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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."
....ok, we've really got real numbers THIS time!!
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I've always been sort of intrigued by Top500 Has there ever been a good comparison written about the similarities/differences between a 'supercomputer' and the regular pc sitting on my desk running Linux/2k? At what point does the computer in question earn the title "Super"?
The power usage (think cooling the room) for a similarly-performing Athlon cluster would likely more than make up for what phantom price difference you are talking about.
MORTAR COMBAT!
>>yes, VT paid full price
This is disgraceful! Hundreds of Macs on one purchase order, and they couldn't (or chose not to!) negotiate a deal? The Virginia taxpayers should be outraged! Good grief, if I bought 600 loaves of bread from the corner market, I'd expect a discount. Perhaps they were more interested in making the press than being good stewards of the public trust. After all, the college knows the taxpayers will have pay the bills, sooner or later.
Shameful.
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.
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An audience member asked if he'd made the purchase through the Apple store. Varadarajan smiled and said that actually, yes, he had.
[snip]
yes, it's running MacOSX Jaguar ( soon Panther)
More like whole-lotta-CD-jockying. Perhaps the bio department can lend a hand by donating the services of their chimps to handle the CD swapping.
(Yes, I'm aware there are smarter ways of doing it, but isn't it a fun mental picture, 100 chimps running around a cluster of G5's and throwing bananas and CDs at each other?) Talk about your fun install-fests.
Please help metamoderate.
Until then, quit your trolling.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
This is simply an amazing achievement. Plenty of people have built supercomputers from huge piles of x86's, but this team managed to not only pull the trick off in less time, for less money, but on a new hardware platform. I certainly follow their logic (PPC's have always been far better than x86's for real scientific-level precision FLOPs) but it's a really gutsy move betting your entire supercomputing program on a new CPU, new hardware platform, etc., and on your ability to get everything ported to the PPC -- that's a lot of risks to take, and a small school like that can't afford to fail, even building a relatively cheap supercomputer. But it clearly paid off! Not only did they get great PR for the university, they got a great computing resource for the students and faculty, and by doing it themselves rather than buying a complete system from a vendor, I am sure that those students all learned far more. And those 700 pizza and coke consuming students that cranked the code will all be able to say that they were part of this amazing thing.
Damn!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
'yes, errors in RAM are accounted for,' And no malloc library benchmark jumbling bullshit this time? T minus 10 minutes before some PC nut looks at all this, sees that the Mac relies on something a PC can't do, and 'blows the whistle'. T minus 15 minus before they realize it's the OS.
So he went full price with the G5 ($3000 apiece) and for only $5.2 million has the number 3 slot and is shooting for a 10% boost.
Varadarajan told the audience he would publish full documentation and release most of the code written for the machine. However, some of the software is subject to patent applications, he said, and he wasn't yet sure if it would be released under an open-source license.
What's up with that?
Used to be that work like this done at a Univeristy was considered 'open' as in available to anyone to help advance the state-of-the-art. Not anymore...
Wow.. I can't believe Apple didn't cut them a break for buying 1100 Dual G5s.
You'd think apple would at least sell G5's to VT without SuperDrives and Radeon 9600s. I seriously doubt those things (especially the video cards) will get a lot of use in a giant cluster.
But, hey, even with all that pointless extra hardware, this cluster is still less then half the price of a comparable intel system from Dell or IBM. Weird.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
... but that doesn't matter. An accomplishment is an accomplishment. Besides if an AI manifests itself it'd be less likely to destroy the world and more likely to tell you that your white socks do not match your purple tie.
To those who are wondering why the G5 is a serious contender for supercomputing applications( and why VT decided the way they did ), you may want to follow this link: http://www.chaosmint.com/mac/vt-supercomputer/
Here's a quick rundown:
Dell - too expensive [one of the reasons for the project being so "hush hush" was that dell was exploring pricing options during bidding]
Sun (sparc) - required too many processors, also too expensive
IBM/AMD (opteron) - required twice the number of processors and was twice the price in the desired configuration; had no chassis available
HP (itanium) - same
Apple (IBM PPC970) - system available with chassis for lowest price
"The IBM with a PowerPC 970 was a first choice but the earliest delivery date would have been January 2004."
"On June 23 Apple announced the G5."
I was under the impression that the G5 was a Power PC 970. Is it just some derivative of the Power PC 970... or what?
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
From the summary: "the home-brewn supercluster is happily rolling around at 9.555 TFlops"
Ignoring the "brewn" part of things, since when does "home-brewed" mean "designed and funded by a major university"?
I usually think of "home brewed" as something that someone put together at home. With their own money. In their spare time.
This is *not* a home-brew supercomputer, it is an institute designed and created super computer.
That is all.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Here is da slide-show
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
better than WOPRs.
For anyone interesting in learning a bit more about what some of the issues are when creating a super-computer, you might want to have a look at the following:
Red Storm PDF
The article is talking about Cray/Sandia's new Red Storm machine, a supercomputer using over 10,000 AMD Opteron processors that is expected to be competitive with the Earth Simulator for the #1 spot on the Top500 list. It does, however, talk about a lot more than just the specifics of this cluster, describing what some of the bottlenecks in supercomputers are and how to avoid/work around them.
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.
Okay for everyone asking about optimizations, why do it?
Look at what they built: a complete COTS supercomputer, miniscule price, functionality in six months, public data in a year. They have >9Tf right outta the box.
Yes they have written their own software, but name a company that doesn't? They modded them (cooling I think, but I couldn't find data only pics.) They bribed students with pizza and soda, they didn't have to buy, make or gut a building. What is amazing is they showed that any simple slashdot pundit could build one if given these resources.
Just FWIW, they are claiming power usage of 1.5MW for this cluster of 2200 processors. Cray just released the numbers for their upcoming Red Storm cluster with over 10,000 AMD Opteron processors, just slightly less than 2.0MW.
Ugh, this is getting old.
Red Storm, the machine by itself itself, uses 2.0MW.
Big Mac and all of its networking gear uses less than 0.75MW. The supercomputing center itself (building, air conditioning, UPS battery charging equipment, and the 1100 G5s) is fed by a 1.5MW substation feed. They're still not even maxing out the substation.
The latest, fastest Opterons (not the scaled down low-power Opteron for blade servers) consume 53 watts at full clock. PowerPC 970 @ 2 GHz consumes 48 watts. The U2 and K3 motherboard chipset on the dual G5s uses just as much power as the PowerPC 970 "G5" processors. Hell, the power supply in a dual processor G5 system is 550 watts. 550 x 1100 machines = 0.61MW.
I usually never reply to these things, but I think it is funny that people are arguing about how he ordered on the Apple Store. I find it even funnier that people would even go to the Apple Store and try. It was a joke! There were a lot of dedicated people at Apple, including myself, that helped to make this dream become a reality. The "myth" that I would like to clear up is that Apple DID have a clue and a lot of great people at Apple have been working really hard for that last few months, making a lot of personal sacrifices to make sure that all the awesome work from Dr. Varadarajan and the rest of the cluster team could be possible and successful. That's my 2 cents.
Jerome Holman
Apple Campus Representative @ VT
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jeholman
I strive daily to better master Shakespeare's and Snoop Doggy Dog's language
Ah. In that case, the word you were looking for was 'brizzled', MizzutherFizzucker.
Hope this helps.
You could calculate a new marketing BS peak number where multiply-add only counted as a single flop, or you took into account some realistic cache miss rate. The new lower theoretical peak would give you a much higher efficency.