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Big Mac Officially Ranks 3rd
An anonymous reader noted that
according to Wired, it will be announced officially on Monday the Big Mac supercomputer is the third-fastest super-computer. The article also talks about some of the amazing supercomputers in the planning stages. The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer.
...you insensitive clod!
It has to be said that Mac's haven't been famous for their speed, always pushing the "it does more", or "there are 2 procs" arguments, but this gives them some serious ammunition. Perhaps they'll even get their advert on the air in the UK now :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
...what does the Quarter Pounder(c) rank in the all-american taste test?
Can it sing the whole song without messing up so we all win the big prize? or doesnt anyone remember getting a record with their bigmac all those years ago...
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
Clicky for the official November list
Excuse me, but Big Mac is a registered trademark of McDonald's according to http://mcdonalds.com/legal/index.html
So what's going on here? Can they actually do that?
Given the basic benchmarks used to rank supercomputers, could a cluster of loosely coupled machines compete, or is the bandwidth demands for the benchmark set too demanding? I'm just curious how projects like what is detailed at distributed.net compare: 1100 dual-processor macs would be vastly outranked by the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of PCs taking part in distributed processing for various code cracking or cancer curing purposes.
me too ... I even continue to download some games and programs for it ... :D
I remember asking my father to buy me the TI-85 in US (i'm european), cause of the price
I still use my TI-85 - never seen the need to buy anything else.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
The TI-85 is a super-calc.
My desk drawer has a TI-58C, TI-59, and an SR-56. I turn them on occasionaly to bask in their soft red glow for a while.
Can the Big Mac play games like the WOPR?
How about a nice game of chess?
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
That said, for what is provided, the Earth Simulator seems to be the current king by about 2x. (Corrections appreciated.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I'm also european. But my father buyed my TI-85 here in Spain.
TI-85 forever!
double plus mac
(If you don't get the joke, click here and read the post with the long explanation...
The Top500 site lists two competing 64bits architectures-based clusters: the Integrity rx2600, with 1938 Itanium2 at 1.5GHz (must be pricey), and an 2816 Opteron 2 GHz cluster, that achieves only three fourths of Big Mac's performance. Now that's a defeat for AMD.
Also, the VirginiaTech cluster is the only "self-made" supercomputer in the Top50 (the next one is ranked 63th, based on SunFire V60). The original #3 slipped to the 7th position because of the new supercomputers. Competition for that third place was tough !
Now where's the G5 XServe ? It was supposed to be out when OS X Server 10.3 was released.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer.
Cluster a billion TI-85s together and then we'll see who's collecting dust.
The coolest voice ever.
There are some other interesting semi-commodity hardware based new additions to the top 500 right under VT's #3 slot.
BigMac is certainly impressive, but even if these systems can't quite match it's scores, they deserve a mention.
4
NCSA
United States/2003
Tungsten
PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet / 2500
Dell
9819 Rmax
15300 Rpeak
5
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
United States/2003
Mpp2
Integrity rx2600 Itanium2 1.5 GHz, Quadrics / 1936
HP
8633 Rmax
11616 Rpeak
6
Los Alamos National Laboratory
United States/2003
Lightning
Opteron 2 GHz, Myrinet / 2816
Linux Networx
8051 Rmax
11264 Rpeak
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Interconnect is very important.
This is nothing like distributed.net.
For a problem that can be broken into millions of discrete, independent chunks, sure, distributed.net's model is fantastic, and works really well... (seti, folding, distributed.net, etc)
For something where you need lots of feedback from nodes, (like these benchmarks, and lots of simulation work), bandwidth is everything.
Since it's running MacOS X, you can play the games available for this OS. Search for any title here.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I mean, I understand reasonably well the benchmarks used... but my question is this:
In the past, we always looked to the DoE or DoD for who had the fastest computers... they had stuff we could only dream of.. huge, fast clusters of funky computers we've never heard of.
Now, a university built one out of macs... and it competes with the same benchmarks.
What I wonder is, are there applications the old-style supercomputers are still better at, or has technology simply advanced since then? (Things like 10gig ethernet and ghz processors and memory busses, etc)... have we simply surpassed them? Don't just feed me some line about I/O either....
I used to run an Intel-based supercomputer, but then one night, I was modelling a nuclear explosion on it, and all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the model just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good model of a nuclear explosion! I had to cram and remodel it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed model wasn't nearly as good, and I blame that Intel supercomputer for the fact that DARPA yanked our funding.
**IBM has managed to cram 1,024 PowerPC 440GX processors into a slanted cabinet the size of a dishwasher. The unit -- described by IBM as a small-scale prototype of Blue Gene/L -- is already ranked 73rd in the new Top500 list.**
now that's intresting.. you could fit one hell of a cluster in your basement.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Now this system is the cheapest of the top 10. its cheaper than many it beat by a factor fo ten (more than that considering some of the building infrastructure are in that figure). Even more interesting these were stock mac at full price loaded with DVD-roms, firewire, blue tooth, the OS, etc..---not some stripped down model.
Its a good bet too that this thing is going to have lower maintainence costs and higher up-time given the macs attention to cooling, the use of high quality hard drives and power supplies, and high end memory chips. (on our cluster a tenth that size we blew 60 hard drives in the first 6 months and had to replace 10% of the motherboards.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of..... oh, wait.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
WE'RE NUMBER 3!!
WE'RE NUMBER 3!!
WE'RE NUMBER 3!!
GOOOOOOOO TEAM!!
=)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It's just you.
Hmm, guess this means my submission a couple hours ago won't go through (dangit, Wired!)...
Here is the official press release and the list.
There is a lot of good points to note all around. The first is the G5 Terascale cluster at Virginia Tech at #3 (10.28 Tflops/s, 2200 CPU, Infiniband) is the first academic computer to break 10 teraflops/s. This extra performance was promised at Mac OS X Developer's conference last month. Not to sure if the price is a testament to Infiniband ($1.5 million cabling, cards, and routers) or the Macs ($4.2 million list).
Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet). This cluster is built using Dell's running Pentium 4 XEONs and Red Hat Linux! One subtle point to note is that they didn't get all the systems online in time (there should be 2900 CPUs, not 2500). I bet some programmer at PSC and an ex-Chief Scientist of SDSC is appreciating having a hand in edging out NCSA for #3--not to mention Apple beating Dell for #3.
The fastest Itanium cluster is at #5 (8.63 TFlops/s, 1936 CPU, Quadrics) which is looking like the odd man out boxed in by a PC based systems using Myrinet, the P4 Xeon above, and the most powerful Opteron system at #6 (8.05 Tflops/s, 2816 CPU, Myrinet). Another point of similarity:did I mention it's also using Linux?
And finally, It's easy to overlook #73, a single compute node of BlueGene/L (1.44 Tflops/s, 1024 CPU). Imagine 128 of these connected together and you have something that will easily take #1 when it's completed even if we handicap it 20-40%. As noted on SlashDot earlier, this will be running Linux.
I miffed some of my links in the parent post:
Here is the reference to the ex-SDSC scientist.
Here is the link showing that the Opteron cluster is using Linux Networx.
Finally in the interest of full disclosure and to pre-empt the anti-Mac zealots, I should mention that the $4.2 million for the G5 machines is probably the education list price, because when you go to Apple Store, putting 2GB of RAM into 1100 2x2Ghz G5's will cost you $4.4 million (+ a little more for having some spare machines).
the whole purpose of this supercomputer was the fact that it was CHEAPER than the PC alternatives.
a bunch of dual opterons would have been more expensive.
Texas Instruments Ti85 emulator
Well now we know where they are being stockpiled. ;)
Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet).
That's pretty funny. A Pentium cluster with 2,500 CPU's is slower than a Mac cluster with only 2,200 CPU's.
What's also funny is that the hottest competition in supercomputing today is between Apple and Dell. Remember when it was between SGI, NEC, and Cray?
that more and more of the new supercomputers use the same processors than everybody's computer...
... and I think this trend will continue in the future.
Xeons, Opterons, PPC 970s,
I think this is because of the low cost of these processor.
But I still can't understand how a so expensive G5 (for personal use) can blow everybody in term of performance/cost. Amazing, it's obvious that we gonna have more supercomputers powered by G5 in the near future.
Iraq: war to save the U
Now to get on with the research. It's a credit to them that this computer got from the drawing board to fruition in the tiny amount of time that it did. It's raised the bar for price/performance in the research computing world and hopefully many less wealthy institutions (I'm looking at UK universities especially here). At the end of the day its about the research they put into it and the results they get out of it.
Sorry, no chance of that, because Slashdot has a strict policy of no duplicate articles.
Imagine if they were all AMD Dual Operons at the same cost.
Imagine away. Because that's all you can do. Since you've evidently been living in a cave on Mars for the past decade with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears, you might not have heard: they went with the G5's because they were cheaper.
Besides, check the list. There's an Opteron cluster on there with more CPU's and significantly lower scores.
Yes, I agree - these machines do deserve a mention. However, not necessarily a favorable one.
For example, the Tungsten machine at #4 uses 14% more processors at a 53% higher clock rate to achieve 95.5% of the Rmax and 87% of the Rpeak.
The Lightning machine at #6 uses 28% more processors at the same clock speed to achieve 82% of Rmax and 74% of Rpeak.
I'm not impressed.
you insensitive clod
A great graphics calculator.
:)
Great to program with - I wrote a vm in an exam because I was bored and too suspicious to leave early.
Even things like bezier curves were fun to get going.
The only thing that anoyed me was that the TI-85 had no means of finding out if a pixel had been turned on or off in the graph view (the way you did graphics). The TI-82 had it, but not the TI-85. Why is this anoying ? It makes collision detection very hard to do and thus gaming was somewhat limited. So even though I was Mr-Fancy-Pants with my TI-85, I couldn't get the good games that my friends with the TI-82 could. Although I did write an elementry space invaders game in the text mode part of the calculator in a double lesson of pure mathematics.
Ohwell, the time wasted at school
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
Well, to get the ball rolling, here is a query on the top 500 supercomputers using Microsoft Windows. Corrections and insight are appreciated.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
so when they upgrade to Panther will they get 10.31 teraflops?
Yes, it might make some fast scientific calculations really really fast, but I want to know how fast it does some real world stuff. Give me some Quake framerates, or Photoshop gaussian blur benches.
The G5 is a cool processor, but it isn't the reason the VT cluster is so fast, the Infiniband interconnect is. The LINPACK benchmark that is used to determine position on the Top 500 list depends very strongly on the latency of the network connection.
Infiniband has ~ 8-12 us latency (probably even less by now), while ethernet is an order of magnitude slower. In real-life applications it's actually worse than this suggests.
We have tested a real-life application (socorro) using both gigabit ethernet and Myrinet (slightly slower than Infiniband), and gigE took 600 seconds to finish a run, while Myrinet took 4.
VT's cluster is using the largest Infiniband network yet built (or at least announced). The previous largest Infiniband network was O(100) machines. VT could have built the cluster using Xeons, Itaniums, or Opterons and arrived at roughly the same level of performance.
I agree. And that's before cost considerations: do you wanna bet that the NCSA at #4 is in fact more expensive than Big Mac?
--
$tar -xvf
An anonymous readers noted that according to wired, It will be announced officialy on monday MacOSX is the third Operating System on the market, behind Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux. The article notes that due to an impressing growth rate in rate years, the Free OS has taken over Mac OSX [... snip rest of article].
http://www.masquilier.org/republic/election/ Condorcet, Plurality voting and alternative voting enabled bulletin board.
Now this system is the cheapest of the top 10.
You may notice that the BigMac is listed as self-assembled. It just doesn't make too much sense to compare a self-assembled system against company-delivered systems. You could do exactly the same thing VT did with G5 Macs using dual-processor Opteron or Xeon systems and end up paying significantly less.
Why don't people? Because most places that build machines that large want something turnkey and something that is supported as a cluster.
Its a good bet too that this thing is going to have lower maintainence costs and higher up-time
Actually, the opposite is probably true: desktop machines, like the G5, do not make good cluster components. They require lots of space, are difficult to access when sitting on racks, etc. And Apple's history on quality is not uniformly good anyway.
Run down the list and look at processor counts. We've got 5120 at the top (vector), but number 2 needed 8192 to get the job done. BigMac at #3 drops to 2200 and the processor counts hover in that 2000+ category. Until #19, when Cray's X1 jumps in at 252 processors.
Having a fast computer is cool and all, but if you can do it with 252 CPUs instead of 1024 (#22, P4 2.4), isn't that a win?
Besides, LINPACK doesn't stress interconnect latency and bandwidth, only cache and memory performance. When you run a "real" codes on these Mac/Xeon clusters and get 5% efficiency, suddenly the Earth Simulator (and the small Cray X1's) look good when they blow well past the 50% efficiency mark.
Yes, you're quite right, the networking hardware is important.
But as researched by the VT folk, the G5 is significant: It was cheaper for their needs than the Xeons, Itaniums, and Opterons of similar performance and energy consumption!
So both component choices were critical to their achieving number 3.
GPL Deconstructed
And yet equally, if not more, important products like amd64 don't have their own icons ?
Additionally, why does this CPU have a G5 icon? And not a PPC970 icon ?
Has slashdot sold out to apple ?
The article is cool enough (first official confirmation of the 3rd spot) but after stating this in simple terms, they go on bashing Big Mac with the 'future' clusters that will beat it big time.
It might be well true that BM will be beaten, but please, a more positive spin on the present achievements would be in good order. If in 6 months it gets beaten, yeah, cool, but it will be *then*, not now. Pleaaseee, wasn't it over, that pointless subliminal Apple bashing?
dani++
I don't know much about trademarks and copyrights, but I'm wondering if McDonald's can sue Virginia Tech if the university begins using the name "Big Mac" to refer to this cluster? Obviously it's a lot of Macs that take up a lot of room and power in order to do 10+ teraflops/sec (hence the name "Big Mac") but is it legal to use that name?
My TI-85 isn't collecting dust in my drawer. This summer I had a small accident with flavoured oatmilk. What started as a tilted backpack ended as a TI-85 with some IC connectors magically erroded away after 5 hours or so of traveling.
Kids, remember this: Oatmilk with salt = ionized water. Batteries = electricity. Ionized water + electricity isn't healthy for those small metall pieces of yours.
Whoa, do I smell a intresting+informative moderation?
Its pritty funny when
:P
Cray X1 at number 19 with only 252 CPUs beats out
other with a thousand + CPUs..
now not knowing how this would scale,
if you had 2200 of these, boy woudl that kick
apples ass
point being theres more to compare then the
price and or number of CPUs..
What was it built for?
any specific alterations to get more
performance in one area?
Cost and Date!
average CPU perforamnce
the list gose on.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I'm sure that no one has trademarked the letter X yet...
Linkie
I suppose it's no worse than Slashdot bashing: The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer??? Regardless of the success of future supercomputers, it is complete hyperbole to compare Big Mac's eventual demotion in the SC ranks to today's utility of a TI-85. Slashdot ediotrializing at its best folks!
I left highschool in 96 and now this year rejoined college since the tech jobs now require a college degree.
Hell the el cheapo Ti's have more memory then my high end model but at the same time mine has alot of functions reserved for the TI-89.
http://saveie6.com/
If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else.
The facility's name is Terascale Computing Facility. The cluster itself is called "X".
This is similar to NCSA. The facility is called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Their new #4 cluster is called "Tungsten".
Perhaps they used this, he said with a grin: Mac Raid Storage Solution
The other question I have is how much of network pipe do they have to the outside world? Tungsten has a 40Gb connection to the Internet.
The focus of these questions being- if you can't get your data onto and out of the cluster, what use are all those teraflops?
Big Mac does prove a valid point, but it's purchase smacks more of a stunt than a real attempt to provide users with a useful computing environment.
The Internet has no garbage collection
On the other hand, it may even be more sad that they still sit so close to human touch, considering that no one has gotten any use out of them since my freshman year in college, some three years ago.
That TI-82 was good to me. It saw my first programming efforts come to fruition: from simple BASIC math applications (for which I became a seemingly proficient developer) to minor assembly applications (which I never got deeply into). Since getting my TI-83 in high school I haven't used the TI-83, and since getting the TI-89 my senior year I haven't used any of the others (except occasionally the TI-83 for its financial calculating prowess!)...
Oh the history of calculators. I still remember the days when I worked on the web site Calc.org, which was then called Dimension-TI (heh), and later the TI-Files... and of course we all can remember submitting to and downloading from ticalc.org, the only of all the TI calculator web sites with just the right look and feel to endure the many years of evolving technology and still remain on top.
Sorry for this post. I think I was reminiscing. Hmm...
The 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 costs over $3000 per chip, and even the 32-bit Xeon 3.06 GHz is about $1000, while the 2 GHz PPC 970 is about $300 or $400.  In addition, VT wants 64-bit chips, so Xeon is a nonstarter.
Excluding the Earth Simulator, the 2 GHz G5 has the highest Flops per CPU, even 5% higher than the 1.5 GHz Itanium 2 and 10 times cheaper:
#2 Alpha 13880 / 8192 = 1.69
#3 G5 10280 / 2200 = 4.67
#4 Xeon 9819 / 2500 = 3.92
#5 Itanium 8633 / 1936 = 4.45
#6 Opetron 8051 / 2816 = 2.85
From what I remember about the press release, they did not purchase all the RAM through the Apple store. They got the standard 2x2GHz model and bought the RAM elsewhere, at a cheaper price.
today is spelling optional day.
can it run Maya AND Photoshop at the same time?
Jory
http://www.fftw.org/speed/
Hopefully they can remote install en masse.
Clearly everyone here likes talking about Macs, but few use them.
,BR>
Never pet a burning dog.
...another writer claims LINPACK DOES stress latency and bandwidth, so one of you guys has it wrong. The point is, they have a fast supercomputer, TODAY, for under 5 million. And 5% efficiency? Uh, let's wait til they run some actual code before guesstimating.
Never pet a burning dog.
There was no mention of network bandwidth external to the cluster.
The Internet has no garbage collection
Please ship your dust-collecting calculator to me, I will happily clean it up and put it on my web site. As you can see (user info) I collect calculators. Darn I forgot I'm on a 12kB/s upstream connection and now I'm gonna get /.ed... My mistake.
:-)
Or was it a joke?
You ought to look into the '89. It's really amazing that TI's products have been so static over the years, but also somewhat cool. Ti's most advanced calc is now the voyage 200, which is basicaly a suped up '92, from what I can tell. I remember using the 92 back in highschool.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Seems like Apple's ranking will be a springboard for supercomputer sales, especially given their relatively inexpensive supercomputer price tag.
I would imagine that the cost per Teraflop is one of the cheapest in the top 100 at least.
... you insensitive clod!
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Could a five year old Mac even run OSX? I seriously doubt many people will enjoy using such an old machine 5 years from now, even if it is a Mac. In my experience, very old Macs seem just as slow and obnoxious as very old PCs, that haven't been upgraded.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, I've never had something I've run continuously for years and years, but in my experience you can almost always get old hardware assembled and booting. For a couple years I was running a mail server on a P200 board shoved into a 386 case and held in with just one screw. It worked.
Any kind of PC will last for a very long time, after all they have no moving parts. There are some issues with capacetors leaking, and things like that, but if they're well made you should be fine.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They had 4GB RAM, not 2, which raises the total cost of just the towers to $5.3M. Add in $1.8M for networking equipment, and $2M for facilites upgrades and it comes to $9.1M.
And #5 and #6? Is there anybody has some ideas? Thank you.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I still use my TI 82 regularly, and I have quite a few classic games in it...
On CNN they said the new supercomputer will be able to handle 360 computations per second. That's fast!
...it's the special sauce! ;-)
-psy
fwiw, the information that I've read about the Big Mac cluster is that each G5 shipped with the standard-build hard drive; so that's 160G of SATA per node. 1100x160=176000G, which I believe is also 176T. So that trumps your storage--unless each node of yours also comes with it's own HD in addition to the SAN that you mentioned. And, I'll concede that a single SAN is more useful than 1100 drives in different machines in some circumstances--but each node in Big Mac will be able to cache information locally rather than having to call it over the network.
As for your other question about network pipe to/from, I haven't seen that.
--
$tar -xvf
Otherwise, we'll send you to one of our Vietnamese sweatshops as an indentured slave.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
...at the thought of a tennis court's-worth of tightly-packed IBM processors all running Linux. Blow the dust off your TI-85 and work out the total per-processor fee SCO will be demanding for that lot!
You must think in Russian.
The machine will likely run on Linux.
errr.... or maybe it's the other way around
If the BlueGene/L interests you, take a look at the next member of the family BlueGene/P (the P means Petaflop). If I recall correctly, the Petaflop version is going to have more than a million processors in it. These computers are pretty much used for biological applications, and are going to benefit from some serious hardware, software, and networking.
P resentation_January_2002.pdf
Here is the project update from a while back, talks a bit about each level of the blue gene project. It also talks about the biological motivations for supercomputing.
http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/BG_External_
And more generally, the blugene homepage: http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/
-SF
Bzzzt. It's running OS X. Nice try.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
10.2.8 = current Jag version 10.3.1 = current Pan version
The G5 is the cheapest of Apples processors.
(if you compare speed per buck)
This is somewhat interesting, as normally new
technologie is overpriced, but the G4 was so behind
Intel/AMDs performance that Apple had to put out
a much faster processor at a low price to get back
into the game.
That's why the G5 has quite a good speed/price
ratio, while the older G4 is overpriced.
Dig around the Top500 list and you'll see that for this benchmark (LINPACK), Myrinet and Infiniband don't do much better than plain GigE. (Which is one reason why the Cray X1 systems aren't ranked higher).
In fact, there are some nearly-identical setups in which there is no difference between GigE and Myrinet.
LINPACK is a good benchmark for generating big numbers for clusters, but it's a pretty poor supercomputing bechmark in general. The faster your machine can multiply and add fp numbers, the better its LINPACK score. This isn't SPECfp_rate. (Notice I said SPEC rate, not SPEC base).
Then the Unreal Tourney will really rock !
Where are those? This project was headed by an indian.
I didn't think techies used non-RPN calculators. Oh well, I guess they could get on a daytime talkshow. ("I was a techie who couldn't understand RPN.")
"The article also talks about some of the amazing supercomputers in the planning stages. The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer." Well no, not really... they may be fast relative to the mac cluster but in absolute terms, where it matters, the mac cluster is still -fast-.
there for a minute i thought they were talking about the sandwich being ranked 3rd.
The five year old iMac that I am typing this on is running OS X.3 (Panther) very, very well thank you. And, mind you, this is an all-in-one, blueberry iMac. Not a, at the time, top of the line PowerMac.
Your facts are quite off.
While I tend to agree with you that a rack-mounted cpu is generally easier to maintain than a typical PC, I am not so sure about the PowerMac. With the right rack mount you will get the same benefits that you would get from a dedicated rack-mount unit. Slide out the box, pull a switch and drop the side, do the work, raise the side, and slide it back in. The process is the same for both.
Now a typical Intel box set-up is rarely like that (there are exceptions). Their engineering sucks. Getting to parts and pieces is a real pain.
Anybody actually from VT postin here? I think it's kinda crazy how few ppl know about the supercomputer even on campus, I mean everyone knows our football ranking but tell the average joe on campus we have the 3rd fastest supercomputer in the WORLD, and they're like, really? where? In point of fact I dun even know where they're storing this thing on campus *wants to go and drool* oh well, too bad hokie pride's only allowed to apply to sports eh?
You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect. Miyamoto Musashi
done so and grab the #3 or #2...no wait!!! #1 spot for them selves....ooohhhh its because your talking out your ars again.
We are at the end of the bell curve re computers. 5 years from now we might be seeing 6 ~ 7 Ghz from the high end. 5 year old G3's with stock configs are getting 400 bucks on ebay. I sold my G4 for only a 150 dollar loss after using the thing for 9 months. Macs do hold value better than PC's - it's a fact. Go use a Dual 2.0 and tell me if you think it will be outdated to the point of non usefulness in 5 years. I dont think it will.
>The G5 is a cool processor, but it isn't the reason the VT
/is/ responsible for the speed of the cluster. Infiniband may be responsible for its efficiency, but it is not the only determining factor in this any more than the processor is.
>cluster is so fast, the Infiniband interconnect is
You are half right and completely wrong.
The Infiniband interconnect is fast, it is cool, and it is a big part of the reason that they got so much out of the G5s, however, the G5s had to have something there to give. Rpeak is the telling statistic on this point--that is purely based on the processors.
The "Big Mac" has the third highest Rpeak as well as the third highest Rmax. This says that yes, the G5
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Is teraflops/s supposed to be the rate at which the processors can accelerate in speed? Or did the industry just redefine "flops" like they did with "gigabyte"?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
If the cluster were named WOPR, I'd be scared.
IBM makes the G5 for Apple. It also uses similiar processor in its own machines. And yes, they can cram a lot of them into a small amount of space and still deal with the heat. If you had read the article you might have noticed the following:
Meanwhile, IBM is working on a monster supercomputer that will easily rank as the world's fastest supercomputer when it comes online next year. Blue Gene/L will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second, or 360 teraflops.
Commissioned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Blue Gene/L will be based on 130,000 processors.
Not only will it be the fastest, but Blue Gene/L will also be the most compact, IBM said.
IBM has managed to cram 1,024 PowerPC 440GX processors into a slanted cabinet the size of a dishwasher. The unit -- described by IBM as a small-scale prototype of Blue Gene/L -- is already ranked 73rd in the new Top500 list.
When finished, Blue Gene/L will be about the size of half a tennis court. "That's very small considering how powerful it is," said IBM spokesman Adam Emery.
By contrast, the Earth Simulator's 5,120 processors would fill four tennis courts.
Lasers Controlled Games!
According to the oficial VT site, it states it costs 5.2 Millions to build it. But this morning various sites (I think one is Washington post) claimed it costs 7 Millions to "build and maintain".
I wonder why the hell people did that just to overstate the costs with maintain costs? When people says "Earth Simulator costs 350M", I think it's just the building costs as the figure remained unchanged for a year or so. People didn't say "Earth Simulator costs 350M + x to build and maintain"...
Or maybe I take that wrongly. 600 - 700 pizza plus lots of soda MAY costed 1.8 Million.
According to here
& th reshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=181&mode=thread&cid=7 377337
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84181
The 5th place MPP2 costs 25M,
6th place Lightning (was only 6.756 TFlop Rmax) costs 10M,
7th place costs 6M...
Maybe that's the reason why in some recent reports, it states VT's X costs 7 millions to "build and maintain"... It seems to me that it's just another PR trick to overstate the price!! I don't see anybody says the Earth Simulator costs 350M + $?????????.?? to "build and maintain"...
Or maybe I'm wrong. 600 - 700 pizzas and lots of soda MAY actually costs 1.8M...
thats not true. number 4 on the list, the pentium system is cheaper per tflop. especially if it is self built and not a dell system.