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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!"
:/
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!
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.
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: