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Dell $38m Supercomputer [not] More Costly than VT's G5s
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Austin Business Journal, Dell's 3-teraflop, 600 server supercomputer cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As The Apple Turns has pointed out that this is 7 times the cost (and a quarter of the power) of Apple's cluster at Virginia Tech! " Update: 10/14 17:56 GMT by M : worm eater writes "The Register has posted a correction to the widely-reported story that a 3.7 terraflop Dell cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As it turns out, the computer cost $3 million, vs. $5.2 million for the 17.6 terraflop Mac G5 cluster at Virginia Tech."
Monday, 5:57 PM: Virginia Tech's G5-based supercomputer is (sort of) running-- with 17.6 teraflops of theoretical performance. Meanwhile, Dell tries to build something (sort of) similar, but it winds up with a quarter of the power and seven times the price, and Apple (sort of) announces Xgrid, a product for "parallel and distributed high performance computing"...
Monday, 5:57 PM: Today's holiday episode is now broadcasting. Don't forget to take your shot for a free AtAT shirt (tee or turtleneck) by entering the Q4/03 Beat The Analysts contest; guess closest to Apple's final reported quarterly profit or loss, and you get the garment-- or your choice of creaky old software from the Baffling Vault of Antiquity(TM). You've only got until Wednesday at 4 PM, and in the likely event of a tie the earliest entry wins, so why wait? Enter now!
Up, Running, & Kicking Tail (10/13/03) Fun fact: believe it or not, folks, AtAT's wild success isn't confined to these here United States. No, seriously, it's true! The show actually has semi-regular viewers holed up in such far-flung corners of the world as Iceland, the Dominican Republic, and Delaware-- and for the benefit of those fans, we thought we'd explain that, here in the U.S., today we celebrate a holiday called Columbus Day. Columbus Day, for the uninitiated, is one of our most sacred occasions: a day on which we reflect on the many cultural and technical achievements of the city of Columbus, Ohio. We celebrate Greater Columbus's world-famous quilts, its shrubberies recreating Pointillist masterpieces, and (most importantly) its commitment to the preservation of really old TV sets by wondering why the bank is closed and our mail never came. A good time is had by all.
So if this is such a major holiday, why are we broadcasting, you ask? Well, normally we wouldn't, but faithful viewer Nathaniel Madura pointed out that Slashdot just referenced a BBC World report on that G5 supercomputer down at Virginia Tech, and we're just a little giddy about the existence of a Mac-based cluster than can chew through 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second. Yes, the thing is up and running (at least enough to run performance testing), and reportedly it pumps out 17.6 teraflops of raw perforated aluminum muscle while sucking down enough juice to power 3,000 average homes. Wow, is it getting warm in here, or is it just us? (It's just us-- the G5s are cooled by means of 1,500 gallons of chilled water pumped through every minute. Ooooo, frosty.)
Kudos to the Virginia Tech team who pulled this off, because frankly, this is the sort of technological triumph we'd normally only expect to come out of, say, Columbus, Ohio. Now, what's interesting about that 17.6 teraflop figure is that if you scope out the last compiled list of the world's top 500 supercomputers (from last June), you'll notice that, if 17.6 teraflops is Virginia Tech's "theoretical peak performance" score, it'll probably slot in nicely at number three. (Scores are ranked by "Maximal LINPACK performance achieved," so it's just guesswork so far.) The top-ranked Intel-based cluster is currently ranked at number three, with 2,304 2.4 GHz Xeons and a theoretical peak performance of 11 teraflops. Gee, more processors, a higher clock speed per processor, and 63% of the performance. Now that's efficiency, baby!
We'll have to wait until the next top 500 list comes out in November to see if "Big Mac" (as the VA Techies apparently call it) really takes third place, or if the real-life LINPACK scores push it down lower-- but we figure a top five placement is a safe bet. One of the world's bestest supercomputers made of Macs and running Mac OS X? Why, it's a Columbus Day miracle!
4x The Bang, 1/7 The Buck (10/13/03) Meanwhile, we know that the G5 supercomputer is delivering more pluck per processor than any other supercomputer out there, but what about bang for the b
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I told you Macs were cheaper!
Seriously, though: How?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Of course Apple gave them a little bit of a deal on these systems, but on the whole, the bid process was made based upon who gave them the best deal. Apple won out in the free market making this supercomputer cluster one of the most inexpensive supercomputers in the world. Imagine it, we have ASCII blue, ASCII red and ASCII white guarded by guys with guns, and here we have a tech school that appears like they are going to enter the 500 list at potentially number 2. Cool.
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UT is in Austin. Dell is in Austin.
Can you say "sweetheart deal," boys and girls? I knew you could.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So wait, let me see if I get this straight. Are they acutally implying that supercomputers built starting five years ago are actually more expensive per unit of computing power than supercomputers built today? Why, if that were true, and if the same thing applied to workstations, then you'd be able to get a 2 gigahertz machine today for what a 500 megahertz machine cost five years ago. Ludicrous I tell you. Simply ludicrous.
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$38e6 / 300 servers = 1.2667e+05 $/server
Methinks the price tag includes a lot more than the hardware costs.
The comparison with the VT supercomputer is almost certainly not apples to apples (so to speak)
You can never equivocate too much.
but the numbers jumped at me:
38E+6/6E+2 $ is about 60000 $ per machine. Seems to be a little much for a cluster of "cheap" machines, right?
Isn't there more to it?
Ok, off, reading the article.
went towards mice with more than one key
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Indeed. However, a lot of it comes from your code design and your network layout. If your model is written well enough, you'll be maxing out CPU just before you max out network bandwidth. Else, the whole idea behind having a massive number of CPUs goes down the drain with dropped packets.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Well, VT are clearly getting a very good deal on their hardware. $5m for 1100 nodes works out at $4,500 a node.
Speccing up a dual G5 at the Apple store comes out at over $5,000. They also need to pay for the power and cooling hardware to run the thing.
Looks like they are getting a very good price from all their suppliers/contractors...
The retail price for the processing hardware for the UT cluster is very similar, a dual PowerEdge 2650 with 4Gb of RAM is also about $5,000. If they had taken the workstation route favoured by VT (by using Dell PWS 450 boxes) it wouldn't have saved them much as they come in at $4,600 at a similar spec.
The article says "The cost of the five-year project is about $38 million" and "The university plans to add at least 200 servers to the cluster within a year", so it isn't costing them $38m for the 300 node cluster they currently have.
Damn, just found the original press release showing that the Dells are 3.06 GHz boxes. That pushes the price per node up to over $6,300.
Austin has its nose so far up Dell's butt that they would make a supercomputer of their PocketPC's if they were asked to. You think there was even a QUESTION of who would build their supercomputer?
And don't try to tell me that the Company-Formerly-Known-as-Compaq had a shot even though they're based in Houston...well not really anymore anyway.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
So I hit Dell's website and at educational pricing the servers they bought run around $4k apiece. Which means that this solution should be very price/performance competitive with the VT cluster.
I hit the UT page and found that the $38M number came from a press release about their investment in quite a bit of stuff, including the "Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), a new center for interdisciplinary research and graduate study in the computational sciences." I.e. at least one new building.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer By Leander Kahney
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60791, 00.html
02:00 AM Oct. 14, 2003 PT
A small chip-design firm will unveil a new processor Tuesday it says will transform ordinary desktop PCs and laptops into supercomputers.
At the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, startup ClearSpeed Technologies will detail its CS301, a new high-performance, low-power floating-point processor.
The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.
According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.
An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).
At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.
"That's a supercomputer on the desktop," said Simon McIntosh-Smith, ClearSpeed's director of architecture.
The souped-up PC would cost about $25,000, ClearSpeed said. By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world, Japan's Earth Simulator, operates at about 10 teraflops, consumes a warehouse-size space and cost $35 million.
Soon to be in prototype, the chip may be on the market within a year, ClearSpeed said. The company, which is based in Los Gatos, California, and Bristol, United Kingdom, said it will be providing prototypes to computer manufacturers by the end of the year.
When it comes to market, the chip will likely be sold to consumers as a co-processor -- an add-on PCI card that works in parallel with a PC's main processor, just like an add-on graphics card. But instead of boosting graphics performance, the chip will help compute intensive math calculations.
Similar capabilities are already built into Apple's G4 and G5 Macs, which have a floating-point co-processor called AltiVec, which handles complex, data-intensive calculations for the main processor. But whereas AltiVec is four-way parallel, ClearSpeed's chip is 64-way, the company said.
"You might class it as a big evolutionary step of AltiVec," said Mike Calise, ClearSpeed's president.
The second generation of the chip will be 128-way parallel, and then 256, and so on, Calise said.
He said server manufacturers are looking at the chip with a view to building petaflop machines -- monster supercomputers capable of a quadrillion floating-point operations a second -- or the equivalent of 25 Earth Simulators.
A petaflop machine based on the second generation of the ClearSpeed chip would take up about 20 server racks, the company said.
Calise said computer manufacturers are very excited about the new chip.
"Right now it's awe, shock and when can I get my hands on it?" Calise said.
ClearSpeed said the new chip is also very low-power, operating at about 2 watts, which would allow it to run off a laptop battery and wouldn't require special cooling.
"At 3 watts, you could put it in a PCMCIA card," said McIntosh-Smith. "With two chips on a PC Card, you can have 50 gigaflops on a laptop, running off a battery. That's equivalent to a small Linux cluster on your notebook."
McIntosh-Smith said that down the line, a PC Card with a pair of second-generation chips would perform at about 200 gigaflops, which is equivalent to a big Linux cluster and would nearly qualify the laptop for today's Top 500 supercomputers list.
Appropriately, the chip will be described at the Microprocessor Forum during a discussion of extreme processors.
Though supercomputer performance on a desktop machine may seem like overkill, Calise said there is ever-growing demand in science, government and industry, especially Hollywo
the cost in that journal article seems much much too high. poked around and found this article at infoworld: http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/03/HNdellcl uster_1.html
they quote a dell spokeswoman saying that a configuration like that costs about 3 million with installation. it also states that UT gets an educational discount, but doesnt say how much they got off the $3million.
if the 38 million were correct, theyd be spending on the order of 120,000 per machine....a 2650 with highest processors and max ram only comes out to $13,500 on dells site...yeesh
Stupid question: Are these really supercomputers or superclusters? I always think of a computer as one unit not a collection of units.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Not if you picture the kind of girl that would actually be guarding a supercomputer with a gun... ... beastly.
evil adrian
Dell is Austin's biggest employer. University's like to give back to their town and area, endearing the locals. Also, by pumping more money into the area it becomes a better place and more people would be willing to come there. I'd be willing to wager that most, if not all, of the work was done by the local Dell plant. This isn't a coincidence guys, this was more than just a business deal, it was giving back to the community that supports the school.
Of course it matters! The Apple Bigots need the Apple cluster to be faster, and the Intel Bigots need the Intel cluster to be faster.
;)
One positive note though, Both the Apple and Intel clusters will be faster then the Microsloth cluster
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Supercomputer with a gun?
What happens when it attains self-conciousness, and kills it's operators?
It is my understanding that the G5 doesn't support ECC RAM, so how can you trust it's results? With that many machines, the statistics of a bit error in RAM gets quite high.
So you have fast incorrect data.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
The article makes it plain that this is the just the beginning of a five-year project that will eventually spend $38mil, and which will end up with a lot more than 300 systems (200 to be added next year alone, for example) too. Comparing this to another project without knowing all the details of both is pointless.
I posted this elsewhere...The cluster is running OS X -- page 13 --not linux you nimrod...
;)
Besides, if it was running linux it would be liable for the 'SCO tax' what with Linux' inability to do 64 bit without SCO's 'contributions'
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Hey, I'm a Mac zealot, I know. I love to make Apple look good, for any reason. But this story has too many inconsistencies.
The Slashdot blurb and the article don't even match. And As The Apple Turns is being quoted as a technically informed Mac news source?
Anyways, yes, $5 million for the G5s. Now let's add in the price of those racks they sit on. Let's add in the price of the cooling system, the network equipment, cables, power supply. Contractors. $38 million doesnt' sound so far off the mark when you think about what all that stuff.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Umm, when is the last time windows released a 'Service release' that massively improved the disk cacheing scheme, the graphics subsystem, the optimization level of the kernel, the network que and tcp/ip stack, and virtually every other core level service. .02 better, it must not be much?
In addition to that, theres fast user switching, expose, a new finder, new mail app,... blah blah, everythings updated
reports have shown older machines (~400 mhz G3 and that ilk) getting double the speed they had under 10.2 (does win XP run faster or slower than win98 on your 600 mhz p3?).
the day an MS service patch does 1/10th this level of upgrade is the day I will re-evaluate my opinion of that evil bohemoth.
By the way, on what did you base your statement... the fact that OSX is currently at 10.2.8 and since 10.3 is only
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If this were an OS to OS comparison between Windows and OS X, perhaps we wouldn't be getting so frothed up. But this is hardware, and dammit, PC hardware is supposed to *always* be cheaper than Mac hardware!
To summarize what others have said:
1) Dell gave UT a sweetheart deal
2) Apple gave VT a sweetheart deal
3) Nobody has dredged up any information to indicate that the $38M UT spent includes the cost of a building. As csoto pointed out:"A "Center" at UT is a special term for a particular type of organized unit, often a research unit. It does not necessarily mean this place gets its own building. In fact, at UT, space is such a premium that most "Centers" don't have their own (yeah the place is huge, but has lots of people). In fact, I'd venture to guess that NO center has its own building."
4) Hardware is only a portion of the total cost, obviously. UT and VT have set up their supercomputing projects differently. This again is obvious.
5) The really important point of all this is that VT manage to put together a very powerful supercomputing cluster using Macs at a cost that in no way can be considered more expensive than if they'd used PC hardware.
You can argue that costs would have been cheaper had they built their own, or used PCs from some source cheaper than Dell. But they still would have had to deal with labor costs in assembling the PCs, or higher maintenance costs associated with keeping all of those commodity PCs running properly.
UCLA is already using OS X to run Beowulf-style clusters. Tokyo University is replacing over 1,100 Linux PCs with OS X boxes.
Even the total cost of installing, operating, and maintaining large numbers of Macs running OS X is cheaper than either PCs running Windows or PCs running Linux, people often seem incapable of absorbing that information.
You can talk all you want about the Reality Distortion Field, but the truth is that Apple is always working against an incredibly strong bias that says Apple is always more expensive.
That's simply no longer true.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
From Infoworld Dell delivers Linux cluster deep in the heart of Texas
Dell's list price of a configuration similar to Lonestar is $1.9 million, with services and installation charges expected to bring the total cost to around $3 million, a Dell spokeswoman said.
From the Inquirer: University of Texas kyboshes MacNN's cluster story.
Cost of supercomputer only part of $38 million
By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 14 October 2003, 17:09
THERE'S MORE THAN MEETS the eye to a story published by MacNN and reported here today about the cost of a Dell cluster versus an Apple Mac OSX cluster.
See Dell Intel cluster costs 30 times more than Apple system.
Tina Romanella de Marquez, communications and development manager at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), says that the $38 million mentioned by MacNN is for far more than just a supercomputer.
She said: "The $38M total you refer to was not for a single supercomputer. It was announced in February for a total package that included:
"The establishment of the new Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences (ICES) at UT, including:
our new endowed faculty chairs in ICES at UT
additional funding for the research endowment and the visiting scholars endowment in ICES
he completion of construction of the ACES building (the 4th floor) for use by ICES and TACC
"and the establishment of a terascale distributed computing infrastructure at UT, hosted by TACC, including:
two supercomputers at TACC (the cluster you refer to, and the other IBM system
two massive storage systems at TACC
three leading-edge components to increase UT's networking infrastructure
increases in operations funding over five years for ICES and TACC".
She adds: "There are many more things that were needed to create ICES and establish a terascale distributed computing architecture at TACC. This point was made by TACC Director, Jay Boisseau, during the Lonestar dedication ceremony. The value of the specific computer referred to was approximately $3.0 million. And, no tuition funds were used in this process. Most of the money did not even come from UT. The package included $8M in discounts and donations from about 10 leading technology vendors, and over $15M from a generous foundation." And, she continued: "The VaTech number ONLY includes the actual computer, not the cost of the building, power, cooling, people, or anything else needed to actually operate it."
So that comparison goes out the window, then.
As it turns out, the computer cost $3 million, vs. $5.2 million for the 17.6 terraflop Mac G5 cluster at Virginia Tech.
3.7 tflops / $3M = 1.23 tflops/$1M
17.6 tflops / $5.2M = 3.38 tflops/$1M
So with the Apples you get 2.75x more computing power for the same $$.
Sounds like a an easy argument to get by the Dean's office...
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second, i have never heard labor factored into the cost of a machine (tho to call either of these beasts, just a machine is a shame, lol) but it would be reasonable for someon to calculate the TCO based on computing power and the cost of cooling, interconnect, etc.
third, the macs are using SATA which is today's technology, not ancient scsi, score one for cheaper hardware.
last, can't you just accept that apple finally hit a home run on the high end of the hardware world, for a welcome change from the stagnation of the wintel world? ? ? ?? ?
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