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Own a Piece of An Apple-Based Supercomputer
Graff writes "Now that Apple has come out with the Xserve G5, Virginia Tech has been swapping out parts of their 'System X' supercomputer for the more compact 1U Xserves. MacMall is selling some of those System X component G5 systems with an approximate $200 savings and an extra 512 megs of RAM over a normal G5. You can read more about it at MacCentral."
I bag the 'go-faster' stripes on the case !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
I wish there was some kind of engraving on the aluminium casing stating something like "Virginia Tech, Supercomputer node #758 - 2003" Then they could definitively sell it at a Premium. I mean I can get this kind of computer off ebay for more or less the smae price. I need some kind of souvenir that it's from Virginia. How about sending it through the IPOD engraving shop?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Only 6 months of use out of these things and VT is tossing them out like yesterday's trash. Gee, thanks for doing this after delaying my order for 6 weeks back when the G5s were originally supposed to be shipping to the rest of us. Apparently you didn't need them that badly after all.
8==8 Bones 8==8
It is nice to see the inclusion of PCI-X, we can hope that this is the start of the end of "old" PCI. I was a bit confused by the decision to include Firewire in this machine. I know it is an apple kind of penchant, but surely a server won't need firewire. Who wants to use a firewire hard disk with a server? You're more likely to back up onto tape. It seems akin to a High End commodity intel server having an Audigy sound card with optical out, I don't think there is much point. I think some of the features could have been thought about more on the machine rather than lamely following the tradition of previous iMACs. However, it looks like a great machine, and Mac is coming up in mine, and many other x86 users (I believe) opinions.
tim
Did Virginia Tech's System X have any impact on Apple release the Xserve G5?
/still pissed at Dell for not offering Athlon's, I wanted a 64 bit processor and AMD and Apple were the only companies offering them three months ago
Did the Xserve get any benefit from the optimization of the Big Mac?
Is Virginia Tech going to lose money on this deal?
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
As someone else noted, if they were engraved or etched or something that would make them special.
Why couldn't VT hold their horses? ...)
my bet is... they could.
no one likes building any cluster (not to mention a supercomputer) out of desktops, esp. ones configured like desktops (gfx, no ecc,
but apple really wanted the PR of having the computer cluster, and perhaps to list the revenue in 4Q2003.
so i can't blame them - looks like a fair deal.
Although, I agree that a bit of engraving would go some way towards supporting their value. Is there anything at all, beyond that 1 sentence on the website, for a purchaser to establish that they really do have one of the Virginia Tech machines?
'Never buy the first version of anything' - even if it is $200 less than list price, has been well looked after, comes with an extra 512Mb and used to be part of a supercomputer. Rev2 or 3 is always a better purchase.
"This is crazy, you realise we could all go to jail for this?" - my manager, somewhere I used to work.
So they can make money when people forget to send the form on time, or fill it in incorrectly.
Several companies in the UK do the same for extended warranties. They say "pay lots of money and if your machine doesn't break, we'll refund it after five years". You typically get 30 days after the five years to get your money back, and most people will just forget.
Should that be a concern? Do these 6 month old computers already have 2-3 years of typical mileage on some of their components?
This is an educational and research establishment, not a commercial enterprise.
/.) that Virginia Tech would have sold the units to students, freshmen, whatever, at a knock down rate. Or even used a ton of them within the university itself.
You'd have thought (as some students were hinting here at
Yet more profiteering from a supposedly educational institution.
Actually you were modded down because you were commenting on the sites normal rates and not the actual virginia computers which were on the side.
Then you went offtopic griping about mail in rebates
Karma's over rated. Speak your mind.
Of course this is simple. They make the profit from those that don't send in the rebates. Sounds like the whole insurance scam, well I don't use it, so why do I have it?
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
No but Apple gave all the editors free TiBooks IIRC...
Not to mention that PowerPC chips "load" non-linearly compared to other architectures -- that is, they become far less efficient at, say the top 8-10% of CPU usage time, both electrically and logically. If true, this could definitely shorten their lifespan if it causes excessive heat stress.
Unfortunately, I don't have anything to back that up. Occasionally Google is not so friendly.
Karma: Positive (mostly due to rash moderations)
oo..damn.. it was!
Probably the only actual record the big mac can claim is the shortest time to obsolescence. Not to downplay the achievement though...
Well, it's the fastest supercomputer ever built with off-the-shelf components and the number three fastest machine on the planet -- and that's before the upgrade.
They will probably make quite a decent profit out of this, despite the $200 discount. They must have got pretty decent discount from apple for both bulk buying and promotion. And any self respecting geek will want one of these over a stock G5
As someone else pointed out, these are refurbished by Apple and then sold through MacMall. VT isn't selling them, but traded them back in to Apple for credit towards the Xserves.
Life is short: void the warranty.
In Connecticut, this practice is illegal. You can not say something is free if it involves a rebate - you must say something like :
$100
-$100 rebate
Don't Tread on Me
Why oh why do companies use mail in rebates?
so they can stick low price tags in big numbers on the shelf. That's gotten me a few times - you see, "Oh, an X for only $19.95!" so you take it up to the counter, and the cashier rings you up for $39.95 - often by then the consumer is already psychologically committed and just pays it. It's a common tactic, rebates are just one methode of exploiting consumer naivety. Bottom line is, it generates more sales.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Actually, VT and Apple have both stated on a few occasions that they paid the normal price for all 1100 nodes.
Apple's online store is charging $2399 for refurbed dual G5s, and the student store's price for a new dual G5 is $2699, $100 less than the MacMall refurbs from Tech. You can even take $26 more off for getting rid of the internal mode, which the supercomputer refurbs don't have either.
Even if you add the extra 512 megs of RAM from Apple's site (where prices aren't the best), these Va Tech refurbs are only $100 less than what a student would spend on the same box new. Not to mention these 2 GHz duallies are rated as "Buy only if you need it - Approaching the end of a cycle" on the Macrumors buyers' guide page.
So not a deal at all if you're a student (though I have to think students at Va Tech could get the inside track on the boxes -- anyone know?) and not a great price for a refurb if you're Joe Schmoe. And not a box with great longevity, relatively speaking, either, if Macrumors has the lifecycle pegged.
Wait for a processor speed bump unless you're dying to own a little bit of celebrity.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
What would be spiffy if there was a way that they could do SOME of the math on the GPUs. I never saw a product that could do that, but it would be rather fast. No?
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I beg to differ. I believe that the G5 XServe is an iMac decendant, in the same way that we are decended from somethingopithicus and will continue to evolve into pure being of light. [this neatly ties in all three /. stories, beat it if you can. 1.this story. 2.light chips. 3.culture in animals.]
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
Hey, that's cool. Where else could you get G5s with ECC memory so cheaply?
They do have ECC memory, right? Having been part of a supercomputer....
My guess is that both they and Apple wanted to have a spot on the last Top 500 list, with all the associated press at the Supercomputing 2003 conference. Apple's been trying to convince somebody, anybody to build a large HPC cluster with their hardware since the G3 came out. Until the G5 came out, it made very little sense economically -- the per-system price for Apple kit was 30-40% more than comparable Intel-based stuff, and the memory bandwidth and 64-bit floating point performance was the same or worse. The G5 fixed that, for the most part
Nobody in their right mind wants to build a cluster out of machines in desktop/deskside chasses. We've done it once, with the first generation Itanium systems where there was no rackmount option for a 2-way box, and we'll never do it again -- remote management of those machines was and is actively painful. (Our 1st-gen Itanium cluster is out of production service now, but it's been partitioned up into smaller clusters at universities around the state as part of the Cluster Ohio project, which we still manage.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
They used to run all simulations twice to verify the non-ECC RAM was returning the desired result. As a consequence the system will speed up two-fold in real life use. Now that is a performance gain!
anyway if you look at the specs you can see all the silly stuff.... that cluster does not need 1100 Superdrives, or 1100 Radeon 9600 cards..... let alone size and whatnot... i'm sure it was done because the Xserves were just too far off and it was the only machine out there with the G5/970 chip for sale to anyone.
look at the specs:
The systems sold by MacMall are listed as 2.0GHz Power Mac G5s equipped with 1GB DDR SDRAM (2 512MB memory cards); equipped with 160GB ATA drives, a SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics processor, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports, 2 FireWire 400 ports and 1 FireWire 800 port, along with an AirPort Extreme card slot and no modem -- in other words, a stock Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz system with a memory upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
it does seem the pulled the fibre cards out... they are optional in Xserves... maybe they just swapped those? i don't know if they are the same in both machines normally.
And an original Lisa sold from Apple for $9,999. Hmmm. $1 profit. There's your return on investment.
I believe refurb products have a 90 day warranty from Apple.
"massive wear and tear" is also known as "verified reliability"' to some people.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
This may be juuuuuust a bit off-topic, but...
/.'ers are capable of bringing to the party.
With the inclusion of ECC in the new XServes, and Apple's slow-but-steady propogation of high-end features towards the lower end, how likely is it that we'll see ECC in some future rev (maybe even this alleged-real-soon-now bump) of the desktop G5s?
It's been many years since my computer architecture coursework, so I am not sure that there's even a real cost-benefit reason to do so. I look forward to reading any brilliant insights that
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
OS X supports TCP/IP over firewire. Firewire has significantly lower latency than ethernet, and it's a shared bus.
So Apple's biotech clusters use FW800 as a large, shared bus for distributing work packets. It's like a "free" high speed low latency third ethernet port... great for shared high-speed communications.
1. Buy computers from Apple at discounted price to create supercomputer.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Well, from what I can see there is barely any difference between the memory controllers on the two systems. It looks like it was just a new revision of the same ASIC. Apple doesn't exactly provide many details on this, but it looks like the new memory/processor controller chip would be a drop-in replacement for the chip used on the original Powermac. Therefore it's possible (even likely) that they will use this new revision on the next revamp of the G5 line. In fact, they could well start slipping them into the current line-up without telling anyone about it.
I don't anticipate that Apple will sell any desktop G5's with ECC memory installed at the factory, but if the memory controller supports ECC you could easily replace the factory memory with third-party ECC memory.
How many intelligence agencies are there worldwide? How many list their mainframes in the 500 list? What was the last time we knew about the exciting things people like the NSA and GCHQ were doing with computers? World War II. Now take how far ahead of academic computing they were in 1945 and add 50 years worth of Moore's law, Cold War and funky Russian mathematics geniuses.
I bet NSA has stuff that makes this look like a gameboy.
--
Before modding "troll", go look up the meaning of the words discussion, rhetorical and "devil's advocate".
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
That's an integer multiply-add. The PowerPC 970 can do a double-precision floating point multiple-add, and that is what the Opteron and P4 lack. They can get pretty decent throughput for this sort of thing using SSE2, but only about half of the throughput, clock for clock, that a PPC 970 can get.
Given that getting on the Top500 list seemed to the main goal of this system, and that list uses only the (very limited) Linpack benchmark which is essentially nothing but multiply-adds, this makes the PPC 970 a much better chip. Of course, for real-world code, the difference might not be nearly as large and in many situations the P4 or Opteron could easily be a lot faster.
Of course, one question that could easily come out of this is WHY doesn't SSE2 include a double-precision floating point multiply-add instruction? You would have to ask Intel about that one, because it seems like a natural instruction to have in SSE2 if you ask me. Even with the updated SSE3 they didn't add this.
In my experience the price of Macs depreciates far less with time than your standard x86 boxen.
First of all, buying a new Mac is generally expensive.
Secondly, Apple's computers are generally made with solid, high-quality components and last a long time.
I just sold a single-processor G4/450Mhz Sawtooth for $400 the other day: that's a 4 year old machine that cost about $2000 new, yet can still be sold at %20 of original price.
Of course, for real-world code, the difference might not be nearly as large and in many situations the P4 or Opteron could easily be a lot faster.
"real-world code" *is* multiply-adds, when we're talking about scientific computing (and why else would you need a 1,100-node cluster?)
Just called, no need to call.. they're all gone.. shucks.
-Jim
Not every. But most. Solving ODE's usually boils down to iterating a (possibly implicit) linear system. Solving PDE's with finite differences does too. Or with finite elements. Or spectral methods. Lots of statistical computations do too.
Certainly there *are* scientific applications that don't involve multiply-adds, it's just that the vast bulk of scientific computations that are suitable for parallelization really boil down to solving linear systems, some kind of linear iteration, least-squares problems, or some combination. All of which are solved using lots of multiply-adds. So, while linpack isn't the end-all and be-all of hpc benchmarks, i'd say that it's a pretty good guideline; i'd also say that the speed of multiply-adds matters a whole hell of a lot for scientific computing.
WHY doesn't SSE2 include a double-precision floating point multiply-add instruction?
Most instructions take two operands, but a multiply-add takes three, so you need an extra port on the register file and enough space in the instruction encoding to fit four register numbers. I'm not familiar with the specifics of SSE2, though.