Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer

Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."

Comments

**Lets chop that price down...the newegg,com way**

[Bananatree3]

Motherboard: MSI K9N6PGM-F MicroATX $62.99 * 4 = $251.96

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPU $67.50 * 4 = $270

Main Memory: Kingston DDR2-667 1GByte RAM $48.49 * 8 + $4.99sh = $392.91

Power Supply: (can't beat price): $76.00

Network adapter (node to switch): (cant beat their price) $164.00

Network adapter (switch to node): (cant beat their price) $15

Switch: Trendware TEG-S80TXE 8-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch $46.99+$7.04sh = $54.03

Hard drive: Seagate 7200 250GB SATA hard drive $69.99

DVD/CD drive: (can't beat their price): $19

Cooling: (can't beat their price): $32

Fan protective grills: (can't beat their price): $10

KVM: (can't beat their price): $50 Grand total (incl. 15 in hardware): 1416.89 $1000 saved by using Newegg!

Re:Actually... Microwulf might well be revolutiona

[forkazoo]

One of the problems with supercomputers is that there aren't really very many of them, because of the size and cost. It means that the tools you use to run your supercomputing applications are similarly unusual. The skills to use and develop on parallel systems are then equally scarce. Access to a supercomputer isn't exactly common.

Revolutionary? Everything old is new again...

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/
http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid =494184&xsl=story.xsl -- 8 way parallel cluster that fits on an airplane for under 3 grand
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/ -- a 7U chassis that holds 14 blades, and is a bit spendy, but not completely unreasonable for some situations
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8177 -- My personal favorite, this page talks about several small portable miniclusters that have been made over the last six or seven years...

Yes, 8 cores of Athlon64 is faster than 8 cores of low power VIA CPU's from several years ago, but the concept isn't revolutionary, and there isn't a lot of headline worthy engineering that goes into a project like this... I'm sure it's a very handy tool, and I'm not suggested it shouldn't have been built, or that it was entirely trivial to build, but in the end, it's just four ordinary motherboards and ethernet.

Re:How does it compare to a PS3?

[MacroRex]

Sorry for replying to myself, but I found an interesting paper about the subject. Seems that a PS3 should have Rpeak of 14 Gflop/s with double precision floating point operations. Sounds to me that with a proper clustering solution a four-node PS3 cluster would be significantly faster than Microwulf. And it would probably be a smaller, too :)

Re:Newbie translation please?

[noahisaac]

So 1 Hz equals 1 FlOp? And a 3.2 GHz CPU can do 3.2 gigaflops, right?

No, one hertz is one cycle of the processor.

Can they execute multiple FlOps per tick then?

Yes. A single processor will perform several steps in one cycle. Typically, the steps are something like:

1. fetch (an instruction from memory)
2. decode the instruction
3. execute the instruction
4. access (some memory location)
5. writeback (some values calculated during this cycle)

In reality, this cycle is usually more complex and processors are designed to predict certain events in order to pack more into a single processor cycle. On top of this, note that the processors used in this machine are all dual-core processors. This means that instead of the 4 processors listed on the hardware manifest, it's really more like 8 processors (well, not quite).

And do we care that these will bottleneck at the rather limited bus (even forgetting about the switch).

No.

Hey, those computer engineering classes I was forced to take as a part of my CS major have actually proven useful! Oh wait, this is Slashdot.

Re:Definition?

[mikael]

The basic definition of a supercomputer is a system which has top performance compared to other computer systems (within the top 500 or 100).

In the past, this could only be achieved by having custom CPU's to perform pipelining or parallel processing. Processors in the Cray supercomputers had extremely deep vector pipelines, which was good for three-dimensional simulations like CFD or computer animation. But other systems followed the parallel processing method. The Connection machine had 2^16 one bit processors which was good for encryption/decryption. Other systems used standard CPU's (Intel 80x86's, DEC Alpha's and M680x0's) connected together through a high-speed bus network.

The different types of systems could be defined according to how these processed instructions/data.

SISD - Single Instruction, Single Data - Early home computer
SIMD - Single Instruction, Multiple Data - Vector processors
MISD - Multiple Instruction, Single Data - Fault tolerant systems
MIMD - Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data - Parallel processing CPU's

Some systems had hardwared interconnect configurations - either a 2D square grid, a 3D square grid or torus network, or even star networks, while others had dynamic routing capability. Transputers only knew about the adjacent processors in the four compass directions (NESW).

But all of these techniques have been incorporated into mainstream CPU's now - you now have dual-core and quad-core CPU's that can be used by laptops.

Modern day methods are to make the systems super-scalar. Multi-core CPU's can be arranged side by side onto multi-CPU boards which in turn can be rack mounted into chassis which communicate through high-speed interconnect systems. There is no limit on the number of racks that can be used except space and money.