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Earth Simulator, G5 Cluster Drop In 'Top 500' List
daveschroeder writes "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution. Here's an excellent cost comparison (Google cache) of the top machines ('System X' is significantly cheaper than anything else in the top 20, not to mention cheaper than many things far below it in performance)."
Err, I'm not sure if the costs can be accurately compared in this way. One needs to remember that a cluster of separate computers acting as a supercomputer compared to a custom designed hardwired system isn't exactly the same thing! Otherwise you can start comparing stuff like SETI which I'm sure is the world's cheapest supercomputer because it technically didn't cost anything to SETI themselves.
A few more thoughts...
Before anyone says "Of course System X is cheaper! Virginia Tech had free student labor to put it together! They paid them in pizza!"
The only thing anywhere close to System X is NCSA's Tungsten, a 2500 processor Pentium IV Xeon Dell Linux cluster. It cost $12 million, just for the asset (comparable to System X's $5.8 million overall price, including the upgrade to Xserve G5s). That's twice the cost, and over 2Tflops less performance. 2Tflops is a top 100 supercomputer...so it's a whole top 100 supercomputer poorer in performance, for an extra $6.2 million.
Another example is PNNL's 1936 processor Itanium2 cluster: 3.5Tflops less performance than System X, for $25 million.
Any way you slice it - no pun intended - System X is still a LOT cheaper, even if you allot, say $2M for professional installation and systems integration - an EXTREMELY liberal estimate, probably by an order of magnitude.
System X also has the highest Rmax per CPU of any system on the list, except for specialty non-commodity systems like Earth Simulator.
And on top of it all, last November, they hit #3 in the world, #2 in the US, and #1 academic, as well as the first academic site to ever exceed 10Tflops, all for less than $7 million in total - including all improvements to buildings, physical plant, and other infrastructure.
That first system might not have had ECC, but what it did do is break into the top 5, following all the rules of the Top 500 organization, for relative pocket change - for a price that was absolutely unheard of, sharing the spotlight with systems that cost $100 million or more - and also catapulted Virginia Tech to a supercomputing center of national prominence overnight, able to attract additional attention, funding, grants, and publicity. Not to mention testing and proving the suitability of a completely new OS, platform, processor, and interconnect for high-performance computing, increasing choice for all (and resulting in new clusters based on the same technology, such as the US Army/COLSA cluster). And even as new systems enter the top ten in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, System X retains the title of #1 at any academic institution, and shares the top 10 with the best of the best.
Seems to me that Virginia Tech pulled a real coup here, and a full year later, is still considerably cheaper that anything else. And now, it's being used for real scientific work. To bring a whole new platform onto the scene in essentially under a year and break into the ranks of the supercomputing elite virtually overnight, and to do it significantly, and sometimes ridiculously, cheaper than everyone else, is a feat that can't be ignored.
5 of the 10 top machines use the Power archtecture, either the Power4 or PPC family.
It's nice that Off The Shelf boxes like Apple and Intel can make a super computer cluster. When do the stories stop? We know that if you put enough PCs together, you get a very powerful machine. What we should be looking at is cutting edge technology in specialized CPUs. Give me 10,000 vanilla boxes and some good custom software, but give me a cutting edge CPU designed for super computing, that's science. We already know that it is possible to fill a fucking building with Pentiums, or better 68000s.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
"I'm not sure if the costs can be accurately compared in this way. [
Actually that sounds like a perfectly valid comparison, SETI included. In bang for the buck SETI deserves to win hands-down in that scenario, and fairly. System X deserves its place as well.
While you are correct that clusters are not the ultimate solution for high performance computing, single-image computers are not a great solution either. They require specific optimizations to be done for the particular system and do not lend for easy system upgrades.
kc8apf
"Be a little more logical, open minded, less fanatic people."
So we should say "It's really no achievement to have a supercomputer in a pricerange available to institutions other than military. The fact that they use Apple's G5 and OS X, an almost out of the box solution is totally irrelevant. If you like you can build your own courtesy of Virginia University, but who would want a supercomputer that's cheaper than the other twenty first contenders in the list of supercomputers. Remember, they're Apple, so they're crap. And expensive, whatever the calculations say. They must be. They're Apple. I repeat, they're Apple. Crap. Be realistic, don't be a fan-boy."
Fan-boy indeed.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
It doesn't make much sense to compare operating temperature differences between machines with different cooling systems. There's a much easier way to figure out how much heat a processor generates: just look at how much power it consumes. An Opteron at 2.2 GHz sucks 89W. A PPC 970fx at 2.5 GHz uses around 50W.
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Apple worship because we all knew they were going to die and are overpriced and whatnot, then we see their products being used to make one of the most powerful clusters in the world for very cheep.
Apple worship because it's a smack in the face to those who still continue to bash Apple for reasons that no longer exist.
"OS 9 sucks!"
"We're on OS X now, and it's unix-like"
"oh...um...Well one button~"
"And yet I'm still more productive on it than my Windows box"
"Well um, I want linu-"
"You can install that too."
"Well, they're slow and-"
"I suggest you actually try using one before saying that."
"They're overpric-"
"Really? I didn't think $900 was that expensive for a mid-range machine."
We do the Apple worship thing just to fustrate the anti-mac crowd even more.
This is not a flame:
That UoM 512 CPU one is significantly smaller than the top 5 super computers. You should probably only be comparing in class. Costs do not increase proportionally with size of the computer.