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Mini-ITX Clustering
NormalVisual writes "Add this cluster to the list of fun stuff you can do with those tiny little Mini-ITX motherboards. I especially like the bit about the peak 200W power dissipation. Look Ma, no fans!! You may now begin with the obligatory Beowulf comments...."
... but that's about all it'll be useful for. A Nehemiah CPU is really weedy by todays standards, even the 1GHz one is about the same as a 600MH P3. So, he's got 12 of them, which is probably less CPU power than an average dual P4 motherboard...
Still, you can get some stats on how the clustering works, what's the best algorithm for dispersing problems, and these boards are cheap, but that's about the only advantage I can see...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Not to mention that mini-ITX is VIA-proprietary technology. At least, I think it is.
And VIA markets their own line of CPUs for use in that scenario.
However, I wouldn't mind seeing Pentium-M or mobile Athlons placed on mini-ITX boards.
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Yet another example of why you shouldn't do everything that you can do! These puppies aren't exactly famous for their flop-per-dollar ratio. In truthfully, it would be more efficient ( and cost effective) to make the cluster out of PIIIs. Anyhow, I'm off to go cluster a few toaster ovens, I hear that they offer a great delicious to efficiency ratio. Chris
I'd just like to point out that 12 nodes is not "massively parallel."
Perhaps many people would insist on using FP dollars and cents, but those people are fools, and it is very easy to part them with their money. Just make sure all the rounding errors work out in your favor, which isn't hard if you have access to their accounts.
Yeah I know that for small numbers FP has no rounding errors, but that doesn't last long.
the floating point performance (why else would you build a cluster?)
* To crack encryption?
* To compile big projects?
* To compress huge files?
How about scientific computing? That's really the big thing that keeps cluster computing alive. Cracking encryption is the only thing on that list that makes sense. The other stuff shows your lack of knowledge of other disciplines by the fact that you think these are computationally expensive tasks.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
It would be quite useful for a university with an undergraduate course in high performance computing to have their own little NoRMA cluster to play with without the space, heat, and power consumption of a supercomputer.
Let the researchers use the real supercomputer, but the undergraduates can still play with message passing parallel algorythms to their hearts content.
Well...I'd be able to get major numbers in SETI@Home...um...
Video encoding? (Now, where'd I put that parallel-processing version of AVISynth?)
Rent it out to a university?
Program it to solve chess and leave it going till it does?
Get a decent frame rate in any FPS, once and for all? (Note to self: develop parallel-processing graphics card.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Hmm, high availability and/or load balancing come to mind.
As others have said, the Nehemiah core based boards are really slick little widgets.
If the heatsink is massive, and it's made of aluminum, it probably makes up a significant number of the atoms in the computer. As a result, the Pentium M mini-itx board probably uses more electrons. It also, purely coincidentally, uses more electricity than the Nehemiah boards.
Here's your link, by the way.
I've had this sig for three days.
See, that's how I used to think. G4 at 800MHz... 4 fp operations in parallel with altivec... 3.2GFlop goodness. But of course, why stop there? With various tuning, you can get up to 32-way parallel integer math (although going beyond 16, admittedly, sucks). 3.2 GFlop is nice, but 25.6 G-ops ain't too shabby.
I've had this sig for three days.
Mod me....
Informative:
If you're looking for a small form factor for high-end processors, you will likely find future products using the picoBTX form factor. The motherboard layout provides better cooling for hot processors that mini-ITX can't address. Here's a summary of the BTX form factors from Anandtech.
Interesting:
Has anyone figured out how to use the floating point power in their graphics cards for non-video applicaitons? Those things are becoming powerful that they use their own heat sinks. Just like we had floating point chips for the 486SX series, perhaps it will be more cost-effective and power-effective in the future to separate commodity, low-cost, and low-power I/O processing from floating point processing.
If graphics card developers start thinking of their cards as being more like floating point coprocessors and less like device controllers, they can help drive future floating point computing and leave traditional central processors to manage memory and I/O.
Redundant:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of video cards!
-ez
Disclaimer: I use a 500MHz Celeron on my desk and a 300MHz laptop at home. I'm not a luddite - I just don't utilize a 3D "rich" graphical environment to surf the web, create documents, and manage computers.
The floating point is just a convenience. Almost any algorithm can be modified to work with fixed point precision -- and without loss of performance.
Apparently you've never done any numerical computing, especially of the scientific variety. In an astrophysics simulation, for instance, the density of a field may span over 20 orders of magnitude, hardly reasonable to do with fixed point arithmetic.
Not to mention that many iterative algorithms can oscillate wildly in the presence of numerical error.
It is true that there are many other uses for a cluster besides numerical computing, however the idea that any floating point algorithm can be converted to fixed point could not be more wrong.
Disclaimer: My research at Cornell University is high performance clustered numerical computing.
Cheers,
Justin
As a green geek I can't resist pointing out this merit: with only a 200W power dissipation this would be "home friendly" even in a non air conditioned house during the hot Mississippi summers. And with only a 200W PEAK draw, the entire system could be powered by a single PV panel and one or two storage batteries. Trade the "high quality UPS" for a couple of batteries and a PV panel (or cheaper still if you're in the midwest or near a coastline, a windmill) and you have a cluster that could run without any "store bought" AC at all.
Screw Beowulf Clusters...Open Mosix Clusters are where it's at! http://openmosix.sourceforge.net
Open Source. It's the difference between trust and antitrust.