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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.
Clicky for the official November list
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.
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.
Virginia Tech has not (and will not) call the computer "Big Mac". BBC used the name when it first started appearing in the news, and everyone else picked it up, IIRC.
The people in charge of the cluster don't want to call it "Big Mac" because (1) they don't want a lawsuit from McDonalds, and (2) who wants to be associated with nasty, greasy fast food?
They've worked out a solid candidate for a name (it's not official yet) that isn't quite as catchy as "Big Mac", but it also doesn't have any of the downsides.
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.
Hmmmm:
PowerPC 970 G5 1800 rc572: 13,400,000.00
AMD Athlon64 1600 rc572: 5,771,251.00
Intel Pentium 4 3500 rc572 4,960,583.00
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.
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.
Okay, I took your advice and looked at the distributed.net speed statistics. I looked for the fastest PowerPC & Intel scores in each project. Here's what I found ...
PROJECT OGR:
CPU @ MHz = Speed
G5 @ 2000 = 19,180,166.00
G5 @ 1800 = 17,100,000.00
G4 @ 1250 = 13,946,216.25
P4 @ 3200 = 12,155,245.00
Xeon @ 2800 = 10,251,811.00
PIII @ 1440 = 9,570,000.00
PROJECT RC572:
G5 @ 2000 = 15,058,974.67
G5 @ 1800 = 13,400,000.00
G4 @ 1250 = 13,084,678.25
P4 @ 3200 = 4,502,730.00
Xeon @ 2800 = 3,935,299.00
PIII @ 1440 = 2,927,187.00
Of course, these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt since there is only a few (or even one) top-end machine of each class in the statistics. However, contrary to your assertion, it appears that the PowerPCs kick ass compared to the x86s.
My understanding was that, if anything, the distributed.net algorithms unfairly favor the PowerPCs - esp. those with Altivec. I believe the Apple has used that fact in their advertising much to the consternation of many Slashdotters.
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.
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
Actually, you are horribly horribly wrong about two things.
You definitely could not do that with Opteron or Xeon systems. VT was in negotiations about price and delivery time with Dell and Apple. Apple beat out Dell's prices (shocking!!!).
Also, the G5 makes a great cluster computer. It comes standard with gigabit ethernet and has very easy access to parts (no screws required to install anything).
Finally, the Apples make a good cluster because in 5 years or so when they disassemble it they have 1,100 really nice desktop machines. PC's need to be upgraded more often to serve as a desktop computer (that's why Macs have awesome resale value compared with PCs).
Help I'm a rock.
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