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NASA Installs Linux Supercomputer
unassimilatible writes: "Federal Computer Week reports that NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system. The new supercomputer -- an SGI AltixT 3000 single-system image supercomputer -- has been installed at the space agency's Ames Research Center in California."
Imagine a beo...oh never mind.
The article explicitly says they're using NUMA archeticture.
Obviously, it's running SCO's intellectual property. SGI doesn't really own NUMA, they only wrote it. Deep down, it's really a derivative of vi.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
SGI's Altix handles up to 64 processors on a Linux kernel using the patches they release as opensource. As SGI hacks away at their bigmem and numa patches, they'll be able to handle more and more processors. The plan is to eventually graft enough IRIX technology to support just as many processors on Altix as they do with MIPS processors in Origin with IRIX.
Even if you aren't a fan of Itanium2, Linux, or NUMA, these patches are bringing some nifty high-end tech to the free software arena.
hmmm, that's what I was thinking too. NASA(national auronatuical and space administration), I guess aeuronautical works with the ocean too, but well, it just doesn't seem right.
My sig beat up your sig.
As if NASA needs any more funding problems, $699 goes a long way for monkey-food in space.
Last winter has been one of the coldest in a few hundred years in Sweden. I was there (south part) during christmas and the warmest temperature we had was -24. The same goes for the summer here in Europe. So damn hot. Here in Paris we've had thousands of deaths due to the heat.
Something strange is happening. All research about our "new" environment is welcome. Ocean or otherwise. What are your thoughts?
At my place of work/research we have an Altix. The machine has a littany of kernel problems and needs regular reboots. The stability of the system also does not compare to that of the Origin. On the plus side, the SGI people I have come into contact with are very responsive and they really appear to perform in the face of SGI's cost-cutting. Also on the plus side, better modeling of our Oceans will help the world understand the dangers they face.
Fluid dynamics and environmental studies are also part of NASA's research mission.
Whewre can I get the patches from SGI to make 2.4 run on such insane hardware ?
How is space trivial?! Besides, they have done a pretty good job of exploring the nearest objects.
or the tv show "Seaquest DSV"?
the ocean seems to be a gateway to the stars...
I'm not sure why I even bother replying to this obvious trolling, but here it goes anyway.
When was the last time you found an EULA on a VCR? Never? And on your Nintendo system? Never? Oh, what a surprise. How about your brand new car? Dishwasher? Bed? Computer? Anything? I don't even like the X-Box but if I had one I would definetley install Linux on it, since it is my own property, and as with everything else I own - I do what I want with it since I bought it :-D
What font problems? It is pretty obvious you never tested one of the newer distributions.
And to answer your SCO/Linux FUD. You just need to read and educate yourself. That would take care of most of your illusions.
SCO sues Nasa for using Linux.
Darl McBride stated yesturday, "Since Nasa is using Linux we now own the entire universe and are claiming our rightful ownership."
It turns out that the study of other planets also requires some investigation into our own.
Life in Orange County
He's being ironic, you fool.
As if NASA needs any more funding problems, $699 goes a long way for monkey-food in space.
Not just $699, but $699 per processor IIRC. With 512 processors, that comes out to around $357,888 plus tax.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Learn the definition of irony before you spout off.
A 512 CPU and 1024 CPU IRIX system. The 512 one is referred to as the small one :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The SGI Altix 3000 is not quite a supercomputer. Our local university got the very first model for production use of the Altix 3000's successor, the Altix 3700, in last April or so, and it made it in the TOP 500 supercomputer list in last June, but it fell out of the current list. And the 3700 is even faster than the 3700, so what's so special about it?
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Nice to know that it is the fastest Linux supercomputer, but how does this compare to the other top-ranked supercomputers in the world?
Nice move there posting as an AC. Too embarrassed to post as yourself, eh?
BTW, dumbass - STFU already.
this does not even make the top500 so by definition it is NOT A SUPERCOMPUTER.
top500.org does show that for 3.2 million of macs and under 2 million of infiniband and hardware racks you can get to the THIRD position in top500,org using macintohses and the mac os x.
Isn't using a supercomputer that has hundreds of very hot processors to simulate climatic change going to directly cause a change in the climet be ejecting large quantities of hot air?
3000 Processirs @ $1399 ~ $4.2 million
So that's where SCO was planning on getting its money for Linux. It all makes sense now
Nah, that's not the NAS. That's just the power grid next to the 80x120' wind tunnel. Their 1024 processor box takes a lot more juice than this anyway.
Slightly on topic, it's nice that Linux is making headway there as well. There are only so many companies building 512 CPU boxes though, and Linux is SGI's best bet for the future.
GPL: Free as in will
I can confirm this. They want to test how much useful work 1 processor can get done with 511 others spinning on locks. They hope to gain some of the FreeBSD zealots' insight as to how exactly FreeBSD is more scalable than Linux. They're really doing some deep, fundamental research. Its not likely to have any real applications for probably 10 to 20 years though.
Well, they pay lots of people for doing other stuff than space research. Just think of Larry Wall, who was working on Perl during his time at the NASA JPL.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
How IRONIC that you are an AC yourself!
... I have something of a soft-spot for SGI, and it's nice to see them still making high-profile sales - it'll do their government profile no end of good :-)
:-))
512 processors running a single image is pretty cool
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Probably after Longhorn
In the long run, SCO will bring everyone down! >:)
Don't hit the post button if your joke requires a life support system such as:
"oh, never mind"
Printed backspace symbols^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcharacters
...pause (Think about it longer, you'll find a new way to make an old joke funny!)
A comment relating to the moderation system or karma
Rehashing all your old Slashdot memes are belong to Natalie Portman's hot grits in Soviet Russia goatse.cx posts YOU!
Using any form of Slashdot cliche as an attempt at humor
Ending your post with @^T#G@#YHB^#@$NO CARRIER
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I can think of a couple of reasons why NASA might be interested in this research area. First, the ocean and the rest of our planet is orbiting the sun in, well, space. Second, few organisations have the infrastructure to engage large-scale science programs like this one. If the 'Gulf Stream Conveyor' theory is true and the next ice age is due to start in 20 years time due to global warming, this research could be the rather more important than, say, finding out if germs exist on mars.
I stole this
I have two comments:
"With NUMAflex, high-performance computing (HPC) innovators like NASA can analyze data sets as whole entities, without breaking them up into smaller segments to be handled by individual processors."
1. lazy men run NASA
2. money still does not buy innovation
This whole exercise probably costs far less than the shuttle's zero-G toilet.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
NASA just wants to play a really good game of TuxRacer
If I'm not mistaken, NASA *invented* the bewulf cluster. And it ran Linux then, too.
Clicky
The emperor is naked.
and it costs a lot of money for a new one
Linus is going to ask the responsible for the /proc/interrupts code how on hell didn't he tested that at home: /proc/interrupts with 512 CPU in ?"
" Why didn't you test
DUH!!
... as it has completed it's simulation of the ocean in order to predict it's future:
cold and wet.
Wasn't it NOAA, who is responsible for studying oceans?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
NASA plans to study the ocean's future...
I think I can guess the ocean's future if they use FreeBSD. It must be dying.
I could care less, but not without a lobotomy
Learn the definition of irony before you spout off!
Perhaps they can send a rocket to intercept a properly-sized asteroid and deflect it just enough to land on Darl's house.
Today, most large-scale parallel computers are built by assembling smaller ``commodity'' compute nodes. Two main architectures have emerged:
* Shared Memory Multiprocessors (SMM's), where each processor can access all memory (and all I/O), and all processors' caches are maintained coherent. Such systems are usually controlled by one operating system image. The prevalent parallel programming model is thread parallelism: each processor runs a separate execution thread. The threads run in a common address space, and communicate via shared memory.
* Clusters, where each node has a separate memory and a separate I/O subsystem, and each node is controlled by a separate operating system image. The prevalent parallel programming model is message passing: each processor runs a process in a private address space; processes communicate with each other via messages
According to SGI Japan, Ministory of Education and Science
has orderd 4 Altix 3700 computer to make up 4 node
super computer, November 18th.
Each node, which altix3700 is equipped with 64 cpu. Total
main memory has reached 1.9TB.
It's also said that hardwares will be installed and in
operation in the early half of 2004.
So anyone got a copy of /proc/cpuinfo from this mother?
(Oh and do you do something special to 'top' so it doesn't give you 512 lines of CPU state?)
Oh, I agree, and I'd go further - a single image over 512 procs is more than cool, it's very good engineering.
As with many things, the compute problems that get thrown at "supercomputers" or big clusters or whatever, will vary enormously. Some will require lots of CPU but have little need for a large network connection. Others will work much better with this sort of highly-connected system - low-latency, high bandwidth, single system image. There are some parts of problem space that best fit machines like the Altix (or the IRIX equivalent - Origin350/Origin3000).
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
To study the ocean of tomorrow, you need the operating system of tomorrow!
Shoot, that's good enough for me. Anyone want to by my copy of yesterday's OS?
...a cluster of these!!! ;)
bury this puppy - link has nothing to do with anything
The thing that is special about the NASA computer is that it is a single image system
I did parallel code development on Sun SMP boxes. Starting up jobs, seeing what was going on, killing zombies, debugging was all easier on one system than through different boxes you'd have to ssh over to see.
Even though I was using MPI and getting ready for a distributed memory architecture for the really big runs, the development was easier on the SMP box that showed a single system image.
I haven't used things like OpenMOSIX, and Don Becker, early pioneer of Linux ethernet drivers (not many other folks can claim a complete decade of experience with Linux networking), founded a company called Scyld that sells Linux clusters with single system image.
Sometimes it's convenient to see the whole box as if it were one, even though efficient programming dictates that you become aware of the different costs of data access (network, main memory, cache, disk). Practically speaking, developing and running parallel jobs is a higher user productivity proposition on a single system image.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
BTW I see this post in every article that has anything to do with Linux. Can you moderators ban this one-sided, biased luser with observations about Linux coming out of his balls rather than his brain? Thanks.
Unfortunately, NASA will (mis)manage this cluster to running at 0.245 trillion ops per second.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
The research is being done at the AMES labs in Moffett field, California. Home of the climate model for Mars and Solar system modelling and numerical modelling in general. As well as some X-projects (as in X15 and X33).
NASA doesn't just send things into space anymore.
I am at work just at email reading and reloading Slashdot, the radio at high volume, Watching an Iron Maiden '92 live video, while i'm on the phone with yet another client that is mad 'cause we deactivated http upload for php, Now, *That* is _real_ Multitasking!!!!
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I wonder how this will impact Sun. Sun has been making a big deal about Linux not scaling and that Solaris is. Yet solaris does not run on a SSI system of this size.
Linux keeps winning all the rounds.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Because SCO is probally going to sue you ;)
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
IBM's new Prodigy Linux Comercial
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
http://www.oss.sgi.com
wow. you really suck. linux isnt about stealing -- maybe the USERS are, but linux is about opensource, d00d. get it right. and besides, i'd rather pay for an improvement of a free OS then give my money to greedy corporate f**ks like billy gates. -hiro.
mmm....caffeine....
But where will those naval aviators land?
I used to have a 7MB taglines database, which was quite an accomplishment for someone who only had 4.77MHz of processor power and a 30MB hard disk. A large number of them were NO CARRIER jokes.
Ah, the days of Blue Wave Offline Mail Reader, FrontDoor, and Fidonet...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Who modded this as a Troll? How exactly did you think he was trolling?
I was wondering the exact same thing - what are NASA doing spending money and resources studying the ocean when they can't seem to keep space research on track.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
I haven't used an Altix, but from the docs it seems sgi's patches provide a lot of the tools and goodies from IRIX. On a montster Origin, "top" gives 4 nicely formatted status lines above the process details. For specific details on each processor and other aspects of the machine, there's "osview". There's also a handy script called "hinv" that prints out a hardware inventory of the machine. "hinv -m" even prints out the part numbers and laser-burnt serial numbers for the various boards in a system.
I believe the Altix software environment provides all three of these utlities. Each of which gives pages and pages and pages of nicely formatted, human-readable details with the right flags.
I'm all for cleaner rivers, air etc, but you must understand that all policies and laws have a price. To understand if that price must be paid, we have to ask ourselves whether any particular observation is proof that our theory is correct. This must be based in science and not speculation.
Why?
Because the alternative is the same sort of specious 'reasoning' you just used. Unless it is tempered with logic and checked with reality you could just as easily use similar 'reasoning' to conclude:
1. (Premise) If you don't believe in God you will go to Hell.
2. You might as well believe in God because:
a. If you do believe in him and he doesn't exist at least you won't go to hell.
b. If you do believe in him and he does exist you might go to heaven.
c. If you don't believe in him and he does exist you will go to hell.
Using this argument most muddle-headed fools will just panic and start believing in god out of fear. Fear causes decognition which makes it impossible to rationally evaluate the likelihood of the premise, the possible outcomes or the validity of the conclusions. Never mind that the premise has not even a shred of proof.
It's classic propaganda and mind-control. I'm sad to say that most educated fools fall for it also.
Given this, it's also obvious that the propaganda being spread by many environmentalists in government is religious in nature. The very definition of a religious belief system is that its concepts are not falsifiable. Not matter what you tell the true believers, it is simply proof that their belief is true.
Steps:
1. Keep repeating to the general, uneducated populace that global warming is everwhere.
2. Weather, by its very nature is chaotic. Yes that means you have local minima and maxima. Sometimes these locals change.
3. If we are having a bad heat wave in Paris where grandparents are dying while mummy and daddy are vacationing in the Riviera, tell the people its because of global warming.
4. If we are having a 'freak' cold spell in the winter, tell people that global warming causes that too.
No matter what, use it as proof of global warming. Of course this line of reasoning is ridiculous, because the only proof that global warming doesn't exist is if we have several decades where today's temperature is never outside the first standard deviatiation.
-- so ---
Global warming might be real. Cold fusion might be real, but we don't arrive at intelligent conclusions by looking at chaotic patterns and 'cotton picking' the choice data samples we want for proof. This is the oldest mistake in the experimental play book. Don't fall prey to it.
Please don't misinterpret what I'm saying. I'm not some sort of conservative nut case. I'm green in all the ways you might imagine me to be green. I don't waste energy. I'm all for advanced and cleaner forms of power. Wind. Solar. Newer forms of fission (pebble beds) as a mid term replaccement to coal. Transition to hydrogen or He3 or something similar when it becomes mostly justifiable.
Good luck and use the brains that you were born with.
... sues NASA and all SCO executives miraculously disapear off the face of the earth and are last seen hurdling towards the sun in a firey death ball..... (LOL)
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
What is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doing spending huge sums studying water? Should every bit of this money go to getting us to MARS?
Itanium compilers are the result of a long, crazy story. At one point, SGI was working on their own opensource "Pro64" compilers, but stopped when talk of highly optimized gcc/itanium came about. But... gcc on itanium suffered from major suckage, sgi had already canned their own compilers, and had to resort to Intel's fast-but-buggy compilers.
For those who aren't keeping score at home, this is typical for sgi. They start working on their own mega-cool project then can it when they smell the vapor of some other company's product they could just implement instead. After awhile the winds blow the vapors away, sgi realizes the emperor has no clothes, and their whole product line takes a hit. This happened a couple time in the past... once when they stopped developing the MIPS R1x000 processors and stopped design of Beast and Alien processors when they heard of NT and Merced/Itanium. 18 months later and the damn chip still hadn't shipped, SGI's x86 PCs weren't selling, and their MIPS/IRIX customers were demanding something faster than R12K/400 in the workstations and big iron. SGI started CPU design again, but have yet to release anything more than speed boosts, process changes, and minor silicon tweaks. The same happened with graphics. They canceled the Bali (InfiniteReality replacement) project in favor of PC-based graphics clusters. When that didn't work, they had to tweak IR for two more revisions. It wasn't until this summer that they FINALLY got their massively parallel ATI FireGL system to market.
SGI has done some cool things that have helped spark neat developments in the computing world, but they could have done even more had they stuck with many of their projects in the past.
Altix rocks and Itanium2 is better than most folks are let to believe, but the gcc compilers aren't very optimized and the Intel compilers are a mixed bag of fast/slow performance and obscure bugs. SGI's Itanium compilers were never finished and never saw the light of day. SGI followed the vapor once again.
Still, for the money, I'd take an Altix over anything short of a Cray X1. Altix is one hell of a machine.
this is not a troll, it's tough love.
it's a very well documented fact that unless we start mining space, we will easily use up what is here on this planet. the long term damage being done now, is on such a scale that it's incomprehensable.
with nasa green lighted to look into the 'Sea', instead of 'Space', why? the u.s. government has oceanagraphic departments already for this type of work, it makes sense that they should get this type of project. maybe nasa could look for related projects if they started living in the international space station, (both administrative offices at the cape, and at houston). that way when nasa looks 'east' they will see SPACE, not SEA.
It'll be obsolete by next Wednesday, especially the way prices have been falling on supercomputers lately...
Like nasa scientists invented the beowulf cluster, doh!