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Factual 'Big Mac' Results
danigiri writes "Finally Varadarajan has put some hard facts on the speed of the VT 'Big Mac' G5 cluster. Undoubtedly after some weeks of tuning and optimization, the home-brewn supercluster is happily rolling around at 9.555 TFlops in LINPACK.
The revelations were made by the parallel computing voodoo master himself at the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference. It seems they are expecting and additional 10% speed boost after some more tweaking. Srinidhi received standing ovations from the audience.
Wired news is also running a cool news piece on it. Lots of juicy technical and cost details not revealed before. Myth dispelling redux: yes, VT paid full price, yes, it's running Mac OS X Jaguar (soon Panther), yes, errors in RAM are accounted for, Varadarajan was not an Apple fanboy in the least... read the articles for more booze."
I think it's interesting that he wasn't a Mac fan at all before this project. He says he chose it because it had better performance than everything else out there ("Ironically, they lost the gigahertz game," he said of Intel. "(The G5) is extremely faster than the Itanium II, hands down."), and was cheaper too (Dell and other manufacturers quoted prices between $10 and $12 million, vs. the $5.2 million or G5s).
What more do you need? Faster systems, cheaper total cost, and slick looking cases.
....maybe i'm obtuse, but i keep hearing about this thing as "..and we're only seeing X% of its real potential right now!"....
1) Why can't they just shout "Let 'er rip!!" and crank the thing wide open?
2) Why all the media buzz concerning this as a `surprise' when they've already got its performance figured out, apparently?
Sorry.
do() || do_not();
You'd think apple would at least sell G5's to VT without SuperDrives
OTOH, five years from now, when they have the world's 65,000th fastest supercomputer, they could just pull the thing apart and give/sell complete computers to their students. Then it's back to the Apple Store to order up a whole lot of G7's.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
The efficiency is quite poor for this machine, at least as far as efficiency is termed for supercomputers. The cluster has a theoretical peak of 17.6TFlops/s if I did my math right (8GFlops/s per processor), but they are only turning in an actual score of 9.56TFlops/s, for an efficiency of only 54%. Even if they boost performance by 10%, they'll still only be ~60% efficient.
For comparison, ASCI Q (#2 on Top500) reaches 68% efficiency, MCR Linux Cluster (currently #3, but to be pushed by by this new Mac cluster) reaches 69% efficiency, and the #1 spot, Earth Simulator, reaches a quite impressive 88% efficinecy.
Of course, there are other ways to measure efficinecy. When it comes to performance/price, this Mac cluster does very well, even if you do take into account the real costs (ie MUCH more than just the $5.2 million up front cost). For cost/power consumption it seems reasonable, but not outstanding. 10TFlops/1.5MW of power is ok, and not too far off the Earth Simulator's 35TFlops/3.5MW of power, but it's certainly nothing to write home about. Cray's next big cluster, Red Storm, is likely to get over 30TFlops when it's released, but will consume only 2.0MW of power.