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Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster
olePigeon (Wik) writes "MacCentral has an interesting article on a new computer cluster. From the article: 'Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army.'" alset_tech was one of the many readers to point to
CNET's version of the story.
Isn't hypersonic flight research better suited to the Air Force?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What, Duke Nukem Forever still isn't out yet? Hey, maybe such a computer could create Duke Nukem Forever from scratch so I could play it.
for America's Army!
Apple does have this.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sure the computers only costs $5.8 million, but how much will the screwdrivers cost they use to install everything?
This sounds like a killer system, but I don't follow the performance numbers.
The 1655 CPU cluster is expected to deliver 25 Tflops, while the Virginia Tech machine, with 1,100 CPU's (if I remember properly) is rated at 10 Tflops. What else is different? Are they using a different interconnect? Clever programmers to get closer to peak? Or is it something silly like a journalist switching between peak and measured performance, or between computers and CPU's (assuming dual G5 Xserves)? Or is the G5 Xserve really _that_ much faster than the G5 desktop measures VA Tech was benchmarked with? I _like_ that idea...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
That's not true. The CPU is IBM's but the I/O controllers and other chips are all Apple made.
4 bi ts_1.html
check this InfoWorld comparison of Opteron systems with the XserveG5,
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/06/18/25FE6
1566 X Server cluster? That should get some decent FPS.
Ohhhh. XServe. My bad.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
They pretty much all go pretty fast through the atmosphere.
Not sure if it helps your math, but the VT cluster had 1100 G5's, with 2 CPU's each for 2200 CPU's.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
my love for Apple and my hatred for using technology for violence.
Oh screw it, that cluster is gonna be awesome! Forget imagining a Beowulf cluster... imagine your frame rate in Doom III!
First.
20fps.
In Doom III.
Evar!
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
"US$5.8 million"
I'm a grunt in the USMC (former computer geek...who would have figured?)
Anyways... I'm about to go *back* to Iraq in September.
The high brass has some f*ed up priorities some times.... the army has $5.8mil to contract out *research* to some company for technology what.... 10-15 years away at the minimum?
Meanwhile the Marine Corps is scraping nickles and dimes to get us basic equipment the army has had for most of a decade.
Hell, when we go to the field to train, we often have to yell "bang! bang!" because we don't get enough (or any) blank rounds for training.
Imagine if they took just ONE Osprey off the project..... maybe then I wouldn't have a hand-me-down-from-the-army m16a2 (does the army use them anymore?)
Implementing the draft doesn't require number-crunching, it requires I/O bandwidth to run database engines.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster You totally misspelled "1337."
"Physics computations and weapons simulations so good looking, you're going to want to lick them." - Steve Jobs
"Uh, we'd advise against that sir." - Army colonel
"But he SAID I could lick them! Ooh, red, yellow and green WMD icons!" - G. W. Bush
If you need me I'll be off in the corner, sobbing over my 0.533 gigahertz G4.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
>> "US$5.8 million"
$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.
This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)
Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.
Kinda hard when you're in the army ;-)
-psy
The zdnet version I read earlier said it'd run OS X, at least initially, but they might explore running Red Hat or Yellowdog.
I have a feeling that as more time goes on, more and more Apple-based clusters will use OS X. Apple continues to optimize the OS. They also continue to add remote administration features (both GUI and command line) while at the same time keeping the BSD-ness of OS X as pure as possible. (OS X is based on NeXTstep and OPENSTEP, so it does have some oddities when compared to "pure" 4.4BSD or Free/Open/Net BSD).
There are also some Apple software cluster technologies (such as Xgrid) but I'm not sure if they're hardcore enough for something of this magnitude. Apple has mainly been aiming their cluster software and marketing towards the small-scale (10 to 100 notes) research groups.
(Translation:
This is...
O
U
T
R
A
G
E
O
U
S
!
After the article about the renderfarm, I was asking myself why people didn't use the blade for factor to build renderfarms and clusters...
I know there aren't available for mac, but I seem to remember Opterons and Xeon blades were the hot topic some month ago, with dual opteron blades and all...
any reason not to use them blades to build a cluster, each blade bay connected to all other, creating a (sic) beowulf or mosix cluster of some sort ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Well, sometimes, the only way to know something, is to do it.
I think I could have made Duke Nukem Forever by now. No need for a supercomputer.
Game... blouses.
Actually, the ASIC and probably other chips are made in IBM chip plants but they are designed by Apple.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
...But only one mouse button.
:P
I sure as hell hope Steve Jobs threw in an iPod and a BMW to go with it.
...that the Army is buying.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
oh wait...
Not sure if this is a stupid question - but why 1556. It seems like a rather odd number. Is it budget or does this number of nodes work?
Stay tuned for new sig...
As the price of processing power keeps dropping these clusters are getting closer to the magical 100Tflop mark, which is what Ray Kurzweil and others speculate is required to run a human-level AI . Maybe we should start worrying about the computing projects that military isn't announcing.
But wait... how does that fit in with the right-wing-bush-enron-saudi-haliburton conspiracy? The bill cited was sponsored by a bunch of Dems. The only conspiracy I can smell is that a bunch of Dems want the topic of a draft to be out there in the press. Talk of a draft = bad press for the president.
Casual Games/Downloads
Zing.
Because the two Democrats who proposed the bills are using it merely to snipe at the administration.
[from MSNBC]
"In the past year, some lawmakers have urged that a draft for military service be reintroduced, most notably New York Rep. Charlie Rangel and South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings, both Democrats, who have sponsored bills to that effect, primarily as a way to protest against war in Iraq. Though both bills (S. 89 and H.R. 163) remain stuck in committeeand Sen. Hollings was unable even to garner any cosponsors for his bill"
The Army/Air Force/Navy neither wants nor needs a draft.
Vector processing. SSE for Intel and AMD, AltiVec for the G5, and 3DNow for AMD all are instruction sets that allow one to manipulate vectors of 4 floats or 2 doubles (or other assortments) as though they are one operand.
I stand corrected. It looks like Xserves do support ECC http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/06xserveg 5.html
COLSA is too similar to Cozzano from Interface by Stephen Bury aka Neil Stephenson for my liking. This is a great time to re-read that book.
If you want to avoid more deaths of American soldiers in Iraq (845 so far and counting), then I suggest you don't vote for Bush in November.
One thing to note is that vector processing doesn't help the G5 on the linpack benchmark (what the top 500 list uses). Altivec only helps single precision calculations. Good for games and graphics, but not desirable for many scientific calculations.
It's the fact that the G5 can dispatch two floating point operations per cycle (like the Athlon's fpu) and that it has a fused multiply/add instruction that can be done in 1 cycle. This effectively gives it the ability to do 4 flops/cycle.
So the theoretical peak is given by 1566 xserves * 2 cpus each * 2 GHz * 4 flops/cycle = 25.056 teraflops/s
Bollocks. Switzeland, Iceland have a different way.
Switzerland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. That's how it stayed neutral in the Second World War - even Hitler was afraid to invade the great mountain fortress.
Iceland's way is... being better at violence than its neighbors. It opted to join the most powerful military alliance in the world.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
In order for Kurzweil's AI to work, it isnt enough to have 100Tflop. Kurzweil based the 100Tflop number on the idea that we would have algorithms available to replace the brain functions such as vision, pattern recognition, etc.. Just using a simple neural simulator would require many orders magnitude more of power to simulate a human brain. We are a long ways from having the needed algorithms (probably 30 years at a mininum).
Canada as always beaten the crap out of the US of A ( see your history book ladies of the US ).
"Canada" has been at war with the United States twice - once during the American Revolution and once during the War of 1812. On neither occasion was the United States fighting "Canada", because that nation was not yet founded. It was however fighting the British Army in His Majesty's colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. On both occasions the British Army repelled an American invasion of Canada. On the latter occasion the American army also repelled a British invasion of the western United States from Canada. Your statement is, to say the least, a little simplistic.
Whe have one of the biggest country ( in territory ) with one of the smallest army in number of unit in the world.
Canada is defended by the armed forces and nuclear arsenal of the United States (and, for that matter, the other NATO countries). It is therefore unsurprising that it has a small "army in number of unit".
Whe have the best nuclear reactor and MEDICAL nuclear program in the world but NO NUCLEAR FOR WEAPON program even do whe know how and can build in 30 minutes the best nuke in the world, whe CHOOSED not to.
Setting aside the easy jokes about limited grammatical technology, Canada has not constructed any nuclear weapons because nuclear attacks on Canada would trigger retaliation from the United States. It's not likely that Canada could design and construct a nuclear weapon in "30 minutes the best nuke in the world", but it's certainly clear that any modern industrialized nation could manufacture a nuclear weapon with comparatively little trouble, especially if a substantial nuclear facilities complex is already in place. It's not really obvious what this has to do with being better than anyone else.
Whe have -"NO"- Known enemy.
Well, according to this story reprinted from the National Post, Al-Qaeda has declared that Canada must be destroyed, because it is part of Dar ul-Harb. I can understand the strong desire to want to pretend that everything's just fine, but it should be pointed out that only one side has to agree in order to have a war.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Is this really a supercomputer? Sounds more like a... supercluster to me.
At what point does linking together a bunch of off-the-shelf fully-self-contained PCs become a supercomputer? If doing so is the case, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to link together whitebox machines, much as datacenters (the type that rent servers) tend to use whitebox servers rather than rackmount boxes?
I just feel like the term "supercomputer" is being sullied by so-called supercomputers that are nothing more than a simple cluster. Of course, I'm probably a moron, as I said earlier.
What ever happened to the days when our Army would build their own giant evil super computers?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The true radness in this is how cost effective it is to biuld xserve clusters. Not only will they save lots of money biulding the thing they will save lots of money supporting it. RAD!
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
There is a real possibility of a targeted draft - has been for years.
As the military continues to become more high-tech it takes a greater and greater level of techinical skills to operate, especially at command centers. At some point it is going to become difficult to recuit those people (simply put, if 15% of the population has - or is capable of - the technical skills and the military needs 50% of it's troop to have them they must come from someplace).
I do not think it is in the next few years. But since sometime in the 90's (can't really specify a single point in time) it has been a possibility. Any large theater we may have to get invovled in may require this.
Though this has little to do with the current Iraq war and more to do with the shift the military has been taking.
But yes, as to what the vast majority of people refer to the "upcoming draft", it is what a few democrats have discussed as a talking point and a protest against the war. Others have picked up on it and it has changed to "Bush wants a draft". The military still turns down a certain percentage of the volunteers it recieves as they consider themselfs over staffed - especially in the realm of grunts as they need educated technical skills (and grunts are what armchair or retired generals are moaning about not having enough of). There will be no general draft until that is no longer true.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Yeah, but then you'd have to wait another year for the Mac version.
Finally a Grammar Nazi who sure found the proper occasion to post ;-)
The swiss have banks, and they know how to use them. How would Hitler wage his war if he couldn't buy material from neutral states with freely convertible swiss currency?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.
I've got an older M392A2 spin stabilized sabot round in my office. Heavier than it looks :^)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I've asked this question before and been modded as troll, but I'm serious: Is Apple the new Sun? It seems that while Apple doesn't have the broad product line that Sun does on the high-end server market, they are nonetheless making inroads into that very market. Further, Apple is sleek and sexy and has a lot of goodwill going for it, whereas Sun mostly brings out ambivalence.
I'm not saying they are direct competitors, but they are competitors in at least some respects. And it seems that Apple is profiting from sales of its products whereas Sun's biggest revenue inflow recently has been its $1b settlement with Microsoft, not from its product lines.