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A Look Inside Virginia Tech's New Super Computer
Mr Bob "The original" bougert brings us "...a video of the Virginia Tech super computer centre. How many people think that super computer centres like this, with their reasonably cheap cost should be created in more places? This video of the infamous super computer should be interesting to some and pretty to look for others." It views like an ad for Apple, but Virginia Tech has scored quite an achievement with this milestone, and this should serve as a decent introduction for those unfamiliar with the project.
This is a repost of "Xgrid Clustering Software and Demo" in the Apple section..it's just one of the links listed in the story.
Scott
build your own with xGrid!
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
This is just a reposting of an earlier Slashdot article, and should be modded down.
Congratulations - you've found an occupation even lower than troll: plagarist.
Sailing over the event horizon
The project leader, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, will be speaking at a session entitled Building Virginia Tech's G5 Supercluster on Jan 28 at the upcoming O'Reilly Mac OS X conference.
He'll probably reveal some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used, at that session.
Also, according to a blog at O'Reilly:
Next year, all the little known details [about the cluster] will be revealed in a new book. By that time we'll know what the project means for supercomputing and for Apple.
Apple doesn't place a giant markup on its products. They put a lot of money into product and industrial design. Therefore, Apple computer's cost more.
Virginia Tech did not get a discount on those machines. They purchased 1100 Dual 2ghz G5s at full price and spent around 3.5 million dollars on those machines. And other 1.5 to 2 million was spent on networking hardware, software, racks, etc.
Furthermore. You don't have to buy individual licenses for OS X. OS X server comes with an unlimited client license and you can put it on as many computers as you please. Or, you can decide to use OS X (client), and every new Mac comes with that for free anyway. There are also no serial number or license activation annoyances involved with OS X.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I mean OS X...shouldda hit 'preview'
:/
Alright. It's time to crawl out of the hole.
Download VLC or MPlayer. They both play Quicktime files and Sorenson 3 Quicktime files. Moreover, they play them better then the QuickTime player does. (they also play just about everything else in the world)
Every Linux user should have one, or both, of these media player installed on their machines. Seriously.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The Earth Simulator is less than two years old, counting from when it was turned on.
Assuming an optimistic 12 months of doubling for Moore's Law, that's a factor of four. So you've cut the cost by at most a factor of four if you built it today. The VA Tech supercomputer still utterly destroys it on price/performance.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The V-T supercomputer runs on Mac OS 10.3, not Linux
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf04/
Yes, I'm karma-whoring...and you do it too, damnit!
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
I don't think that is accurate. Yes the interconnect is VERY important, but the mesurement is the number of floating point operations per second that the machine can perform. This is purely a measurement of the raw processing power available. You can have the fastest interconnect in the world, but if your CPUs can't keep up it is all for nothing. Likewise, without the ability to feed those processors, the performance will suffer. To use the (flawed) analogy of a cluster to your desktop machine, think of InfiniBand as the bus to the individual processors (nodes).
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
If you just want it to show in moz/firebird rather than having to find the link and leech it first, use the mplayerplug-in and quicktime will display in the browser.
According to this page a 64k processor CM-2 could do 2500 megaflops. Looking at the #4 machine on the Top 500 list, NCSA's P4 Xeon based system, a 3GHz Xeon gets about 3.9 gigaflops. But then it doesn't have cool blink lights of a CM-2. Pretty amazing how far things have progressed. The first supercomputer, the Cray 1, introduced in 1976, did 160 megaflops and had 8 megabytes of memory. Kinda like a Palm Pilot.
The operating systems for the Earth Simulator (#1 supercomputer) is described on the following page:
e ra ting.html
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/Software/op
Because it is a vector based parallel processing machine it wouldn't be able to run standard OS's...
No, the poster wasn't lying. As a matter of fact, he was working for Microsoft and got fired for snapping that picture. They cited 'Security concerns'. Anyone have the link to that article?
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Paragraphs, man. They're useful.
Anyway.. no OpenMosix here, this is using MPI. Specifically, on top of DK Panda's MPI libraries, they brought Kazushige Goto in to optimize the BLAS libraries in order to obtain the Top500 ranking of 10+ TF.
Incidentally, the Top500 rankings are based on a standardized LINPACK benchmark and formula, not "raw" processor rankings. I saw another comment that implied the latter.
Other interesting notes:
In Apple's MacWorld presentation (and this film) they show how the VT supercomputer is #3 and they talk about the details, but barely touch on #2 and #1. I'm curious what operating systems primarily drive those two, but none of the searches on Google I'm doing are turning up the info that I'm seeking. Anyone have any links or resources to share that can clarify it?
Tried this?
It runs on 10.2 actually.
Saying that OS X (client) comes free with every new mac is like saying that the tires come free with every new car. You pay for them, they're just not a line item on the invoice.
Can you use iLife on those machines?
Are those machines going to be able to do 64 bit computing 2 years from now, when everything is 64 bit on both Mac and Windows ( well, maybe Windows. :^D )
I have one of those homebrew Athlon 2500 systems. Nice Antec case with the bling bling window, vantec tornado HSF, pretty blue fans, ATi 9500 Pro. It runs at 2366 Mhz on air, 100% stable. Then I got a dual 1.8 Ghz G5.
Ever since then, the PC gets used 5% of the time, and the G5 gets used the other 95%. I now use the the PC as a full time folding@home client so I get some use of it. The only thing I keep my PC around for is to play BF1942/Desert Combat, and I dont do that as much anymore either. I'm not 19 years old anymore and I can afford better.
Link here.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Good link describing basic functions of mach kernel and BSD layer here
The mach kernel supports things like scheduler, RPC, virtual memory, multiprocessing support etc.
The BSD layer provides TCP/IP stack, API, UNIX security model, file systems etc.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
BULLSHIT. MS purchased $150M of NON-VOTING STOCK in Apple. Apple didn't need the $150M at the time, really, it didn't. They still had $2B in cash at the time.
Rumor has it that the cash was to settle some patent infringment issues and another bit of payment that Apple demanded of MS for Apple dropping their claims was that MS had to commit to 5 years of development for Mac Office.
MS also had to hold the stock for two or more years. MS did so and made a shitload of money.
--Mike
It is amazing how ignorant people are to how much mark-up there are in computers.
... trust me.
I sell computers for a living, including Apple. I sell in very large quantities, to very large organizations.
Apple computers, along with Dell and HP/Compaq have tremendous internal markups. Upwards in the 30% range. The usual "5-10%" people talk about are the reseller markups, not the manufacturer markups.
The money is in accessories for resellers, not manufacturers. Get it right.
Also, Virginia Tech bought those machines at an excellent discount (compared to what other people get), but nothing extra-ordinary. Don't ever think ANYONE is getting $5,000 G5's for $4,000. That does not happen, ever. Even for orders of 5,000 machines. Literally, even not for orders of 5,000 machines
Make no mistake, Apple does not sell the majority of their products. And make no mistake, Apple's bread and butter are educational institutions. Virginia Tech got their money worth, but Apple made a pretty penny.
Now put to rest these base-less comments.
That's why all the high performance computing guys are using Infiniband.
Who else ? Can you cite 3 other clusters in the Top 500 using Infiniband ? I can't.
I cruised by the Cisco booth at SuperComputing and a fellow there told me that the VT cluster did not even use the Infiniband NIC for the HPL run, it used the GigE NIC and the IB was used only as a backbone between the Cisco switches. That would explain the disappointing HPL efficiency (58 %). Regarding the price, VT was smart to go to the vendors ready to not make money, even possibly lose a little, in order to gain visibility. Apple and Mellanox were perfect for that: Apple buying an advertisement campaign and Mellanox shipping stuff they don't sell otherwise.
So, to come back to your first claim, what really makes all this possible is the 4 Flops per cycle on the G5.
Yep! Microsoft announced the new Office 2004 for Mac at the MacWorld expo yesterday. Among the new features are toolbars that fade to transparent when not actively being used, so they don't eat up your available screen space, and new "fit to page" features in Excel, ensuring all your pie charts and graphs, etc. don't end up crossing between 2 seperate pages when printed out.
In fact, the MS rep made a point to comment that "Microsoft brought Word and Excel to the Mac before we ever wrote a Windows version."
Microsoft has also purchased VirtualPC from Connectix, and has VirtualPC 7.0 coming out for the Mac in the next few months - with full G5 processor support added. So yes, MS has plenty of reason to be purchasing Apple G5 computers!
They are called grad students. They even pay to be there.