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North America's Fastest Linux Cluster Constructed
SeanAhern writes "LinuxWorld reports that 'A Linux cluster deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and codenamed 'Thunder' yesterday delivered 19.94 teraflops of sustained performance, making it the most powerful computer in North America - and the second fastest on Earth.'" Thunder sports 4,096 Itanium 2 processors in 1,024 nodes, some big iron by any standard.
And you thought I was going to say something else...
That is indeed one badass piece of silicon.
Now, this may sound stupid, but, who has the fastest computer in the World?
But why did they use itanium processors? Were they acquiring parts before Opterons were availabel? Did they have a problem with Xeon processors? Or did they have too much cash lying around?
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
...who gets the electric bill.
I cringe when I leave the A/C on for too long..
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Look, any way you cut it the 100K computers Google is reputed to have is the most powerful Linux cluster anywhere in the world.
Is it fast enough to run all the latest spyware, adware, and viruses and not slow down your solitaire game?
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
That's amazing!
Now we can... uhh... what are we supposed to do with that much power again?
Can it run Windows?
You missed "All your base..."
3)????? Not everyting my friend..
2 + 2 = 5. Big Brother's watching you. bonglord.com
LLNL built a supercomputer, and it's going to do things besides simulate nuclear weapons?
Quick, someone ring Satan and ask how the sno-cones are.
Please help metamoderate.
http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie= UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ellnl%2Eg ov%2Flinux%2Fthunder%2F
With the moo and the cow and the fish. Minesweeper Record: 7 sec
this thing should do doom 3 with a software renderer at a very playable 47 FPS...
This is probably a stupid question, but would anyone care to explain how this is different than a really large cluster. For example, if people estimate google to approach 100K nodes, how does this compare?
...I can back up my brain
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
What's with the weather? It's been so DRY lately.
...there are basically three type of clusters: 1) shared nothing: in this, each computer is only connected to each other via simple IP network. no disks are shared. each machine serves part of data. these cluster doesn't work reliably when you have to aggregations. e.g. if one of the machine fails and you try to to "avg()" and if the data is spread across machines, the query would fail, since one of the machine is not available. most enterprise apps cannot work in this config without degradation. e.g. IBM study showed that 2 node cluster is slower and less reliable than 1 node system when running SAP IBM on windows and unix and MS uses this type of clustering (also called federated database approach or shared nothing approach). 2) shared disk between two computers: in this case, there are multiple machines and multiple disks. each disk is atleast connected to two computers. if one of the computer fails, other takes over. no mainstream database uses this mode, but it is used by hp-nonstop. still, each machine serves up part of the data and hence standard enterprise apps like SAP etc cannot take clustering advantage without lot of modification. 3) shared everything: in this, each disk is connected to all the machines in the cluster. any number of machines can fail and yet the system would keep running as long as atleast one machine is up. this is used by Oracle. all the machine sees all the data. standard apps like SAP etc can be run in this kind of configs with minor modification or no modification at all. this method is also used by IBM in their mainframe database (which outsells their windows and unix database by huge margine). most enterprise apps are deployed in this type of cluster configuration. the approach one is simpler from hardware point of view. also, for database kernel writers, this is the easiest to implement. however, the user would need to break up data judiciously and spread acros s machines. also adding a node and removing a node will require re-partitioning of data. mostly only custom apps which are fully aware of your partitioning etc will be able to take advantage. it is also easy to make it scale for simple custom app and so most of TPC-C benchmarks are published in this configuration. approach 3 requires special shared disk system. the database implementation is very complex. the kernel writers have to worry about two computers simultaneously accessing disks or overwriting each others data etc. this is the thing that Oracle is pushing across all platforms and IBM is pushing for its mainframes. approach 2 is similar to approach 1 except that it adds redundancy and hence is more reliable. so what type are we talking about here?
And only 55 people were needed to build it!
Betya this thing could run longhorn in bochs faster than you will on real hardware :P
19.94 teraflops??
Gimmy something I can grasp; what's this in BogoMips?
Also in completely unrelated news, Bill Gates announced the first fully installed test of Longhorn happened today.
Hey, with a Beowulf cluster of these, I can run Longhorn!
OK, I'm done. Sorry. Mod away!
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
If I calculate right, they are claiming an Rmax of 19.94 teraflops with 4096 processors.
The Virginia Tech cluster for Apple had an Rmax of 10.28 teraflops with 2200 processors.
So, the Itaninum 2 delivered 4.8 gigaflops per processor, the G5 delivered 4.6 gigaflops per processor.
This seems like a pretty poor showing for Itanium 2, overall. It's a much hotter chip than the Opteron or the G5, so cooling and power costs are likely much higher than a comparable apple cluster. The Xserve G5 is also likely cheaper than a similarly equipped Itanium 2 server, given that the Itanium 2 is $1398 per chip on Pricewatch, and a dual processor Xserve G5 cluster node is $2,999 list. Even with 4 cpus in a single box, I think the Itanium 2 server would easily top $6,000.
But anyway, good game to Lawrence Livermore. I'll be curious to see if Apple has another volley to fire before the top500 list closes for this round.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
"We sold the Inaniums! We sold the Inaniums!"
Okay... imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! Actually, here it is.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
yeah, that we know about. I remember the article on google a few weeks ago that made everyone think just what they hell they're running over there. I wouldn't be surprised if governments kept other supercomputing clusters secret. I don't mean anything tin-foil-hatish here, I'm just thinking that some governments have test facilities that they don't let the public know about.
x86_64 will be the arch of choice, and this proves it.
4,096 Itanium 2 processors in 1,024 nodes
So THAT'S what's causing our heat wave!
Here's a picture: http://doc.quadrics.com/quadrics/QuadricsHome.nsf/ DisplayPages/3A912204F260613680256DD9005122C7
Oh... right.
Now you can't say you have the fastest "Thupercomputer" any more! You've been beat by Intel and Linux!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Itanium's don't run X86_64, they run IA_64.
God damn you are stupid. That is all.
"How about a real os,"
Hmmm.. FreeBSD 4.4 base with the best gui isn't real?
"I can't get any nic laying in a box to work on a mac"
This sounds like a user error to me. Almost every piece of hardware I plugin is automatically picked up.
you keep referring to x86 when this article is not based on IA32, but Itanium IA64.
"But chances are I can buy *cheap* video editing hardware and *cheap* good soundcards that work sweet with these things."
The sound cards in Macs are already top notch as is core audio - just look in any sound studio worth their salt.
I like linux as much as the next guy, but don't shout off about things you aren't intelligent about.
that they didn't build this just to win 2 grand from distributed.net.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Microsoft counters that their new Windows Server farm is 25% faster and has 50% less TCO.
And whats so wrong with AMD?
-Imidazole
Hilarious Office Prank!
yes, they're hot as hell and eat power the way oprah eats twinkies, and yes Intel has made a poor handling of the Itanium line, but the Itanium architecture is very interesting, and is actually very appropriate for a HPC environment. Not the part of the HPC market that clusters dominate, but the segment that Cray, SGI, HP Alphaservers, etc. have traditionally dominated. The segment that doesn't give a shit about cooling, power consumption, or price-performance, but who just need to get the job done as quickly as possible.
Some of the coolest features of the Itanium are also some of the reasons why a lot of people don't want to use it. The EPIC ISA, for example. It was designed ( along w/ the physical hardware ) to expose a lot of the internal workings of the processor to the user. But rather than recompile and re-optimize their code, people would rather bitch about migration. That's fine for workstations and servers, but in an HPC environment, you want the nifty features, you want to occasionally hand-tune code segments in assembler, etc.
Anyways, I'm not a fanboy ( well, maybe an AMD and MIPS fanboy ), just wanted to get in a few honest points before everyone started shooting holes in the Itanic.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
You honestly think they built this machine to "stick it to the mac"
Wow, talk about zealot distorted reality. I'm amazed by your total lack of intelligent thought.
"Some might argue that powerpc and sparc64 is more scalable than x86. But ask yourself, is it really?"Last I checked, this ITANIUM2 machine isn't about proving scalabity on x86 arch machines (btw ITANIUM isn't your typical home consumer x86 boxen). In fact I think they were going for specific types of computation when this was developed, but you know...I may wrong. :rolleyes:
Its all about choosing the right hardware for the job.
Your last statement is bullshit too. x86 is the most common arch because of original ease of use and relatively cheap hardware. Just because you can get drivers for a lot of "NIC's" on Linux boxes doesn't exactly prove that x86 is more scalable.
FLAMEBAITI'm going to guess and call troll. I almost bit on it but then I restrained my self when I realized that the poster didn't really say anything intelligent. For a consumer there is really no need to upgrade a computer other than memory. When is the last time your mom went out and bought a new motherboard for her PC? Thats what I thought, it probably never happened.
I'm still waiting to see how much this cluster costs. I'm going to guess it was a pretty penny with quad Itanium processors.
do they have the nerve to go after this cluster?
afterall they are trying extortion by lawyer against other large Linux users
No...... 1) Imagine a beowulf cluster of insensitive soviet russian clods belonging all your base that run linux 2) Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers 3) ?????? 4) profit
did you copy this post or did you both just copy from some other forum?
"We sold the Inaniums! We sold the Inaniums!"
"The Itaniums, however, remain unsold."
*hopes that was not an actual mistake but rather a poorly conceived pun on "inane"...*
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Itanium isn't x86.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Back in the days of Karma points, there was a perl script called "Karma50.pl" that did that trick...
Can it run WINE?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thunder sports 4,096 Itanium 2 processors in 1,024 nodes, some big iron by any standard.
If the government gets a hold of that, we're going to need some big tinfoil...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The NSA, on the other hand... I would guess that they have the most powerful cluster of machines in the world for breaking encryption. Though perhaps not as powerful as the article's supercomputer for other tasks.
Plus there are undoubtedly several other highly classified supercomputers designed to chew on other problems.
So it would seem that you'd have to caveat any claim of regarding the "fastest computer" by saying it's the fastest known, non-secret computer. But then the headline loses some of its appeal.
I think that speaks volumes as to the usefulness of LLNL's research. After all, it's been 10 years, and there are still no hydrogen-powered cars available for purchase by consumers. Furthermore, there is extremely little research needed in the area; hydrogen conversion kits were developed by numerous companies and individuals decades ago.
Why no hydrogen cars? Well, it could have something to do with hydrogen being a net-loss fuel; it takes more energy to make than it provides. But hey, Dubya loves it. Why? Well, you can extract hydrogen from natural gas(which pollutes just as much as burning natural gas, but it moves the emissions out of sight of the consumer, yay!)
Why is it people like you who hear "Nuke" rant on and on like biased little children and post inflamatory things like this?
I'll stop ranting when my nation's defense budget isn't the largest in the world several times over both in total and per capita- we spend OVER 50% of our budget on "defense" and our budget is larger than our top 3 potential enemies -combined-. Those are 2001 stats, mind you- and the defense budget has only gone up.
Please help metamoderate.
Twid (67847)'s post is dated Thursday May 13, @11:10PM
callipygian-showsyst (631222)'s post is dated Thursday May 13, @11:27PM
Now, which one was posted first again?
... if you want a practically guided tour of LLNL, watch TRON sometime. They filmed it there (the science-lab live action stuff anyway).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...can i play warcraft3 on it?
Gotcha. Ha, ha!
The segment that doesn't give a shit about cooling, power consumption, or price-performance, but who just need to break up data judiciously and spread acros s machines. Also adding a node will require re-partitioning of data. Mostly only custom apps which are fully aware of your partitioning etc will be able to take advantage.
It is also likely cheaper than a similarly equipped Itanium 2 server would easily top $6,000. But anyway, good game to Lawrence Livermore. I'll be curious to see if Apple has another volley to fire before the top500 list closes for this round.
- "When you want to occasionally hand-tune code segments in assembler, etc."
Anyways, I'm not a fan of Intel lately, but the Itanium could have been a good choice. ALSO: Don't forget that the Itanium 2 is $1398 per chip on Pricewatch, and a dual processor Xserve.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Google's cluster isn't a computational cluster.
You have several types of clusters, each are designed to do a specific task, although you can easily mix-n-match for different purposes.
1. Server clusters. Bunches of machines running together, providing services that compliment each other.
For example you have a file server that is mirrored to another that is hooked up to a different part of a Lan/Wan backbone in order to improve service. Lot's of databases are clusters like this.
2. High avaiblity clusters.
You have a machines that are backups of other machines. If one machine fails a backup is activated instantly and replaces the failed machine without ANY loss in services.
Sort of like a RAID harddrive setup. Hotswappable computers, that sort of thing.
Google is the first 2 types. It has several clusters with nodes. Each node is made up of a few computers, if a node fails then another backup can back it up instantly, giving the techs time to correctly fix the issue. The computers each take some of the burden, too, so that it seems that they would have to be running mega-machines to provide the performance when in reality they just run a bunch of PC-style computers.
3. Computational clusters. Clusters that are designed to pool their resources to create a single big computer that is used to proccess large amounts of data and intense mathmatical functions.
2 types of these are Beowolf clusters and OpenMosix clusters.
OpenMosix cluster is easy to setup if your a little bit familar with linux and even have knoppix cluster cdroms you can build ones quickly and easily.
Beowolf is used for big number crunching and programs that use it are generally written to run a specific cluster, although libraries and tools are portable.
Used lots in astromony for example. 10-12 PCs in a college lab can make a nice number crunching machine.
There are some clusters that do all 3, lots can do only 1 or 2 of the types easily. Different types can compliment each other.
Too bad this article is about an Itanium cluster, not x86.
THE NERD IS THE COMPUTER.
I thought North America is suppose to be the leader of technology. I guess i was wrong...
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
That a roomfull of Chevettes means that someone has an unhealthy obsession with Vauxhall's...
Nothing is as whiney as a Vauxhall Chevette doing 125km/h down the motorway, knowing that it ain't gonna get any faster, except maybe on a slope.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
"Big Iron" is a very vague term - server benchmarks behave very differently than scientific computation as far as performance is concerned; if you don't believe me I can easily point you to a couple of research papers analyzing them.
The humongous on-die caches makes the Itanium perform well on servers, and definitely not the instruction-set architecture. So "WAS DESIGNED FOR" is only 50% true.
The Raven
At least we have girlfriends and dont live in our parents basement.
Seriously. The basement's too cold.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Intel provides excellent Linux support for Itanium. Also if you use the Intel compiler, which Lawrence Livermore does, you get considerable speed boost on Intel CPUs.
l ers
See: http://www.llnl.gov/linux/linux_basics.html#compi
Intel can afford to provide little niceties like this. Can AMD? I doubt it.
Actually, I majored in physics.
Re-read my post. Hydrogen, like gasohol, is a negative net fuel. Which means it takes more energy to make the fuel, than you get out of burning it. Same as Gasohol, which is produced from corn.
Hydrogen is just the New Gasohol, politically. Gasohol is a huge piece of pork barrel spending that mostly lines the pockets of Archer Daniels Midland(ADM) and to a much lesser extent corn growers...to the tune of $1.4B+/yr since the early 70's.
Please help metamoderate.
19.94 is the first result we see for this new cluster, and likely the only. The first result for the Big Mac cluster was closer to 7 than 11, but the cluster was tuned and linpack rerun and resubmitted several times over several months. Although there is nothing wrong with that, it is quite unusual for the top500 linpack benchmark. This is a significant edge for the Big Mac. We can't say how much since other clusters usually don't get this special treatment.
This reason is likely because without ecc memory there wasn't much point in running real workloads on the Big Mac. That has been corrected now, with the XServe G5 systems.
Ed Note: Unless the author wishes to narrow his/her audience to a small subset of Slashdot users, standard formatting and non-cutesy sentence case is always appropriate.
There are basically three type of clusters:
Shared Nothing: In this, each computer is only connected to each other via simple IP network: no disks are shared. and each machine serves part of data. These cluster doesn't work reliably when you have to aggregations. For example, if one of the machine fails and you try to to "avg()" and if the data is spread across machines, the query would fail, since one of the machine is not available. Most enterprise apps cannot work in this config without degradation. For example, IBM study showed that 2 node cluster is slower and less reliable than 1 node system when running SAP IBM on windows and unix and MS uses this type of clustering (also called federated database approach or shared nothing approach).
Shared Disk Between Two Computers: In this case, there are multiple machines and multiple disks. Each disk is at least connected to two computers. If one of the computer fails, other takes over. no mainstream database uses this mode, but it is used by hp-nonstop. Still, each machine serves up part of the data and hence standard enterprise apps like SAP etc cannot take clustering advantage without lot of modification.
Shared Everything: In this, each disk is connected to all the machines in the cluster. Any number of machines can fail and yet the system would keep running as long as at least one machine is up. This is used by Oracle. All the machine sees all the data. Standard apps like SAP etc can be run in this kind of configs with minor modification or no modification at all. This method is also used by IBM in their mainframe database (which outsells their Windows and Unix database by huge margin).
Most enterprise apps are deployed in this type of cluster configuration. The approach one is simpler from hardware point of view. Also, for database kernel writers, this is the easiest to implement. However, the user would need to break up data judiciously and spread across machines. Also adding a node and removing a node will require re-partitioning of data. Mostly only custom apps which are fully aware of your partitioning etc will be able to take advantage.
It is also easy to make it scale for simple custom app and so most of TPC-C benchmarks are published in this configuration. Approach 3 requires special shared disk system. The database implementation is very complex. The kernel writers have to worry about two computers simultaneously accessing disks or overwriting each others data etc. This is the thing that Oracle is pushing across all platforms and IBM is pushing for its mainframes. Approach 2 is similar to approach 1 except that it adds redundancy and hence is more reliable.
So what type are we talking about here?
As redundant. As someone else has pointed out, they just copied and pasted someone else's post. Honestly, finding an origional opinion is getting harder and harder these days...
Even better. The virigina dudes paid retail for the stock macs. If you can get adeail on itaniums you can get a deal on G5s.
I thought Deep Thought was the 2nd greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space?
My userid is prime!
LOL! And just when I'm out of mod points.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
But Windows only has 50% less TCO if your time is worthless.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
You forgot Natalie Portman, naked and petrified with hot grits down her pants, you insensitive clod!
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
...you realise that it isn't a linear scale. Trying to make a G5 cluster which achieved 4.8 gigaflops per processor would take more than the 4400 processors, and thus would easily take more than 300 more processors than are used for the Itanium cluster.
300 processors. Thats 150 dual-processor boxes. I can't be bothered working it out now, but how far that goes to eliminating the power & heat advantage the G5 has would be interesting to find out...
Game dev and music blog
HAHA, my mom just bought a new Asus board and a 2500+ Barton and some ram from crucial.com to replace her AMD K6-3 400. Oh the irony
How about a real os, with SCALABLE architecture.
But this cluster runs Linux, so much for THAT idea.
Linux is the new OS of choice.
You keep telling yourself that.
x86 has ALWAYS been the arch of choice
Too bad this cluster is IA-64 then. I guess all the embedded processors don't count either?
If you disagree, why do I have every driver for almost every NIC on linux for x86, but I can't get any nic laying in a box to work on a mac?
Because you are a moron and are trying to use an OS designed primarily for x86 on a non-x86 architecture. In other news, square pegs don't fit in circular holes. Man you are a genious.
MACS ARE DIEING!
And Linux is still born and hoping to one day be alive.
According to the distributed.net speeds page, the rc5-72 rate of an I2 1.4 is about 1Gkey/sec
Itanium 2 speeds
Since a P4M running at the same clock does 3 times as much, it wouldn't be so efficient... though we are talking about the US Gov't.
-Nev
Indeed, that is true. I stand corrected, but also like and have seen x86_64 run insanely fast. :)
>It's all for reserved for Doom III on longhorn.
Sorry, I'd played Doom III yesterday at E3. That's joke is (in your best Iron Chef voice) o-vah!
$2,863,104 in license fees going SCO's way!
I can see the investors now rubbing their 2 cents together....
4096 Itanium2's, pumping out 20 teraflops, and it's supposed to be the fastest? I thought that Red Storm (10,000+ Opterons) was pumping out around 40 teraflops/second.
Did I miss something?
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Everyone knows Magus Casper, Magus Balthazar, and Magus Melchior are far superior. Fear the Magi system. (I almost pulled root on Casper too, damnit.)
after not more than 30 seconds the thing clicked and whirred and spat out a little piece of paper that said "2*3*7"
This is the official top 500 list of supercomputers (not updated yet although thunder is mentioned as '*possibly* the second-most powerful computing machine on the planet'). Linux moving up to second place (from fifth a bit ago, iirc), woohoo! Only one left to beat!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Quote from: http://www.cbronline.com/print_friendly/fcd941d5f0 31c96e80256e130060a00a
"The service provider's six-year, $328m deal to provide a range of enterprise-wide IT services to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was...."
Yikes! That's over 50 mil per year, for IT costs???? And this company only has 52 employees? This has to be wrong. Even Windows IT support isn't that high. :)
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Your application may parallelise at a high level but still need a good FP CPU to do the parallel bits. Thats why Cray's X1 has big vector processors linked together in a cluster. If you need to know more buy my book
Ian
Didn't the Stashdot article called How Many Google Machines, Really? claim that google consisted of 79,000 computers. That makes google the fastest computer in the world :-)
Thunder: 2x the performance of the VATech cluster, 4x the cost. mmmmmm...... (OK, 3.8 times the cost if you paid the students who assembled it)
When Edinburgh University bought a Cray T3D they did use the waste heat to heat the building. Cray T3Ds used a liquid freon cooling system to shift the heat from the 256/512 alphas this went through a huge heat exchanger with the output of this feed to the heating/hot water system. This went some way to offset the costs of the electricity. The power requirement was such that a new electrical sub station was required.
Better formatting doesn't solve the fundemental problem here which is that the content is wildly inaccurate.
It also has twice the processors, to generate the X2 times speed that they claim. Something tells me, now that VA is recieving the XServer G5 cluster nodes, that they may want to add some more units. they can put 48 units in each rack now, rather than 12 of the full size G5 Desktop form factor. According top my primitive calculations that would allow them to run 4 times as many machines in the same space (would be over 8000 CPUs. I figure that will likely kick the crap out of this new linux cluster...
MacOSX, because making *NIX better is a lot better than waiting for Micro$loth to fix Windows
To bad its Intel. They would have had more power and paid 1/2 as much for opterons.
whatever this (Thunder) cluster can do in terms of performance will be peanuts compared to IBM's BlueGene/L, also at LLNL: 360 TeraFlops ~130K processors http://www.llnl.gov/icc/lc/OCF_resources.html
They can't, they no longer have the two cents to rub together, now that SCO is falling apart...
MacOSX, because making *NIX better is a lot better than waiting for Micro$loth to fix Windows
(end of msg)
click here for my proposed solution to the energy crisis.
Unfortunately, could only be enacted by a dictator.
60% more performance, but 150% more processors and 500% more cost. Opteron isn't really a great value proposition in this space, although it can perform very well (supposing Red Storm is completed and performs as expected).
Scaling is a hard problem on these clusters, so it is quite possible that Opteron could put on a competitive showing at the same performance level as Thunder, even though Red Storm has a much worse price/performance ratio.
A computer that can run Longhorn.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
...know what framerate they get with this thing?
and I'm about to gey myself a new PC for running Linux after having this one for over five years. What is a good high-end-consumer solution that doesn't heat too much? This is Rio de Janeiro, and we ain't got no air conditioning either.
we spend OVER 50% of our budget on "defense"
Bullshit
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/misc/outlays.jpg
Defense spending, INCLUDING veterans affairs and foreign affairs, is 20%. Nice try.
We spend more on "social programs" alone, and twice as much on social security and medicare.
Not saying defense spending still isn't a lot, but it's no where near "over 50%".
No, its not big iron by any definition, its a cluster. Big iron are big powerful machines, not lots of ordinary little machines attached together with a fast interconnect.
"I want to try Gentoo"
"NO. We're using Debian!"
"Bob's already started loading Slackware!"
-- Seriously --
Anyone know specifically what OS they will be using?
peoplesprimary only got you fired because you were surfing slashdot while at work. At any rate, you would have been fired anyways for wasting your company's time. You are exactly what is wrong with this world. You are employed to do work, not waste time browsing slashdot.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
1936 Itanic2s 1.5Ghz, 8633 Rmax -> 4.45 GFLOPS per CPU
Less than the G5. Where's the big Floating point monster Itanic now i wonder?
G5 and Itanic can both do 4 DP-FPops per Cycle. However, the G5 has 25% more clock, so bad luck for Intel!
Sorry, but the SPEC-Scores (Itanic2 SpecFP = 2x G5-SpecFP) simply fail to show... SPEC has become as much of a fake as almost any Benchmark!
I might consider buying your book if you didn't want a hundred and twenty books per copy !! Unless each page is printed on sheets of platinum I don't see how you can justify such a price.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
How is this a troll?