Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer

karvind writes "IBM Power Architecture Community Newsletter has a story about making a supercomputer (Number 4 on top 500 list) from easily available components (like BladeCenter and TotalStorage servers, 970FX PowerPC processors, and Linux 2.6). A joint venture between IBM and the Spanish government, it is named MareNostrum: the Latin term meaning 'our sea.' Peaking at 40 TFlops, the beast consists of 2,282 IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers housed in 163 BladeCenter chassis, 4,564 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970FX processors, and 140 TB of IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers."

Comments

specifically

[bersl2]

Mare Nostrum refers to the Mediterranean Sea.

Mare Nostrum

[nebaz]

Mare Nostrum literally means "our sea". It is what the Romans called the Mediterranean Sea during the Empire. As you can see, it was an apt name.

Humans are so behind the curve

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an African Grey parrot, and I can tell you that while you humans are celebrating this achievement, I and my fellow Greys are laughing at you. Supercomputers are old news to us; in fact, one of my friends solved the halting problem while taking a crap the other day. Seriously, people, we like you 'cause you feed us, but leave this kind of stuff to us.

(I tried to register an account but /. thought my user name was too long)

It's all fine

[Anonymous Coward]

but does it run Linux? Oh crap, never mind.

Top 500?

[Ubi_NL]

(Number 4 on top 500 list)
...while being Number 6 on top 300 list, and Number 65 on top 2000 list.

This is like those CDs that have 'best of the Top40' and not contain the top10 list of that

and in 32 years

[headlessspider]

and after about 16 (or 32) years we'll have that power in our desktops...

Off who's shelf?

[identity0]

I love the first line in the article, which ends, "is constructed of such totally off-the-shelf parts as IBM BladeCenter JS20 servers, 64-bit 970FX PowerPC processors, TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers, and Linux 2.6. This is its story."

Right, like I regularly go to Fry's to stock up on some DS4100s and Bladecenters. I'd love to be the geek for whom that stuff is "off-the-shelf". Can you even buy bare PPC CPUs and mobos?

Re:Off who's shelf?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBMs shelf. The stuff in itself is nothing particular, just ordinary computer stuff sold by IBM to hundreds or thousands of other customers.

Just because you "can't" buy the stuff in pieces (IBM will probably gladly sell you the stuff as spare parts, if you prefer to assemble it yourself) doesn't mean it's not off the shelf.

War in the age of information warfare

[flopsy mopsalon]

I happened to look at the Top 500 supercomputers site and I couln't help noticing out of the top 5 supercomputers almost half are in non-US countries like Spain and Japan. This is not to beat some kind of patriot act drum. Instead, it got me to thinking.

With supercomputing powers now avaible to any country or group with a few readily available components, it is only a matter of time before these supercomputing powers may be used by a rogue state or radical group to cause havoc among electronic communications using methods like denial of service attacks, spyware, and crapflooding message boards.

I think it is high time the nations of the world put their heads together and addressed this issue. For example, I don't think the US Federal Government even has any cabinet-level position like Secretary of Information Technology or something like that. When are they going to get with the times? It will probably take another terrorist attack or something.

Re:War in the age of information warfare

[grozzie2]

These things are already being used by rogue states. The us military has a bunch of them dedicated to modelling nuclear events.

With regard to denial of service attacks, there's a cluebox over in the corner, you need to go grab a couple out of the box. DOS attacks dont require a big computer, they require massive bandwidth with massive routing diversity available. The actual computer power required borders on insignificant. A supercomputer like this is useless for that kind of thing, by necessity, it will have an internal networking and communications environment, and likely only a relatively low speed interconnect to external networks.

But look on the bright side, the knee jerk 'terrorist behind every lamp post' reaction is just what the american government has been trying to instill in the population for the last few years. Your post here shows, it's been an effective campaign, money successfully spent, and the objective achieved. It's become the 'trendy' response to just about everything these days.

Re:War in the age of information warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that these are Top500 KNOWN supercomputers.

It's quite possible that many more computers that exist but are operating under classified conditions. For instance I would be suprised if the NSA had something for breaking crypto that rivaled some of the machines in the top 50 or so super computers, but it's not something that would appear on this list. This is for boasting rights only, if a place chooses not to publicize their computer, it won't end up on the list.

American computers pretty much dominate. Some like the Spainish one are built by American companies (like IBM), but just happen to be installed in foreign places.

Now the NEC Earth Simulator is a BIG exception. It dominated the top 500 for a considurable period of time and is completely japanese built, designed and owned. It is a huge technological acheivement and the pinnacle of technology for it's day. It's hard to relate to how significant it was. It is the top of the line when it comes to old-school massively parrallel supercomputers, blew American supercomputers out of the water.

But along came Linux clusters (which in many ways is competely unsuitable for some of the things that Earth Simulator can do) and now Blue Gene. Which can possibly do twice the work as Earth Simulator, but consumes a fraction of the power and space needed to house these types of computers.

timely and focused PR

[bandix]

This is all about timely and focused execution. The speed at which this project was realized is important. Consider: from the initial concept in late December of 2003 to assembling the computer in Madrid took less than a year. Normally, this kind of supercomputer projects take years.

Lame!

SGI had NASA AMES' Columbia online in 120 days, and landed #2 on the Top500.

Sounds like

[jim_v2000]

Peaking at 40 TFlops, the beast consists of 2,282 IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers housed in 163 BladeCenter chassis, 4,564 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970FX processors, and 140 TB of IBM TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers.

Sounds like the specs of Microsoft's Xbox 3...

Re:Beowulf cluster?

[commodoresloat]

Yeah but it's made from "easily available components." Hmmm, I think I've seen that before, at the University of Virginia. Don't G5s qualify as "easily available"?

Mare Nostrum

[woah]

Mare Nostrum is Latin for "our sea"?

But I thought it was Ouray Easay!

What's going on?

This is all so confusing! I need to take a nap.

Re:Beowulf cluster?

[tomhudson]

It makes you wonder where the limit currently is for if it is worth adding an extra node,

If you're the vendor, there is no limit. Every extra node == $$$

If you're the buyer, there is no limit. Every extra node == _MORE_STATUS_

If you're the guys writing code for it, there is no limit. Every extra node == job security++

If you're the people administering this, there is no limit. Every extra node == bigger budget next year

See, citizen? Size does count.

Re:Beowulf cluster?

[antifoidulus]

Eh, not really. In a lot of the algorithms, there comes a point when adding nodes will make it SLOWER because the increases in communication time are greater than the decrease in computation time. Now granted this does depend a lot on a) what you are doing with the machine and b) the machines themselves, but just thinking that people who make these things love to just pile on hardware is a bit naive....