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!"

Comments

What would this be used for?

[notbob]

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.

Re:What would this be used for?

[turgid]

Sounds quite insane, I'd love to see the practical reasons for this.

With the heat given off by all those itanics, I'm sure they could do some pretty good real-word research into heat shield materials and rocket engine nozzles.

Re:What would this be used for?

[MoonFog]

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

Re:What would this be used for?

[Timesprout]

For the conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landings were faked a collaboration between NASA and SGI on simulated exploration will just provide a basis to think that the Mars missions will not only be faked, they wont even use real actors next and the whole mission will be CGI.

So when we do 'land' on Mars, if the astonauts burst into a song and dance extravaganza during the planting the flag ceremony then the job was probably outsourced to India. If the ceremony involves a 10 hour trek up a mountain and is interrupted by hordes of attacking Martians that must be defeated by the 6 astronauts then they probably got Peter Jackson to do it. If the whole mission is really lame and not quite what you were hoping for, look no futher than George Lucas.

Good News for intel

[turgid]

This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!

Re:Good News for intel

[cnkeller]

Good news for Intel indeed, but wouldn't the same deployment with AMD Opterons been cheaper AND faster??

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.

Re:Good News for intel

[turgid]

There are no 512-way Opteron systems; maybe NASA likes to write shared-memory parallel applications.

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.

Doom 3 and 10240 Itanium2 processors

[levram2]

I'm guessing that NASA found out Doom 3 has a software renderer and are buying the minimum specs.

Re:Honest question: Why Linux?

[WindBourne]

The reason? The License. While BSD License really is the most free, it would allow IBM to put a lot of effort into it, and then have MS swope in, modify it, and sell with a sorts of closed APIs, etc.

In essence, the BSD license would allow the creation of another Unix model where the core is identical or just similar, but the APIs would be used to lock users in. How would that solve IBM's problem? Or for that matter any Hardware vendors problem? It would not.

Re:Is their graphics really ATI?

[lweinmunson]

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.

Re:SGI was supposed to be dead

[arth1]

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.

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

...well....

[mhore]

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.