WITH OTHER ASIANS on racial/ethnic classifications, so how could you say they want to be like the fucking Korean culture ripping Japanese or the Chinese???????? YOU ARE A ROACH that badly needs to be SQUASHED.
Here is a list of Philippine Achievement in the U.S.
WRITER: Jessica Hadedorn
COMEDIAN: Rob Schneider
ACTORS: Lou Diamond Philipps, Nia Peeples
ACTRESSES: Tia Carrerre, Tamlyn Tomita, Phoebe Cates
SINGERS: Leah Salonga (Broadway star & Tony Award winner), Julio Iglesias Jr., Prince
MISS UNIVERSE: Gloria Diaz, Margarita Moran
MISS U.S.A.: (can't recall her name)
ATHLETES:
* Pancho Villa - World Champion Flyweight Boxing Champion 1924
* Gabriel Elourde - World Champion Boxing 1962
* Vicki Draves - U.S. Olympic Diving 1984, 1st woman in Olympic history to win springboard and platform diving, America's sports sweetheart in 1948
* Bobby Balcena - Cincinnatti Reds Baseball Player 1948-1963
* Roman Gabriel - Quarterback NFL MVP 1969 Hall of Fame
* Tai Babilonia - Olympic Ice Skating 1979 Champion
* Benny Agbayana - Baseball Outfielder 2002 Colorado Rockies
* Jerome Williams - baseball pitcher, S.F. Giants
POLITICIANS & BUSINESS PEOPLE & PROFESSIONALS
* Governor of the State of Hawai`i is a Filipino-American named Benjamin Cayetano
* Co-founder of Los Angeles. In 1781, Antonio Miranda Rodriguez Poblador, a Filipino, along with 44 other individuals were sent by the Spanish government from Mexico to establish what is now known as the city of Los Angeles.
* Loida Nicolas Lewis is chairman and CEO of TLC Beatrice International Holdings, Inc., a multinational food company with sales in 1995 of $2.1 billion. Working Woman magazine hailed her as the top businesswoman in the country for 1994. Mrs. Lewis was the first Asian woman to pass the New York State bar exam without having studied law in the U.S
* Ruben Aquino and Cynthia Ignacio, two Filipino-Americans, were instrumental in the creation of the Disney animation film "THE LION KING."
* Eleanor "Connie" Concepcion Mariano - President Bill Clinton's physician
Virginia Rep. Robert Cortez-Scott, a Harvard alumnus.
* Philippines Herald war journalist Carlos P. Romulo in 1941. (He was also the first Asian to become UN President
****
(Not an American history, but I wanted to include) my Philippine hero, the great revolutionary leader of the rebellion against Spain before U.S. colonizatoin:
Jose Rizal could read and write at age 2, and grew up to speak more than 20 languages, including Latin, Greek, German, French and Chinese. What were his last words? "Consummatum est!" ("It is done!")
INVENTORS
* Nikola Tesla - inventor of fluorescent light
* Eduardo San Juan designed the Lunar Rover or "moon buggy" which was used by the Apollo astronauts to explore the moon?
* Dr. Abelardo Aguilar, a Filipino-American, discovered the now widely used antibiotic known by its generic term as erthyromycin. Chances are, you've already used this antibiotic.
Kali martial arts - unknown inventor in Philippines