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Virginia Tech Supercomputer Up To 12.25 Teraflops
gonknet writes "According to CNET news and various other news outlets, the 1150-node Hokie supercomputer rebuilt with new 2.3 GHz Xserves now runs at 12.25 Teraflops. The computer, the fastest computer owned by an academic institution, should still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November."
this is the official homepage of the listing:
http://www.top500.org/
they were sold off by MacMall at a slight discount around 6 months ago, along with a certificate of authenticity and a "property of virginia tech" sticker
-mkb
Would be interesting to know exactly what stuff do these machines do? Maybe they would even be able to share some code so that people can fiddle around with it optimizing
I don't know about the VT cluster specifically, but here's a couple of typical supercomputer applications that happen to be open source:
ABINIT, a DFT code.
CP2K, another DFT code, focused more on Car-Parinello MD.
Gromacs, a molecular dynamics program.
(should be fun)
Well, if optimizing 200 000 line Fortran programs parallelized using MPI sounds like fun to you, jump right in!
Note: Above applies to abinit and cp2k only, I don't know anything about gromacs except that it's written in C, not Fortran (though inner loops are in Fortran for speed).
Oh, and then there's MM5, a weather prediction code which I think is also open source. I don't know anything about it, though.
First, as they try to increase the speed of the system, the bottlenecks start becoming more of a factor. Interconnects is one big obstacle. While the new System X may use the latest and greatest interconnects between the nodes, they still run at a fraction of the speed that the processors can run.
Also the computing problems that they are trying to solve may not scale either with more processors. For example, clusters like this can be used to predict and simulate weather. To do so, the target area (Europe for example) is divided into small parts called cells. Each node takes a cell and handles the computations of that cell.
In this case adding more processors does not necessarily mean that each cell is processed faster. Getting 4 processors to do one task may hurt performance as they may interfere with each other. More likely the cell is further subdivided into 4 smaller cells and the detail of the information is increased not the speed. So add 4x processors only increases data 4x but it doesn't mean that the data is solved any faster.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Many processes are indeed easy to divide to parts. Take for example ray-tracing, you can have one processor run each ray if you want, getting huge benefits compared to singleprocessor designs. But many tasks are such that the normal way of calculting them requires you to know the previous result. Trying to break up these tasks is one of the focuses in the reserearch around supercomputing.
If power was only equated to speed then you would be correct. However, as other posters have pointed out, there are several reasons why a Cray is a more powerful system besides sheer speed.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Their site is out of date then: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,65476,00.htm
If there's a Wired article, and a Cnet article, go with the Wired article every time. It's written by people who love tech.
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The $5.8M number is how much the computers (and maybe racks) cost, not the whole system. AFAICT, that number appears leaves out US$2-3M worth of InfiniBand hardware that somebody (probably Apple) must've "donated" so it wouldn't show up as part of the purchase price. IB gear costs ~US$2k/node in bulk, on top of the cost of the node itself. It's highly unlikely someone else could build this exact configuration for US$5.8M without serious underwriting or hardware donations. Heck, I can't even get the Apple online store to give me a price on a G5 Xserve that includes an education discount, and I work for a fairly large public university.
The vast majority of clusters are for simulating very complex systems that require lots and lots of calculations.
You can get a few hints by looking just at their names.
The number one "Earth Simulator Centre" is fairly self-explanatory, going to their website show they create a variety of models for things such as weather, tectonic plate movement, etc.
The number 3 LANL supercomputer "is a key part of DOE's plan to simulate nuclear weapons tests in the absence of actual explosions. The more powerful computers are designed to model explosions in three dimensions, a far more complex task than the two-dimensional models used in weapons design years ago." I imagine that most US government simulations would be doing something simmilar.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.