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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!"
What would you do with 10k processors hooked up to 500 terabytes? Sounds like you could replace every machine Nasa has with an account on this thing.
Sounds quite insane, I'd love to see the practical reasons for this.
This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!
Stick Men
Wonder if that thing could play Doom3?
Boxing Equipment Reviews
I really do wonder, why did SGI and IBM invest so much time and money on Linux, instead of e.g. NetBSD? I understand IBM is currently using Linux to push their middleware and J2EE stuff, but they could as well use a BSD and not even need to give stuff back to the community.
Mike Bouma
Can it run a JVM running on a Windows box and still be able to refresh the graphics?
I'm guessing that NASA found out Doom 3 has a software renderer and are buying the minimum specs.
If you would like a shell-account for openssource software development on an IRIX system, feel free to contact me: folkert@vanheusden.com
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
Good luck SGI, the Valley is rooting for its former star, and so are a lot of stock speculators.
Yeah but can it run lin...errr... damn.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
So NASA is planning to upgrade to Longhorn then?
to fake a human settlement on Mars.
Laws are for people with no friends.
In a wonderful book "Homo Zapiens" by Victor Pelevin, the leaders of the world are rendered on clusters of SGI machines by a secret organization. Makes you wonder when you hear about these clusters :)
So... I hear these are the new minimum sys requirements for EQ2... we know where our NASA dollars go. VAK!
There are also strong hints that SGI plans to bring its clustered ATI graphics to Altix in the near future.
I 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?
d.
Im here in San Jose at the NYLF conference. The head of the NASA AIMS center talked about that yesterday. It was pretty impressive. All the stuff there doing is pretty impressive. Within the next week I am going there so I may be able to see it. Maybe even setup an SSH server hehehe.
I was just contemplating the fact that this will be a cluster of clusters. I find that fact deeply satisfying, actually, as it models complex natural computation systems quite well.
... you get the point)...
Our brains work very much like that (networks of networks of networks of
So while you are making a joke, in this case, it is sorta... well... applicable!
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Just curious. My guess is that Intel keeps pumping money into SGI to get Altix systems out and those who have them (LLNL and ...?) got them at practically no charge to run Linpack and look good on the Top500 list.
Because as of late, it has been the Intel CPU's with the gigantic fans ;)
It whirs and clicks and sputters..
Finally, the following cryptic message mysteriously appears on it's console:
42
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not a render of the cluster! (I don't even want to guess how old she is.)
I'm glad to see that SGI has regained its legs and is back in the high-end computing market again. The gamble they made in embracing Linux has paid off. Other folks had counted them dead because they came to the WinNT game late and were, therefore, fated to be high-priced integrators. Their days were numbered by the low-end market forces like Dell and HP.
Now we see that there is a market for high-priced integrators as long as the underlying technology fits the market segment you target.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Doesn't NASA know that Linux is national security threat??? And 10240 cpu cluster no less? Don't they know that such concentrated evil will create a singularity? This could be the end of our civilization.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Finally someone can beta test the new longhorn minimal configuration. See benchmark test results up at www.nasa.gov/longhorn.html
-eric
while(1)
{ get(info);
if (info=true)
goto(war_with_iraq(info));
elseif (info=false)
goto(war_with_iraq(info));
else
do_monkey_subroutine(bush_iq); }
Wonder if this would work?
Please.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
They are doing special research for part of our new mars initiative. here
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
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
We have had a huge bump-up in GFLOPs for supercomputers this last decade. In 1993 the top system was about 60 Gigaflops vs about 40 Teraflops today (see top500.org) while a top of the line pentium 4 today is at about 5 Gigaflops. I don't think another 10 years will quite close the gap.
The only real way to close in on massive parellel systems of today is for multicore chips to start appearing on the desktop (massively multicore).
Letter To Iran
I think you missed a decimal place. At that price, it's actually about $5400 per processor. That's not much more than what some of these processors cost.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I'd like to see a beowulf cluster of those.
Worst. Joke. Ever.
I stand by my decleration.
Sounds to me like they're having to put this cluster together to keep us from bringing down their website/servers/network whenever one of us posts a news item to /. about the photo a space probe took of a methane cloud on Venus, supposedly caused by a single gassy Venutian 35 million years ago -- before they moved to a better neighborhood.
IronChefMorimoto
I want one!
... was reading too much Slashdot.
I knew nothing good could come of all those beowulf cluster ideas!
Doom 3 is not "that" hardware intensive. The latest beta plays just fine on a Radeon 9800 Pro that has been out for quite some time. These jokes are getting so old!
Creative Demolition
why would you need all that for...i mean we can only move things fast as speed of light..damns all this, tss tss. They just like playing with big toys like always.
What exactly does NASA do with this power? I'm aware its for number crunching, but in what sense and for what exact purpose do they spend millions of taxpayer dollars? I've heard of supercomputers predicting economic trends, etc, but what are the space exploration applications?
BTW, i'm not a troll, i'm just curious.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
I mean, it's an operating system like any other right? And no, it isn't for the canned reasons like instability, insecurity or other "Windows is teh sux0r" gibberings.
Fact is, these research and hardware people don't have to negotiate a license with anybody, don't have to wait for the proper "10240 Processor Edition Platinum Plus Edition XP" of the OS to be finished by the developer, because Linux, in its free nature, allows them to add all the necessary capabilities (and remove unnecessary ones) themselves. Because of the philosophy Free Software, science is not held for ransom by some developer's arbitrary software price.
I suppose I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think those of us interested in telling other people about OSS advantages ought to point to things like this. If you have a project in mind which requires software to fulfill, your work does not have to be at the mercy of some EULA. This empowers individuals and organizations, liberating both from needing to be tethered to some vendor's idea of what they should do with their machines.
... because so far this is the only thing I've heard of that could run Longhorn.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
Having a single system image is a -massive- bennefit to people who want to run simulations without having to actually learn the complexities of clustering. Considering that this will be used by a lot of scientists & engineers that are engaged in non-related research, I could see this cluster being used, most of the time, as simply 20 separate 512 processor systems.
We've got a high-performance computing center here on campus and their largest cluster has 512 processors (in 256 nodes). It's an older setup, only running P3-730s. Each node of this NASA cluster is going to be like 5x faster than our entire cluster.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The idea is not to run a single application on the 10k, it is to offer pieces of it to researchers based on their computing needs. We have current customers that use 1024-processor and 512-processor systems. With a [hopefully new] customer database, they can request any number of systems they need to do their computations on. This is also not just a NASA toy, it's available for all US researchers, as the press release states.
As far as Linux goes, it is definately nice to see that in place of IRIX. For those posters complaining about security, there will be special measures in place and staff devoted exclusively to the security of this system.
It's all explained in the web pages that this announcement links to.
I don't know what NASA would do with this, but I know what our group would do with it.
We always need machines. You could give me 1024 machines and I'd still need more.
For example, I study fluids currently. I may simulate 4,000,000 particles and it may take 3 weeks for my simulation to finish. If I had 10240 nodes, it may only take a day. Or perhaps I could simulate MORE particles for longer. There are all sorts of advantages to having this many machines hooked up.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that there most likely will not be *1* job that uses all of these at once. There are probably several researchers that are using it simultaneously and have a slice of the machines. Press releases like this are often time misleading because usually the CPUs are split between several jobs and researchers and research groups and what not.
Not to steal NASA's thunder -- a cluster this big is impressive.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
With this cluster, Intel will have doubled
the number of Itanium 2 sales for the YEAR!
I've seen tons of stories about using Linux machines to create insanely large clusters and creating supercomputers and all that. I don't pretend to understand how any of that works but it fascinates the hell out of me.
What is it about Linux that makes it more possible than MS Windows?
It's a general tech question I'm hoping someone can answer without getting all religious about it.
Artificial Development is developing a simulation of the human cortex. They could use this thing. They need all the processing power they can get their hands on.
Porn!?
:-P
C'mon, she's dressed up! And she's 18+
Where's the porn you see?
She's gorgeus BTW...
I port software on my own IRIX machine. But it is rather slow (R10K Dual 195 MHz). What kind of machine do you have?
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
"My other PC is a 10240-Processor Altix Cluster" Gonna patent that bumpersticker right now...
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
*starts checking Fatwallet for hot deals on new supercomputer*
Game... blouses.
...to withstand a good slashdot'ing. Now, what should they put on the webpages? Images from Mars? A "behind the secenes - How we faked the Mars landing"?
for the next version of Longhorn and MS Office 2008, that's all...
... $7,157,760 you owe me for those 10,240 processors.
Sincerly,
Darl McBride
"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free."
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If Opterons don't win on raw FP performance (which in itself is debatable), they'd absolutely hammer (ha!) the Intel chips once IO and the cost of support chips was factored in.
I'm betting Intel chips were chosen for (supplier-)political reasons.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...three-phase plug you'll need to install before powering the damn thing up, and that - what with the cooling fans and all - not even a Canadian owning one of these would ever see snow in his yard.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think we just slashdotted Silicon Graphics.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Remember when the SGI 512 processor story came out and all those "imagine a beowulf cluster of these" jokes were modded down?
Now we have to go back and mod them insightful