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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."
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.
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.