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Sun Donation Spurs Linux Cluster at Purdue
An anonymous reader writes "Purdue University, with a $3.6 million gift from Sun Microsystems, is giving recycled PCs new life as a computer cluster that makes high-performance computing power available in undergraduate classes. 'Previously, my students could only do what I'd describe as 'proof' animations - small, low-resolution and not presentation quality,' [Professor Richard] Paul said. 'With access to this computing power, the students will be able to ship their software files of instructions to the Linux cluster, and it will come back in three or four hours with modeling, lighting and animation. Students will get to experience the whole thing in terms of scale and presence, and they can do longer animations.' More images of the current Linux cluster and other servers at Purdue are out there."
'With access to this computing power, the students will be able to ship their software files of instructions to the Linux cluster, and it will come back in three or four hours with modeling, lighting and animation
I'm sure glad he didn't use an arcane technical word like "program". That sure would have confused the layman. By the way, how many Libraries of Congress can the cluster store?
great. now there's little kids crying everywhere. last time i browse in the living room.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
These are recycled PCs? They all look identical
Can anybody tell me what, these are?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
the whole geek thing but is it customary to have a page dedicated to pictures of computers?
MMORPG Fan? Prove your worth!
In addition to the Sun Mircosystems gift, Morgan J. Burke, director of intercollegiate athletics, will announce a $1.2 million gift from Cisco Systems Inc. that is enabling Purdue sports fans to access real-time football game data via wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs)
havent they heard of a little device called an AM radio?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Donating all that equipment and no Solaris operating system ?
The sad thing is that any one of those recycled PCs is probably more powerful than the one on my desk :o(
Beep beep.
I thought Sun had proven that Solaris was a much better bet for running x86 servers. Also, because the the SCO licensing issues and the fact that there is no indemnification for running Linux, it seems like a big risk for sun to support its continued use in academic contexts. I hope Sun sets thing straight with this university before they get deeper into the quagmire.
Interesting...like what used to happen with print jobs. How long 'til a student goes to the sysadmin on duty asking for their animation job to be niced down a point or two?
Carousel is a lie!
I have a good friend who is a CG major at Purdue. There were always difficulties in trying to get even simple animation projects rendered in a timely manner. This is a great resource for students who are really trying to get their projects done in a snap, who can see the results of their efforts a little sooner than a full day later.
you don't need a 3.6mil cluster to do more than .. you can do that adequately
'proof' animations
with all the bells and whistles on a single desktop
pc under maya (linux or windows, take yer pick)
oh well
Hey does anybody from Purdue know if this is in the Math building or MSEE? (or somewhere else)
Purdue has been using clusters for some time, there was a cluster being used in Civil Engineering of all places a few years ago to model bridges and other structures. Been too long since I graduated, I should go back for a tour.
P.S.--> A bit OT but Debian has Purdue roots since Ian Murdock went there.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
The PCs pictured in the cluster are Deskpro EPs. These have got to be the last of the breed of good old heavy duty steel, roomy cases. Yeah, the crap 440EX chipset and ATI RAGE video isn't so hot, but the case is actually industry standard (a rarity at Compaq), has tons of expansion room, can be rotated to desktop or tower configuration, and best of all IS FRICKIN HEAVY AS HELL!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
white elephants also produce good ivory
I think I've landed on my new bedroom decor. . . Alos, imagine, if you will, a Beowa%Lg9)
You are not the customer.
I have always wondered if there was a business model - conceptually similar to Akamai speeding up the "last hop" delivery - where all the computation intensive files for 3D modelling etc could be sent, and the the end product shipped back.
... maybe a service where computation power, which is routinely available in most universities, can be made available to non-students may have a business value. They ship the files to the computation center which can then do the rendering and ship it back in a few minutes (rather than 24 hours) to the graphic artist ...
A lot of my friends doing 3D modeliing would do the stuff and then have to let the rendering take place for 24 plus hours
Of course the business will disappear if grid computing, or something based on the P2P infrastructure can be succesfully established, but till that time maybe there is a business model here.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
hey, if I had this cluster when I did my CS, I could have gotten away with writing, bad/bloated 3D rendering libraries.... hehe.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I am working on my own Linux Cluster. Our website is: http://www.geocities.com/cluster_linux/ We need donations.
That 72% of all statistics are madeup on the spot?
"These machines from sun suck down the electricity and provide measly amounts of gflops as thoer benefit"
Umm numbers please?
"Each month the elctricity bill could have bought them 4 more dual g5 macs."
Again where's your proof?
How about next time more facts and less fanboi.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It sounds like most of the cluster is just refurbished Intel PC's with the Sun gift comprising of " five new Sun Fire 6800 servers and two refurbished Enterprise 10000s". So what do these Sun machines do for the cluster? And are these Sun servers running Linux or Solaris?
evanchik.net
That is the freakiest looking dude I have ever seen.
You gonna leave your long-running render on a lab computer unattended?
Blar.
Is this a conspiracy that Sun tries to make Linux look bad?
So for those people that are so against Sun, because they're against Linux, where are they?
Yes, this is flame bait, but if you trash Sun for Linux then it's not flame bait. Is a forum something that no one dare to speak against the main stream?
Sun never bothered to port their UltraSparc beowulf-like clustering system to X86, and they stopped ripping off Linux code after the whole ethernet module fiasco a few years ago.
Hence, no X86 clustering support with Solaris.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Finally someone has posted this on /. The "scrap metal" cluster thing has been around for a while now and I always thought it was a cool idea. Despite the claims of power consumption, etc the cluster itself seems to be a great research tool. Oh, yeah and GO BOILERMAKERS.
right here
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... oh, wait.
Well, imagine a beowulf cluster of beowulf clusters (if that's possible).
If there's any sense to the scheme, there will be some sort of batch processing that isolates the users from the system. Perhaps uploading source data to a particular directory that only a few people have access to - and the system just renders whatever it finds, moving it to a "done" directory when finished. These are artists we're talking about, not programmers.
At least, that would be some sort of approach I'd take, maybe with some front-end Python scripts to upload in a friendly manner - and email students when their job is complete.
It's probably also going to be more inefficient running five unrelated renders in parallel as opposed to doing five serially across the entire cluster one at a time (although I could be completely wrong).
Seeing that this is something near and dear to me (having built and ran render farms) I would love to know more information on what they are using to manage the renders... what batch queueing software, what render software, what animation and modelling software? I would love to know how they approached the problem.
My experience in the past was with Maya covering all the 3d and LSF from Platform for the queue management. Wrote some perl scripts for the frontend and for the backend of the system, did some database calls so that people could resubmit jobs if they failed without having to look up all the settings agin, also forced some uniformity to how it was submitted...
I know that student projects aren't the same as feature films or half hour animations, and managing for 60 artits on 500 procs is not the same as keeping students rendering, but it is still the same basic task.
And a bit of advice from somebody who runs such systems for a living... Just because the horsepower is there and it seems like you will be the only one using the system, if you can spend a few more minutes optimizing the models and the textures, it is worth it. Also take advantage of using layers and simple A over B composites. It will save you time in the long run, and it is possible that others may hit crunch time the same time you do. Computer resources are finite. Anything you can do to use as little of it as possible makes it easier for everybody to make deadlines. And if you do make it into the industry, it will be even more valuable, because your stuff with go through with less problems, and be less costly, and people notice that.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a lot of money for sun to be throwin around? Aren't they bleeding money out the anus? And it doesn't seem like they're getting anything more than good press for this, which doens't help the profits margin much. Someone explain.
If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough.
Not to mention that the G5 cluster is positioned within 100 yards of Virginia Tech's own coal-fired electricity generating plant which itself happens to be located in one of the most coal rich regions of the United States. My guess is the cost per kilowatt-hour is on the order of about 3 cents.
After looking at this picture i see a zip drive, floppy, and cdrom in every computer. I can understand a cdrom and maybe a floppy but why does EVERY computer in that cluster need a zip drive? seems like a waste of $ to me
The project, using what IT pros call a Beowulf-style, parallel-computer approach
\ damn, imagine that. a real beowulf cluster of those!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Yet again, an example of overfunding for something that could be solved much more simply with technology that already exists.
What is it with geeks and reinventing the wheel?
---
Neo lets Smith take him over, and Trinity dies. The Matrix is not destroyed.
Isn't the point of having a digital camerea is so you can delete the bad pics?
I'm getting dizzy just looking at some of these. Or maybe it's just the Crown Royal...
-CowboyNick
Why donate computers to a university, as opposed to the poor in other continents or even in own country? Just so they could have a bigger cluster for animations? In my eyes, that doesn't make sense.
What's in it for Sun?
Whats with everyone wanting to cluster everything? Is that the IN thing?
i thought they where in trouble financially and seeking buyers ? giving away what little capital left as "donations" is sure to please investors
Sun donated the 6800s and E10k. The 6800s are one of the first sites where Sun has installed the SunFire Link interconnect, high-bandwidth, low-latency product for clustering. The addition of these resources freed up the PCs so they could be used for Linux cluster. At one point Sun wanted to donate V60x's but Purdue didn't have the room and didn't want them so they could reuse the PCs.
The high performance computing cluster will be used for many things.... to show both the value of large SMP systems as well as the value in a beowulf-style cluster (most likely running Sun Gridware) for computing which can be distributed.
Sun and Purdue have always been very close and this deal helps to renew their relationship. There are stories of a Sun 3/60 (or 4/110?) being strapped to the back of a tractor for the agricultural school being used for seed, pestitcide and herbicide mixture and distribution.
It's a 32 processor SGI Origin 2000 / Onyx2 with InfiniteReality graphics. Two full racks of Origin 2000 = 32 processors, and half a rack of Onyx2 = 2 graphic pipelines.
Late 1997, early 1998 technology. SGI is currently selling Origin 3900 and Onyx4. Origin 4000 is rumored to be demoed at SC2003 later this month.
Excellent points! In addition to the hardware, the G5 supercluster runs a Professionally Developed operating system. That's something these linux-based clusters cannot claim, with their amateur programmers. With Mac OS X, a student can get actual work done rather than spending 4 hours a day recompiling their kernel and whatnot. Apple makes real products for real professionals. Sure you can use Linux if you have hundreds of extra hours to spare endlessly configuring and reconfiguring computers, but unless you have no other choice, you would have to be an idiot (or perhaps a loser who lives in his mothers basement) to pick linux.
> These machines from sun suck down the electricity and > provide measly amounts of gflops as thoer benefit. You know Purdue has its own power plant, right?
Think expensive and proprietary to Apple. Sun is selling either Solaris, Java or Linux. Not somebody elses stuff.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In addition to the hardware, the G5 supercluster runs a Professionally Developed operating system. That's something these linux-based clusters cannot claim, with their amateur programmers.
Just IBM, SGI, HP, and Sun people working on it. Oh, and the top 4 schools in CS run it.
now we get matrix spam? hopefully this wont continue after nov 5th
Actually, I was a little surprised to see how heavy-duty the Apple PowerMac G5 tower's case is. I knew it was all aluminum construction and all that... but when you actually get to play around with one first-hand and open it up, you realize everything is heavy, and feels quite solid. Reminds me of the way systems *used* to be built - when people really thought they'd be in use for 10+ years before getting swapped out for something new.....
Besides the new G5 though, I haven't seen any PCs in current production with really good quality of construction in their cases. Many are "cool looking" and some are very cleverly engineered to make them easy to open and/or fit lots of drives in a given amount of space -- but everything's thin sheet metal and plastic.
To be honest, I'm not so sure it matters much.... I still have an old AT style full-tower case that originally housed a 386 motherboard, back when that was the fastest thing on the market. The case is the typical plastic front, screwed onto typical gauge metal casing, with flimsy painted sheet metal cover that screws on with 6 screws. It still looks almost like new, except for the white plastic starting to "yellow" a bit.
Most PCs just sit in one place for years, unless you're hauling them around to LAN parties or something. I don't see why people should pay hundreds more for it to be built like a tank....
"top" as in bribed the review publications enough money for the rankings.
Puhleeze.
You are a disgrace. Enjoy your transistor radio, freak.
Think Different, Think Professional. Think Apple.
Are there any interesting innovations in cooling clusters of computers? Are most clusters and main computer rooms still cooled by central air-conditioning?
Nuclear submarines show us that given the space constraints and enough money, cooling solutions can become very interesting.
Just wondering out loud.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
Anyone know which linux distribution they're using for that cluster?
Or does Purdue has to cough that up herself?
What about power wasting ?
this got marked -1 off topic, but power consumption is a fixed cost associated with running a cluster and VERY relevant in budgeting a cluster.
Electrical costs make this a White elephant gift!
The Dual G5 VT cluster (1,100 dual g5 macs) is not only rated as the 3rd fastest super computer on at www.top500.org next november, it is also one of the cheapest per kilowatt hour to run, not super cheap, but cheap enough.
These machines from sun suck down the electricity and provide measly amounts of gflops as thoer benefit.
This department would have been better off getting a handlful of g5 macs.
They can do 16 GFlops peak if calculating FMADD pairs.
Why?
Because the g5 has TWO FPUs per chip and heir are two chips.
And each fpu can do a combined multiply-add per cycle and there are 2 billion cycles per chip and two chips in the 2999 dollar macs.
plus you can wedge 8 GB physical fast ram in them, and they come with fast dvd burners to burn and rip porn movies.
16 GFlops on a modern mac that chews up not too much electricity for cpus alone, make this gift from sun a white elephant.
Thats not even counting the 128 bit vector processors on the g5 (Altivec). Those things offer SIMD using over 110 different amazing opcodes each.
Each month the elctricity bill could have bought them 4 more dual g5 macs.
Given how they're doing these days, how can they afford to donate anything at all? That was roughly 1/2 of their entire revenue! I heard Java is on sale on eBay... (Note: Sarcasm)
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"Many think of using high-performance computing for computational science and research," Bottum said. "At Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), our mission is to support learning as well as discovery. While research is critical, we're also building for the classroom."
But now students can print "Hello World!" in ray-traced, spinning, textured 3-D letters. Yay!
If I have my glasses on right, it looks as though these are desktops that are racked sideways. Would the the floppy and CD-rom drives still work?
If someone can answer that, I'll promise to share the money I'll save not buying empty 4U cases. A Slashdot T-shirt, maybe?
Feel free to mod me down for asking an accurate, pointed question: Im used to it.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Yes they'll work just fine. BTW. That was dumb question.
Yes, most cd drives will work sideways, if you look they have little tabs or protrusions on the tray to keep the disk on when it is sideways. Should be relatively easy to check whether floppy drives work sideways... just stick a floppy in your comp, kick it over and see if it still works :) (I'm pretty sure they do work)
Awww man, I thought they were talking about the recent donations from THE sun.
Does anyone have the exact specs on these things?
I had roughly the same idea about a year ago at my school, and wondered about the feasability. I have literally got stacks of old P1's that I've scavenged from junk at my school.
Last I checked, a Beowulf was possible to run on P1's, but not with as many options. Anyone out there who can tell me more, or what these Purdue machines are made of?
once you go slack, you never go back
is apple paying you well to spam this forum at least?
I noticed that on the picture, each machine still was quite original in that it still had a cdrom-drive and a floppydrive aboard.
I guess you only need one system that has that stuff. The other machines are just ruining precious power and ventilation room with obsolete equipment like that.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Looking at those pics, it appears that the room the boxes are in has quite a fancy fire suppression system. No need to use something silly like a CO2 or a dry chemical suppression system. No Sir, those kinds of things are only for lame hippie geeks. As any REAL computer person knows, water makes linux boxes faster. Fortunately, the pics show the room having a lot of sprinklers, this ensures that the expensive cluster will be well hydrated in the event of an emergency (or just someone who accidentely bumps one of the sprinklers).
A page full of images, and loads up in a second. Less than 9000 in the WebTracker page counter. You can do better than that!
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
I wouldn't see why a floppy wouldn't work sideways. In fact, an old computer (486 I think) I used to use had it mounted sideways; there was never a problem. CD drives can be mounted sideways and have tabs to hold them in place, but I'd still tend to want to mount it normally, although it probably doesn't really matter any.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
if it weren't for the fact that it was built like a tank, though, would it still look like new?
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
I thought linking to pr0n is illegal on /. ?
(/me engeener)
:wq
simply not sufficient to reach Boilermaker fans far away, say, in California, etc. Sounds like an alum at Cisco might have had a hand in this donation.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
those are Brocade silkworms!
First the Virgina Apple Cluster will fight an uphill battle to get research codes ported to the G5/MacOS X platform. Purdue's Research Computing doesn't have the staff that doing such a large porting effort would require. We are friends with Apple and talk with them regularly -- I am by no means slamming them. We have a 10 system cluster of Apple XServes within Research Computing and are working with them on products that have not yet been annouced.
Secondly, all these recycled clusters and the Sun gifts total well below $1m. If you'd like to give Purdue the $5m-$6m that the Apples cost (plus some salary money to help with porting) I'd be glad to talk with you directly. So far, I simply don't have the money that buying and owning such a cluster would require.
We are working toward having a very diverse collection of resources that meet different computational needs. The 5 machine Sun F6800 cluster with each machine having 24 CPUs and 192GB of RAM being the new top and thousands of machines under United Devices management being the bottom with many kinds of resources in the middle.
David Moffett, AVP Research Computing, Purdue University.
Doesn't this, in the same way as for donations to non-profit organisations, legitimate a tax deduction? Of course, there's a PR angle too, as well as getting on along well with possible future influence makers, influence over areas that generate money for SUN. Anyway, good to go!
Well if you start needing your floor reinforced to hold all the machines then you may start thinking lighter is better ;).
I used to work as an operator at Purdue Computing center. Spent a lot of weekend nights sitting there in that computer room. Most of the time was spent throwing tape write tabs at each other and watching movie (we weren't supposed to but I pretty much broke any rule..)
It's excellent that we are getting the good stuff. When I was there the big deal was rs6000s that had come in.
sri
Tell that to New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and parts of Canada.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This decision was, frankly, silly and stupid. Even for <$1m you could have put together a kick ass G5 based supercluster. The porting issues are, in fact, non issues, since OS X is a standard Unix operating system (albeit the most advanced and popular one in existence). It supports every feature that every other, less developed "Unix-like" implementations (cough... linux... cough) support. In addition to that, it also written by actual paid professional programmers who wrote such amazing things as zeroconf and the world renowned Apple gui which would have saved you time and money in the long run, making your crazy $5-$6 million estimate moot. If only people like you could get beyond your closed minds to finally realize that while Linux is fine and dandy as an OS for a handheld or a firewall box, it is lagging pretty far behind OS X when it comes to technological innovation.
Does the sentence "software nstructions for creating multiple images of a program" mean anything??
The poster I replied to believed that a single PC could handle the rendering needs of a student. That may be true, but it would be long-running. If that poster's scheme was used, there would be individual machines in the lab tied up for days doing renders. I know when I was an undergrad people would lock a machine and leave for hours...just so they would be guaranteed a machine when they got back. That resulted in others pulling the plug and doing a hard reset. I wouldn't want to risk my class project on some pissed off guy comandeering my render machine.
Blar.
Ah, I see. So if Bill were running for Homecoming King, than he wouldnt have your vote. Very astute observation; I always base my technical decisions on the CEO popularity contest, too. Not.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
If Bill were running a lemonade stand, I'd want to see him have a good gulp before I tasted it, and I'd want to taste it before I'd buy any. He's about as truthful and reliable as a bamboo watch where money or power are concerned.
Now how about responding to any of the other three points I listed instead of depending on the flippant one for a snappy-looking reply?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Those pictures are from the Hicks undergrad library basement.
We all go a little mad sometimes.... haven't you?