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SGI & NASA Plan 10240-Processor Altix Cluster
green pizza writes "NASA has announced plans to cluster twenty 512-processor Silicon Graphics Inc Altix supercomputers connected to a 500-terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage SAN. The Altix uses Itanium2 CPUs running Linux atop an Origin 3000-derrived architecture. NASA and SGI scaled Linux to 512 CPUs late last year. There are also strong hints that SGI plans to bring its clustered ATI graphics to Altix in the near future. Lots of neat big iron project on the horizon!"
NASA has picked computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc. and chipmaker Intel to develop a major supercomputer based on Linux to simulate space exploration and conduct other research, SGI announced Tuesday.
Read it here
Well, until the final numbers come out, we aren't speculating on performance. Needless to say we hope to claim the top slot in computing power. Also, keep in mind that parts availability is a major concern. We are assembling the system to be fully up and running by SuperComputing '05 in November. Intel has fully committed to delivering all 10K CPU's with no problems. Also, perhaps the biggest reason for Intel, is SGI was chosen as the vendor and they use Intel.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Sigh, that's Supercomputing '04 in November. Of this year. Sorry about that.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
RTFA:
By boosting its computing capacity ten-fold through Project Columbia, the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility (NAS) will be able to more effectively handle such critical projects as simulating future space missions, projecting the impact of human activity on weather patterns, and designing safe and efficient space exploration vehicles and aircraft. The present collaboration builds upon the highly successful 8-year partnership that last year developed the world's first 512-processor Linux server - based on standard, "off-the-shelf" microprocessor and open source technology - the SGI Altix at NASA Ames Research Center named 'Kalpana' after Columbia astronaut and Ames alumna Kalpana Chawla.
Modeling and building on a business relationship.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Really? Considering the Opteron 850 maxes out at 89W while the Itanium 1.5 is 107W, by each vendor's own datasheets.
I'm not a market whiz by any means, but how does a low stock price (assuming other, positive indicators) influence whether a company can survive or not? Once the stock is sold by the company, they don't make any further money on its continued sale.
A stock whose price continues to climb can allow the company to essentially print money by issuing new stock (if the price climbs fast enough existing shareholders don't generally notice or care that you're diluting the pool), but beyond that, how does share price influence the company's actual operations?
Going further OT, I think Apple should have bought SGI. They could have gained credibility in the scientific visualation and industrial sectors and had a tidy little OS and GUI that could have spanned from the receptionist desk to the research machine room, in addition to gaining some high-end server solutions far beyond their XServes.
Somehow it seems that something like this could have develped into a really cool desktop solution that would allow users to run applications locally and remotely on big iron (yes, X-windows style) but with the ease of use and friendliness Apple's known for.
I have always liked SGI hardware. And congradulations are in order for them to have a single Linux kernel running across 512 CPUs.
In SGIs press release they state that they hope to get the top spot on the 500 list. As all know IBM is expecting Blue Gene http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/ to take the top spot in 2005.
It looks like SGIs architecture for the Altix is better than the Blue Gene, but 10,240 intel CPUs is just going to be outpowered by the 65,536 PowerPC CPUs in Blue Gene.
Now the ultimate machine would have SGIs architecute (memory) and #CPUs per node using the PowerPC CPU. We know that IBM and SGI would never colaborate on something like this, but can't a geek dream!
More blue gene specs: http://sc-2002.org/paperpdfs/pap.pap207.pdf
Not yet, but Cray is working on it in something called Red Storm.
Itanium's "better" floating point performance than Opteron is confined to some pretty specialised benchmarks. Over all, Opteron is a more efficient design, runs cooler than itanium, has better compilers, better software support, is cheaper and had more room to scale to much higher clock speeds.
Stick Men
The MIPS/IRIX systems have VPro graphics, yes. But those are not from NVIDIA. VPro for MIPS/IRIX is the last chipset to be developed inhouse.
The confusion comes from the fact that Sgi marketing thought it would be a good idea to give both the PC and Irix graphics cards the same brand: VPro.
They currently don't have anything newer for their workstations, but their newest Onyx (visualization system) computers use a couple of Ati cards for their graphics. It's called the UltimateVision.
No, SGI bought part of Cray a few years back and Sun bought another part (that's where the Sun E10k came from). SGI sold it's part of Cray to a company called Tera which then changed its name to Cray.
Stick Men
thought that SGI sold a lot of their graphics IP (including many of their top graphics engineers) to NVIDIA a while back, and still have agreements with them. Their IRIX systems sell with VPRO graphics cards, which I believe are repackaged NVIDIA chips with a few extras..
Or did I miss something?
Yes, The Vpro series only resembles Nvidia chipes because after it was completed, most of the team went to work for Nvidia and created the geforce with lots of the same ideas behind it. So the original GeForce chips were more like cut down Vpro's than the VPro's were soupped up GeForces if that makes any sense.
I guess I presume that most "stable" corporations (those out of their high growth phases) don't raise cash that often via increasing their outstanding shares, but instead go through the bond market or other lines of credit (banks or suppliers).
You can only print stock if your stock value is fast rising, and that's not that many companies. Otherwise it has the same effect as printing money -- devaluing the existing shareholder's shares.
Regardless, heavy trade in a corporation's stock actually does very little to raise capital for the company.
What few people seem to know (and appreciate) is that SGI has been one of the major contributors to Linux over the last few years. Not only XFS, but lots of commands, utilities and system functions have been enhanced, based on IRIX code. This has been a significant boost to Linux, and it's only fair that SGI reaps some benefits.
I wish SGI and its employees the best of luck!
Regards,
--
*Art
With this cluster, Intel will have doubled
the number of Itanium 2 sales for the YEAR!
I would not be surprised if SGI got NASA to agree to not give the source to anybody else (I believe that is legal within the GPL, but IANAL).
No need to be a lawyer, the GPL is very readable. Section 6 of the GNU GPL (emphasis mine):
Clear enough?
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