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New 640-Node Apple Xserve Cluster at UIUC
frostyboy writes "At the University of Illiois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Computational Science and Engineering , a new high-performance computing cluster comprising 640 Dual G5 Xserves has completed benchmarking runs for the top500 list. The New Turing Cluster is a replacement for an old 208-node linux cluster. Preliminary results have it at about 4.6 teraflops, not too shabby. Slide Presentation and Photo Album"
The slide show shows that the only thing Linux about the cluster is the NFS server. Seems that OS X 10.3.5 nfs server maxes out at 50 clients.
While it might be good for PR to give UIUC a discount so that they would buy the system, remember that the cost per performance is already low. Virginia Tech built the X cluster for around $5 million whereas the computers next to it on the top 500 list cost $20+ million. There may have been a deal, but given the price tag is already low, it may not have been much.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Read the slide presentation. On pg 9, it shows a picture of Mac OSX at the terminal and on pg 16 it lists OSX under the software. However, linux will still operate the NFS server because Apple's implementation of NFS server only allows fifty clients. I am not sure whether a XServe or an old computer from the previous cluster will run it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Tech's machines each have dual 2.3GHz processors as opposed to UIUC's dual 2.0GHz. Tech also appears to have a much faster network, and I imagine custom software for developing and running simulations. I guess it all adds up and Tech did a better overall integration job.
Worth a note: we don't have a 640-node cluster, it's really a 512 and 128 node clusters. Theoretical peak was I think 8 Tflop, and we got 4.6 or about 57%. VT's first entry only hit 54% if I remember what our parallel software expert told me right, so with more time to tune we'll probably get higher again for SC05's list. (VT's up to what, 61% or so now?)
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Mac OS X also has a Carbon-native Emacs binary. See http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_so urce/carbonemacspackage.html.