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."

Comments

Re:Can the results be trusted?

[Waffle Iron]

So they bog down the software doing something that could be done in hardware?

Just because it's in hardware doesn't mean it's free. The ECC logic is going to add a small delay to each of trillions of memory accesses. Plain memory can most likely be tuned to run faster than ECC memory.

If you're running a constrained problem and can verify the results at the end, a single error check in software could consume far less overall time than the continuous ECC hardware checks. The software check would probably catch other types of errors as well (including many errors caused by software bugs).

BJs for Geeks

[bstadil]

My favorite comment:

In fact the heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60 mph winds