Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Tech Upgrade: PowerMac G5 to Xserve G5
An anonymous reader writes "Virginia Tech officially announced that they will be migrating their G5 Supercomputer from PowerMac G5s to Xserves.
According to the article, the Xserve G5s will reduce power consumption, heat production and decrease the system size by a factor of three. The pricing of the upgrade is still being determined, and according to Srinidhi Varadarajan, they are working on getting "very good homes" for the PowerMac G5s which will be replaced."
It really amazes me that VT can afford to waste so much money on a super-computer. Really, could they have not waited the 4 months to get their brand new shiney G5 based super-computer and not wasted so much money on all those G5 towers?
I mean sure they can use them in computer labs and such but it still seems like a waste in the current education environment of tight budgets and program cutting.
All Im saying is that this money probably could have been put to better use else where than getting VT their brand new toy "right now" instead of waiting 4 whole months to get the hardware they really needed for the project.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
Of course, in the original implementation (which some of the VTech guys had actually ported to Gentoo to replace the emerge system!), I had to rely on ASCII graphics and animations to replicate the Quartz Expose graphics. But, running natively on Mac OS X and G5 hardware, it would be possible to strip out the text Expose animations, and write PowerPC 970 assembler to directly invoke the OpenGL version! That's not all though. Because the load placed on apt-get-expose would be much larger for a cluster the size of Vtech's, I had to code a parallel graphics engine, taking advantage of the AltiVec unit on each G5. This new implementation, coded in tight hand-tuned Python, actually replicates the entire DirectX 9 platform, but using AltiVec calls for enhanced speed. That way I can use the same code base for Mac OS X and Windows XP when win-apt-get is released.
Man you should see them down at VTech now. Those guys are loving being able to manage up to 1024 individual apt-get sessions at once, and with a simple tap of the F9 key, select a package upgrade from anywhere on the network. It's an example of how the new Apple, open source, and the ingenuity of the original apt-get developers can combine to produce something bigger than just a fancy window tiling animation. apt-get show desktop out.
You can bet that the VT is HEAVILY supported by mac marketing devicion. Even the original prices look suspeciosly cheap, and the machine was just ready at the right time to enter top500.
And questions about missing ecc ect were evaded,ect...
I suspect that the machine until now was nothing more than a apple marketing stunt and has not done any real computational work besides network/topology testing an a top500 linpack run.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
This is really amazing to me. They spend a chunk of coin
on the system, barely get it up and running, don't actually use it for anything, and then run out and upgrade it 4 months later. Sounds like a typical home computer geek!
But really, shouldn't somebody be better managing the money
there and saying 'hey go do something worthwhile with your new toy, then ask for more money'?
Is it just me, or has this reeked of bad engineering since the beginning? Most everything I've heard from them came from what sounded like Mac/G5 zealotry, rather than actual engineering. If you look at their slide show, they discounted a whole bunch of platforms because they would be 1.5 months later than Apple (to me the "Build and Benchmark" lines sounded like this hasn't been done. There was also no price/performance-type curve, etc.). Their justification for running OS-X also sounds like the sort of propaganda you hear from Mac bigots.
/proc/pci would overflow).
I'm not arguing the G5 is the wrong platform -- I'm just arguing the G5 wasn't chosen because it's the right platform, but because the guy in charge of the project is an Apple zealot. The G5 was quite possibly the right platform. MacOS-X is less clear; it's fundamentally an end-user OS. Linux has a huge amount of active development in high performance computing/clustering, and the kernel reflects that. The Linux kernel is also much more readable, and known by more people, so custom modifications (for low-latency communications with specific hardware, etc.) are a lot easier to do. This is not atypical -- when I was working on a little 18-way cluster of then-state-of-the-art dual PIIIs, I recall needing to tweak one or two things in the kernel (for reasons I won't go into, we had a large number of things on the PCI bus, and
It's not clear how well the G5 version of Linux is optimized (although it should be trivial to reoptimize it for the G5 if it's not -- probably a couple months kernel hacker time), but my impression is the VaTech guys didn't bother to investigate this, and instead said "We've got a full-fledged FreeBSD under MacOS!" and ran with it. Nothing I can find on their web site indicates any sort of competitive comparison.
The "minimal cost" of upgrading compared to the 5 million budget is bogus. That's over a thousand high-end Apple boxes. Those things cost considerably more than a grand each to produce (raw manufacturing costs), so that's easily over a fifth of their budget. They'll probably do some funky accounting to make it look minimal (give G5s to profs, who don't really want them, or place them in computer labs, or similar, and discount the cost it would have taken to do this in the first place). To be doing this change this late means they f-ed up big on some design parameter early on (didn't realize space/power/thermal limitations, didn't investigate other G5 platforms, or similar). I know university funding doesn't work like normal funding (money comes from sponsors, and some expensive things are "free", while some cheap things are unaffordable), but that doesn't make up for the huge cost.
I know people will be screaming that Apple or IBM probably footed much of the bill, but I think had VaTech talked to Intel or AMD, they could have gotten a similar offer (although the other chip houses probably couldn't have matched it).
Anyways, I won't rant and rave more. Everything I said is based on minimal information -- looking at the VaTech site, there just isn't that much. As a result, some of what I said might be wrong. Anyone from VaTech with actual facts care to provide some insight? By facts, I mean "The PIII-3.2GHz costs x dollars per box, while the G5 costs y dollars. We benchmarked them with z scientific computing test, and found the G5 has w advantage," rather than "we downloaded some benchmarks from a Macintosh web site." More importantly, provide insight on why you chose MacOS-X (got any benchmarks?)