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First 96-Node Desktop Cluster Ships
Panaphonix writes "The Register reports that Orion Multisystems is shipping the first 96-node desktop cluster. 'With the new, larger system, customers get pretty much the most powerful computer around that can plug into a standard electrical socket.' According to the spec sheet, the DS-96 runs Fedora Core 2 and gets 110 GFlops sustained, 230 GFlops peak."
I FAIL IT!
My uni recently got some a 12 system dell cluster that came loaded with redhat. mmm; paralizing is fun:)
96 Processors Under Your Desktop
I am not familiar with the architecture of clusters, so I am a little surprised by the more than 100% difference between sustained and peak GFlops. I know what a GFlop is and all that, I just don't immediately see why there is such a huge difference.
Can someone summarize why there is such a huge difference?
bash: rtfm: command not found
Its not duped, this article has been clustered.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
At 150lbs or 68KG you need a Beowulf cluster of people to move it!
It's called a follow-up:
"In October, you'll be able to choose between"
"is shipping the first 96-node desktop cluster. '"
You want to be impressed heh? Well, it is powerfull enough to play solitaire on Longhorn!!!!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
i doubt it, you microsoft astroturfer.
Because they started development before FC3 came out maybe?
With power requirements quintupling that of a standard desktop computer, I'd probably have to use it at my local coffee shop, or only turn it on briefly to scare away song birds.
Will this make or break Transmeta? It uses their processors (Transmeta Tinside as the Register calls it). Slashdot already pronounced the death of Transmeta though (it has no more niches!), maybe this could revive interest?
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
You might want go through this
hilarious
$100,000/96 = ~$1,000.
Not a bad deal.
paintball
You forgot to mention:
12. List of common Slashdot posts
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
.. Computing?
I mean, does Blender run on it at least? Can I do anything interesting from an 'immediate-personal' perspective with 96 nodes, and I don't just mean run Quake, or fire up "make -j 96" and such things..
What sort of interesting modelling software is around? Could I use it to design stuff on a personal, non-hard-core science perspective? What are the practical uses for personal cluster computing?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
From TA "Sound power 55 bels"
:)
...and/or put the box in another room.
550 dBel noise? Perhaps the producers should look into Metal cooling ?
How many FPS can you get on Doom 3? I've got to plan my future purchasing decisions.
picture here
I can't hear you, the guy two cubicles over just fired up his new Opteron cluster. I'm just trying to hold on to my desk!
General CPU's just don't have the punch that special purpose or Fpga processors do.
And FPGAs or special purpose CPUs don't have the generality that normal CPUs have. There's also the small point about the Merrimac system not actually exisitng.
PS. Thanks for linking to Roland Piquepaille's fucking blog. He doesn't get nearly enough links on Slashdot in my opinion.
I gotta say.. I'm a tad suspicious here.. there seems to be a lot of marketing flash (no pun intended) and scarce details.
What kind of CPUs are we talking about ? I'm assuming we're talking non-shared memory here, and therefore nodes that "retain" their own identies. But then isnt each cpu running it's own kernal ? That is.. This ISNT SMP , right ?
I think the details could be a lot clearer here. The lack of tech specs or simple explinations, and excessive use of buisness speak "Efficiency" "unprecendented power" etc. makes me a tad nervous.
General purpose processors have *WAY* more punch. Especially punch per dollar, as FPGAs are fairly expensive.
They're just general purpose, whether they be scalar (CPU) or vector (GPU), so an FPGA that is specifically optimized for a specific problem will kick the general purpose processor's butt - in that specific problem.
But try running Quake III on an FPGA - it will be killed by the CPU in processing and killed by the GPU in graphics. Assuming you can even cram everything you need to be a CPU or GPU into the limited real estate of the FPGA in the first place.
paintball
All the current Orion systems, including this one, use Transmeta Efficeon CPUs. Not surprising since Orion was founded by a Transmeta co-founder.
Actually, Efficeon performance is quite good on the type of repetitive loop-based code this system is intended for. It may not surpass an equivalent Athlon 64 or P4 based system, but in terms of bang per watt, it's not bad.
No worries. He can set up WINE on it and run the Windows version of SETI@home with the screensaver, emulated :)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
You can tell you're on /. when dividing 1e5 by 1e2 to get 1e3 gets modded up to +5 insightful. :-)
Although having 96 nodes in a single box makes it quite cute, from what I can interpret from the specs, you would get more bang for your $100K by getting what the beowulf crowd like to call MMCOTS (Mass-Market-Common-Off-The-Shelf, i.e. mass produced computers from Dell or the like), hooked toghether with a specialty high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect like Infiniband, Myrinet or SCI. Running a free beowulf cluster OS like for instance ROCKS would mean that a normal linux admin could maintain it quite effectively.
I expect this thing to be marketed towards scientists in small or medium businesses that aren't employing many/any IT staff, who use commercial computer models to do things like theoretical chemistry (Gaussian, ADF etc), bioinformatics (Phase, BLAS, Paralign etc), fluid dynamics, statistics, crypto, you name it. I don't expect to see any of these types of systems used in normal supercomputing sites, where people write their own (parallel) code and skilled staff maintain the cluster.
-- Buzh
>When building cluster of stock PCs it should not be more then $500/PC.
What are you talking about?
The now (in)famous Apple cluster cost them about 5 million for 1,100 nodes or $5K/node.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/G5cluster.html
And that was supposed to be a good deal.
Parent poster messed up on their calcs. Current XServes are 18.4 GFlops peak, not 35 eg Virginia Tech currently at #7/500 is 20240 GFlops peak for 1100 XServes. So 7 would only be ~129 GFlops peak, and 33 would be 607 GFlops peak. But not exactly fitting in a single tower case - though 8 would fit nicely one of those mini sound-padded racks which would be almost as good. And at least the last time I saw a price comparison made, the G5s were far cheaper than comparable rack P4s. (The G5 has 2x the FP hardware).
I've never seen that before.
So you cann't use it on a plane.
Who cares? Modern graphics cards are capable of (sorry it's a PDF, it was all I could find) 40 GFLOPS. That's not even in SLI mode, which actually does push you to about a 98% over a single card (in terms of raw processing power).
Why would you buy a 96-CPU setup when you could buy a 6-GPU setup and match the same theoretical performance? (All jokes aside about the costs being roughly equivalent, they're nowhere near the same.) 6 top of the line 6800s would run you about $3600. Even if you added top of the line parts for the rest of the system, you'd be looking at about $1600 per system. Add $0 for the linux distribution to drive the whole thing, and you're at a grand total of $10K.
I'm not impressed.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Yea, I agree that Fedora was definitely an odd choice.. Well, I can trust that the kind of person whom can build a 96 node super computer, makes very educated decisions.. I'm glad to hear that company's are still involved in making these clusters. Its a great way to build something powerful for a cheap price, and not having to lean towards Crays etc.. I worked for a company called Patmos International for the longest time, and we never shipped a single cluster.. We had tons of investors that seemed interested of course, but after 2 years of contiuous development, and no sales, the investors simply stopped investing, therefore my job was done for.. We advertised the "$99,000" super computer that would supposedly be in "everyones" garage one day.. Of course that was just a saying because of how cheap we could offer a 32 node system with all of our custom applications and linux operating system. Pretty sweet setup.. it sucks to see the big guys go down sometimes.. to this day, it was the best job I've ever had.. You can still read about Patmos if you search for James Gatzka on google.. They tried their hardest to bring some damn technology and culture to the podunk town of the Eastern Shore of Maryland..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
One of my best friends just bought a tiny little house in downtown Toronto for $377,000. I left Toronto last November and moved to Santiago, Chile and live downtwon where my rent is $260/month, for quite a nice, though small place, in an excellent area.
So, if I spend $100K on the Orion DS-96, that leaves me more than enough for a 250 channel geodesic EEG system which would allow me to compute self-organizing maps of the human mind based on flashing the 1.6 million mindpixels I have collected over the past five years to various volunteers [english teachers], AND still have 56.73 years worth of rent left!
Too bad no bank will loan me $377,000 for a computer and an EEG system and the time to play with it...
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How blissfully ironic!
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
How about "plugs into a single 110 volt US outlet". This thing draws 1500 watts PEAK. That's about 14 amps for the math challenged or well under the recommended max for a 20-amp circuit from your household panel (think coffee maker on steroids). Let's try your barebones system approach and let's say you tweak it to use 50 watts per system (good luck). That's 50 watts per system multiplied by roughly 100 systems => 5Kwatts or 3+ times the power consumption. PLUS as an added bonus you get 96 cases, external cabling, at least 96 fans, a dozen power strips, and assorted other toys to trip over. Oh yeah and a few weeks of setup, integration, burn in, and testing.
That's not even a product, it's just a schematic. Talking about building a computer than only has $20K of parts, and running an actual business by selling those computers for $20K each are two very different things.