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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?
These are recycled PCs? They all look identical
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
Sun 'Origin' High-Performance Servers and Supercomputers.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Donating all that equipment and no Solaris operating system ?
They're SGI Onyx 2 computers, something like an Octane with a lot more upgradability. you wouldn't be able to fit multiple Infinite Reality 2 pipelines in an Octane... You can find them here, though I wouldn't want to pay the power bill for one:
http://www.sgi.com/products/remarketed/onyx2/
GPL: Free as in will
The sad thing is that any one of those recycled PCs is probably more powerful than the one on my desk :o(
Beep beep.
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.
2 racks of "Origin 2000" super computer nodes.
1 rack of "Onyx 2" visualization nodes
It's questions like these that the high resolution pics are designed to answer. Gaze upon those blinking lights, mere mortal.
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
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
You gonna leave your long-running render on a lab computer unattended?
Blar.
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.
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?
These ITAP (formerly PUCC) clusters are in the Math buidling. You're thinking of some of the ECE clusers in the MSEE machine room and in MSEE214. We still have those too, but they're limited to ECE research use (i.e., me!).
The guy who ran the cluster in Civil (Moffett, quoted in the article) moved over to ITAP and helped start this thing about 1.5 years ago or so.
As far as I know, the donation from Sun had nothing to do with creating this cluster--that's just media spin. It may have something to do with growing it or new applications, but the cluster has been around for a while. It was created to help offload work from the IBM SP, which had a multi-week wait for CPU time until they brought the recycled machines online.
The idea is pretty solid though. Purdue gets rid of computer lab machines every 2-3 years, and rather than sending them off to salvage (literally a dump), they stick them in a machine room and use Condor/PBS to schedule jobs. Very useful to those of us grad students who need a lot of CPU throughput to do work. And believe me, a lot more than just rendering projects is going on--folks from many departments use these things.
And since the university has it's own power plant, it doesn't have to pay retail prices for the elctricity that runs them (or anything else).
For those who are stat-hungry, this system currently has about 700 total CPUs on the main system, all Pentium IIs and Pentium IIIs. There's also 200 Athlons, but they're technically owned by somebody else (i.e., they're not recycled). As of right now, the 1-minute load on the main system 893 (we're pretty busy right now). There are 598 jobs awaiting CPUs. I've personally run 250 jobs today, and I'll be kicking of another 200 in about an hour (big research deadline soon).
There are several hundred more machines available for use, but they are not up yet due to lack of floor space, cooling capacity, network connections, and/or power. Much to the annoyance of those that could really use more compute time.
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
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?
Sun appears to be positioning themselves lately to take on the Linux market. If they really cut a deal with fijitsu to move more of their Solaris work to Japan, maybe, just maybe, Sun is trying to move towards Linux. That would help explain why Bill joy left.
As to lack of money, no. This company is a long ways away from being Corel. They have money, just not to waste.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
maybe not customary, but highly reccomended.
I want 2D games back.
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.
"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!
In case you dont know, grants generally specify how the money is to be spent, and, as in cases like this, what is going to be researched. As I said, nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary.
The second sounds like an ordinary business deal. Since MS is out to make money just like every other business, why should they ignore the bottom line? If they *had* donated the resources AS WAS REQUESTED, you would be complaining that MS was giving away stuff in order to replace Linux.
Sounds like yet another of those 'cant win' situations you guys keep writing up for MS. Post- .bomb companies need to make money, in case you hadnt heard.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I think you got it the wrong way. AM radio is the one with the long range. FM radio has a shorter range, because it takes more power and can only travel in straight lines. AM radio bounces, and can therefore travel beyond the horizon.
For this reason AM radio is used on sea when satelitte-transmissions are too expensive.