With Linux Clusters, Seeing Is Believing

Roland Piquepaille writes "As the recent release of the last Top500 list reminded us last month, the most powerful computers now are reaching speeds of dozens of teraflops. When these machines run a nuclear simulation or a global climate model for days or weeks, they produce datasets of tens of terabytes. How to visualize, analyze and understand such massive amounts of data? The answer is now obvious: using Linux clusters. In this very long article, "From Seeing to Understanding," Science & Technology Review looks at the technologies used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which will host the IBM's BlueGene/L next year. Visualization will be handled by a 128- or 256-node Linux cluster. Each node contains two processors sharing one graphic card. Meanwhile, the EVEREST built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has a 35 million pixels screen piloted by a 14-node dual Opteron cluster sending images to 27 projectors. Now that Linux superclusters have almost swallowed the high-end scientific computing market, they're building momentum in the high-end visualization one. The article linked above is 9-page long when printed and contains tons of information. This overview is more focusing on the hardware deployed at these two labs."

Comments

Re:Mac OS X has similar benefits

[RealAlaskan]

Virginia Tech's "System X" cluster cost a total of $6M for the asset alone (i.e., not including buildings, infrastructure, etc.), for performance of 12.25 Tflops.

By contrast, NCSA's surprise entry in November 2003's list, Tungsten, achieved 9.82 Tflops for $12M asset cost.

When I looked here, I found this: ``Tungsten entered production mode in Novermber 2003 and has a peak performance of 15.36 teraflops (15.36 trillion calculations per second).''

To me, that looks faster than System X, not slower.

Let's see: NCSA stands for ``National Center for Supercomputing Applications''. ``NCSA is a key partner in the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, a $100-million effort to offer researchers remote access ...''

Looks as if the NCSA has a huge budget. I'd guess that ``gold-plated everything'' and ``leave no dollars unspent'' are basic specs for everythig they buy.

What can we learn about Virginia Tech? How about this:

System X was conceived in February 2003 by a team of Virginia Tech faculty and administrators and represents what can happen when the academic and IT organizations collaborate.

Working closely with vendor partners, the Terascale Core Team went from drawing board to reality in little more than 90 days! Building renovations, custom racks, and a lot of volunteer labor had to be organized and managed in a very tight timeline.

In addition to the volunteer labor, I'd guess that Virginia Tech had very different design goals, in which price was a factor. NCSA's bureaucracy probably accounted for a lot of those extra $6M they spent. Different designs and goals probably had a lot to do with the rest of the price, but I suspect that a bureaucratic procurement process was the main cause for the higher price of the Xeon system.

Yes, System X and the Apple hardware is pretty neat, but don't use the price/performance ratio of these two systems as a metric for the relative worth of Linux and OSX clusters.

It's unfair and meaningless to compare volunteer labor and academic pricing and scrounging on a limited budget to bureaucratic design, bureaucratic procurement and an unlimited budget.