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Windows Breaks Into Supercomputer Top 10
yanx0016 writes "Wow, that's some news this week at SuperComputing 08. Apparently Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, with a Chinese hardware OEM (Dawning), made #10 on the Top500 list, edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops. Folks were shocked to see Microsoft getting so serious around HPC; I think we are only beginning to see a glimpse of Microsoft in the HPC field."
FLOPS and MIPS are all very well, but if the OS is pissing them away then it does not matter much.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Honestly, why would anyone want to roll-out something like this on Windows. A lot of extra expense for little practical value.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
...and I thought "hey, that's not news. I've known that for years!"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Being the flash of the BSOD before your pricey super computer reboots?
No sig for you!!
Arming the "Golden Shield" project with comprehensive IT technology
With the rapid development of the Internet, the public security information construction has become an important component of national information construction. Dawning made contributions in improving information technology level within all of the public security departments, arming the "Golden Shield" project with information technology, equipping the "police" force with digitalization, intensifying the police by technology and comprehensively raising China public security's law enforcement and administrative capacity.
I like how they quote "police" force.
So how many CALs are required to access the system?
And if I want to make the system available to a different researcher every 2 hours how much is it going to cost them to be license compliant?
How much cpu power am I going to need to compute the licensing costs?
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/lic_cal.mspx
Can You Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These?
may $deity help us if it gets infected...
That is, programmers who are familiar with Windows more than other systems.
And Microsoft is also looking to roll out a new language that is supposed to make parallel programming much easier for those programmers.
If it works, there would be a LOT more apps that take advantage of these systems.
Shortly after coming online, they noticed that it broke a speed record downloading "instructions" from abilena.podolsk-mo.ru
Then all you get is, "It looks like you're decoding the human genome. Would you like some help?"
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops
Emphasis mine.
Maybe I'm suffering from a case of advancing years, but I couldn't help but be amazed by this metric. These days it is indeed small, but another part of me remembers being a fifteen year old kid amazed at how absolutely great his C64 was.
I wonder exactly how many years a C64 would have to run to make up a single seconds worth of that difference. How long would a C64 have to run to perform 600 Gflop? How long would every single C64 ever made have to run? I wonder.
You'd have to run some integer-only 6502 IEEE floating point library or something like that to figure out how long a single floating point operation would take on the C64. Then multiply by 600G.
Would it be a few years? A few millenia? Blue-green algae?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
to run Windows 7.
This is good, exciting, and promising. With Vista being such a resource hog (and consecuently I dumped Vista and installed XP back on) it would be good to see MS concentrate on performance, not the sort of performance gains that come from running on the baddest hardware out there but the kind of gains that make each revision of software run better and more efficiently on teh same hardware. So when hardware gets faster your computing experience gets faster. Not faster hardware but same or slower response. This can be more efficiensy due to using less instructions to finish the same task or better algorithms to schedule tasks for more efficient carry outing.
"With the release of HPC Server 2008 a few weeks ago, Microsoft also offered an academic version priced at $15 per node to generate interest. By comparison, a commercial license runs $450 per node"
and 500 screens showing "allow or deny?"
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
For once, a computer that deserves the "Vista capable" sticker.
Who verifies the results of these tests? Are these Chinese results produced by doping, the way that Chinese "OEMs" produce high protein food by doping it with toxic melamine that kills children and pets, or shiny toys with lead paint that poisons children? Or any of the many other cheats Chinese "OEMs" use to get past tests with flying colors that bamboozle people into thinking it's really quality?
--
make install -not war
That's just their testing machine for Windows 7. Hardware up people.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
When I read the first two words of the headline I got ahead of myself and thought, "ain't that the truth!"
Can you imagine a botnet of those?
I can.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Finally, a computer that comes close to being able to run Crysis at Max Settings.
Software and hardware cost (seperated) per GFLOP please.
A couple of years ago I was surprised when one of my HPC customers issued a press release saying that their machine ran Windows HPC. The high-speed interconnect we'd sold them had no Windows drivers. You can guess what was going on: MicroSoft paid for the press release, and the machine actually ran Linux.
Dawning's previous fast machine ran Linux.
I stopped reading your post when I got to "M$". I don't like the company and avoid their products as much as possible, but if you're going to wear your bias on your sleeve you probably don't have anything valuable to add to the discussion.
Those news probably hit them as hard as it hit us, all they were doing was testing Windows 7 on a machine with the actual recommended specs..
Just think how much malware, spyware and bot nets this thing can support before anyone noticed a degradation in performance!!!
nobody in their right mind would let Windows in willingly.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Of course what you factor in the disruption to my typing flow to go press Shift+4, are you really saving that much time?
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
"Erris" and "right handed" (who replied to you) are just two of twitter's 14 sockpuppet accounts.
See this thread for a recent fun shill session.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Oh, and another one here.
Expect a few more to show up, it's this guy's usual disruption MO. He gets modded to hell for his useless drivel and shilling, and then he starts whining about how Microsoft is subverting Slashdot just to get him.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Cue the Vista jokes now. You know, the ones this: ...and so, and so on.
"Will it run Vista?"
"Finally I can use Aero"
DISCLAIMER: I'm a Linux aficionado, but have to use Vista for development.
So I got downmodded because I didn't know who he is and called him out?
Lame.
Well, the mods go either way, mostly. We're into deep offtopic territory here now. It really depends on whether or not people with mod points think that a) his drivel is valuable; and b) whether or not his shilling is "OK" because of (a).
Read this if you have time. It's linked from the journal that documents his gaming of the moderation system, but it captures the whole thing very well. That's who you're dealing with here, so I generally recommend just stepping away or risk getting some twitter on your shoes, which is generally not hygienic :)
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What's missing in the article is that there are only a few windows-based systems in the top500 and there numbers have been declining over the years.
New things are always on the horizon
... are you serious?
But can it digest small felines as well as a GNU/Linux distribution? I think not. I pitty thee who say but not do!
pig@bellamy:~$ su - rm -rf /
So how many gigaflops does Norton Antivirus use on that puppy?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
.. but are they running genuine Windows?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
but over a Peta-BSODps
Nullius in verba
That's a shame it was much more insightful then this piece of shit you posted.
Seriously, why do you act all butthurt when someone types M$?
You sound like one of those tards that keeps correcting everyone that it's GNU/Linux or that Hackers are the good guys and crackers and the badies.
Enjoy your losing battle.
It is one thing to measure Drystones etc, or some other simple grunt-measuring metric, but that does not realistically stress the OS's influence on how the system will perform on huge complex number crunching models.
Microsoft has only been in this game for a short time and only recently got support for 256 cores. Getting support is one thing, getting **good**, optimised, support is quite another and that will take some time to get right.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's possible that one of his sockpuppets got mod points and modded you troll, because I don't see any trolling in your post.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Did they measure the performance with or without effect of antivirus software?
(parent comment unrelated)
Yes! Now I can finally run Crysis on full settings!
What is wrong with " M$ "?
Great abbreviation for the evil, greedy, monopolistic company. Think about all the electrons that are saved by using M$ instead of describing all the wrongs they do in every instance.
I have noticed that the paid/unpaid Microsoft (M$) shills complain about people using "M$" here on a regular basis.
So, you have done your job, hope Gates/Balmer gives you a pat on the head for your good work,
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
2009 could be the year of supercomputing Windows!
Is it possible to create a Beowulf Cluster of Supercomputers?
You can still use MS development tools to get most of the way there and then recompile for your final target if that's what you claim is the advantage and I have done so at many jobs before.
I would think that for real supercomputing jobs you can almost write to the metal and have messaging libraries mostly negating the need for an operating system. I'm curious though as to how jobs are normally split up when running on supercomputers, i.e., are jobs allowed to run concurrently or are they submitted sequentially in a batch.
Yeah right...
[1]
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
You are a what of whom? And why does your homepage link to a flamy comment by twitter?
Really, I thought windows was for dummies. (hint, everyone should agree and nod in confusion as to why there is a supercomputer running windows)
So how we should start naming apple then? They are evil and greedy, and the really would love to be monopolistic.
What is wrong with " M$ "?
Nothing is wrong with "M$", in the same sense that nothing is wrong with someone referring to Linux as "linsux" and open-source as "open-sores". The thing is, it tends to make you look somewhat immature.
If you can present a compelling coherent argument, you don't need to use lame decade old snipes about whatever subject matter you are discussing. If you use them in a compelling argument, it usually just makes the people you are out to persuade have a lesser opinion of what you wrote, and thus, you have sacrificed persuasive power.
It comes down to maturity for the most part and just simply putting forward a good argument.
And those Chinese Gymnasts are 16 years old too.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
for people who don't waste time
That's funny, considering you have time for this.
#10 on the list uses a AMD x86_64 Opteron Quad Core @ 1900 MHz and has 30720 cores and pumps out 180600 GFlops.
#8 on the list uses a AMD x86_64 Opteron Quad Core @ 2100 MHz and has 30976 cores and pumps out 205000 GFlops.
#10 runs windows, #8 runs linux.
Working through this: Gflops/# of cores/Mhz per core I get:
#10 with 3.094 Gflops/Mhz and #8 with 3.151 Gflop/Mhz
This leaves the linux machine getting 57 more KFlops per Mhz than the windows box.
disclaimer: Totally useless mental farking, without knowing more about the systems other components and more about the processor generations it's silly to assume the 57 KFlops is purely due to the OS, but hey, it's windows and everyone loves an easy target. :D
Yes, because dollar signs are EVIL . All companies that make money are GREEDY . Not to mention that anyone who complains about childish namecalling is a SHILL who is regularly visited by two of the most powerful figures in the IT industry just to let them know they are doing a top notch job.
So why does anybody need a cluster of MS Windows servers to run MS Exchange so that people can merely read their email?
If MS can rake up a machine to hit Nr 10 in the performance stakes why can't it make a regular server that can cope with the BAU workloads of medium-sized businesses?
He is a twitter sockpuppet, an alternate account under which he posts, one of over a dozen that twitter uses. He is attempting to impersonate the /. user westlake. He uses the account to try and troll under someone elses name, hence nametroll. He feels that creating accounts solely to smear someones name is a valid and justified reaction to someone he disagrees with on an internet forum. Unbelievably, he is proud of this fact as evidenced by his sig and homepage. He also has a persecution complex and a paranoid conspiracy fantasy that these are all professional Microsoft shills sent to silence his evangelism of FOSS. The truth that those who find him most obnoxious are actual valuable contributors to the FOSS landscape, and his babbling ranting idiocy only damages the FOSS movement and makes Microsoft supporters look rational and sane in comparison.
And even *that* computer doesn't run Vista...
(yeah, I know, but still)
and I can tell you, the MS booth is crowded all the time, while MS may be paying to get into the biz, they have done that before and been successful, I think they are finally "getting it" by wooing developers and program managers by emphasizing creating an environment that is easy to use, and interfaces with existing infrastructure. In the end competition is good, and Linux needs a kick in the pants in the HPC arena, as it has become dominant, and somewhat complacent in the last few years.
I would hate to sound rude, but if your information is so accurate why are you posting as AC?
Grow up and get a life, or laid, or something.
Yeah yeah, flaming, trolling, whatever.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
The faster the windows box, the sooner it will lock up. I hope that super fast box responds quicker to ctrl alt delete! :)
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
Awesome. Now the Chinese government can use this system to build new weapons and oppress people even more. Right on Microsoft!
You betcha !
Can I run MySQL server on these Supercomputers?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
not rude just stupid...(I am another AC...)
security by obscurity WORKS...
Or should you provide your name and address so I can impersonate yourself just enough to get the attention of police/criminal/irs on you ?
When you deal with fanboy and dummy like twitter, the last thing you want is to suffer the stalking after that...
Blue screen of death within 0.337 picosecond !!! WhoooHooo !!!!
Linux.
I wonder what the system requirements for the next windows version will be.
crysis at full resolution.
i think this just proves you dont need researchers, grad students, professors, or any of that 'academic' nonsense if you just pick a good outsource partner no one has heard of, and throw lots of money at it until your pimped version of windows server performs equivalently to its linux/unix/bsd counterpart.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You are almost certainly correct. I've got numbers from going from OS X on a large machine to going to Linux on same said large machine and there was a measurable performance gain. I'm expecting another performance gain (quite possibly a significant one again) when we upgrade the kernel to the tickless timer enabled kernels.
It is called "jitter" or "operating system jitter" -- look it up!
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Twitter, mod down accordingly.
What I think is that you sound like a Microsoft shill.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I work for an engineering firm that is constantly running numerical analysis as part of our primary business. We run about 500 Linux boxes (with varying numbers of cores) arranged into multiple clusters. Our desktops run Windows.
Our pre-processing tools are Windows-based and our post-processing tools are Windows-based. Institutional knowledge/experience and mature tools means that this isn't going to change. Our in-house solvers are Linux-based not by choice, but because Microsoft doesn't offer a cost-effective solution for running our simulations on Windows boxes.
Even though we've developed utilities to make the process as smooth as possible, having Linux as part of the process chain is still an enormous pain and one we'd like to resolve. We've been watching Windows HPC with interest and can only hope for the price point to become reasonable.
Although Windows remains in poor regard with many here, there are many companies in the business of engineering simulation that would happily welcome Windows HPC.
Most likely this machine has one GUI, windows.
It would seam retarded to me as well, to have your GUI, regardless it's background, be critical to the tasks the remaining cores are performing. Their is probably a virtual machine running "Windows with GUI", that can be rebooted without affecting the real processing. The rest is all custom software, probably even written by microsoft, that really isn't hampered by how it interacts with the GUI.
Basically saying Windows/Linux/Solaris, etc doesn't seam very important. Saying it's developed by the same people is the important bit. IE with this developed by MS, it is saying to me their is no chance the underlying tech will leave microsofts grasp for others to build upon. When it is done by Red Hat the likely hood that the industry as a whole grows from their experience (through open source) would be more likely (If your paying for one of these systems, you likely want more competition and sharing, so your next purchase won't be as pricey, and upgrades will be cheaper as well.)
However it is saying their is one more vendor, Microsoft, competing, and challenging others, and showing they can build a quality product, that's not bad IMHO.
You don't remove GUI overhead, it's still there, just unusable. Even 'Core' runs a gui. The amount of overhead may be low, but it's not fair to say the GUI is no overhead just because no monitor is connected.
For this, for MS my concerns would be:
-Manageablitiy. MS is a pain in the ass to administer at scales of systems.
-Flexibility. You are confined to MS vision as to how to use the platform. Looking at the rest of the top10, many are incapable of running windows due to the following characteristics:
-Non-x86 hardware
-No local storage or bootable SAN, using stateless images in RAM.
That's just the basics, some projects go so far as a customized stack down to the kernel for certain tasks, to milk the absolute maximum out of the platform without any extraneous processes in the way.
Cost is an issue for the common configuration as well that isn't so fortune to be a bragging point. For this deployment, you can bet cost was an issue too, but in the opposite sense. I imagine MS paid the involved parties a significant sum to help subsidize this effort. Hardware vendors are notorious for this, and MS would be no different.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It was in china, they just walked to the corner and picked up a few thousand copies of Windows and probably paid 5 to 10 bucks.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
After decades of presenting compelling coherent arguments, and no one listening or changing their behavior, I find the lame snipes have both weight and accuracy.
And get off my lawn.
are licensed, the rest are, ahem, Peoples' Copies.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
They were the gold standard of supercomputing in the 1970s and 1980s, then lost their way after the founder's death in a car accident.
...since we're going to need a super computer to run Office on Windows 7.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
it hosts the Windoesn't-Update ftp site
I hope it scales well or Vista is doomed
Actually, I thought it was more immature to attack his usage when the meaning is clear enough, and when words and communication styles have been changing and adapting since the dawn of language.
mode parent funny/insightful...
and no one listening or changing their behavior
People absolutely _have_ listened and changed their behaviour. Linux is in a far better position today than it was a decade ago. It is a major player, if not THE player in various key segments of the server market (e.g. internet facing servers, supercomputing, universities, etc...). It wasn't too long ago that this area was owned by the Unix's, often expensive and proprietary ones. It has made advances, though less significant, in the desktop market. But with distributions like Ubuntu evolving rapidly, I think desktop usage of Linux may well change significantly over the coming years.
There are now major OEM's offering Ubuntu as a Windows alternative pre-installed on machines. This would have been an absurd notion only years ago, but a major milestone has been reached. Finally, it has also forced competitors, like Microsoft, to lift their game in multiple areas due to their at times drastically inferior offerings, resulting in better software across the board.
I assure you, only a tiny minority of the people who did change were persuaded by fanboys calling Microsoft "M$".
I find it ironic that in many cases the staunchest supporters of Linux and OSS in general are also the ones that do the most harm. Seriously, we're talking Ballmer equivalents. If you want people to change, you need to get them on side. If all you can offer is lame abuse, you're at best doing nothing for the movement you support, and at worst, actively damaging it.
That seems to be all you see. You are guilty of the behavior you criticize. Try understanding.
This machine could be No. 2 if it would run a decent OS.
That's funny coming from you, considering twitter nailed you once with one of his sockpuppets and made you believe he was willyhill.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Well, the mods go either way, mostly. We're into deep offtopic territory here now. It really depends on whether or not people with mod points think that a) his drivel is valuable; and b) whether or not his shilling is "OK" because of (a).
Read this if you have time. It's linked from the journal that documents his gaming of the moderation system, but it captures the whole thing very well. That's who you're dealing with here, so I generally recommend just stepping away or risk getting some twitter on your shoes, which is generally not hygienic :)
I don't have modpoints but I can write a nice rant.
Why do you think anybody cares? You're as much as a troll doubling up every discussion he might start. Quit it. I don't care. I recognize a troll without your help. Hell I don't even look at the names before reading the comment. Who cares who wrote what where at what time. Who cares who's abusing/trolling the karma system to get his karma to "excellent". Make 4 funny posts and you've got the same result.
I'm here for new content, not to read the gripes of some vigilante hero who needs to point out the obvious troll on every damn page I read. You're getting far more boring than any troll.
You're feeding him. He'll just have 25 "sockpuppet accounts" in some time instead of 20 thanks to your efforts. You won't make him stop. He enjoys it.
So please don't spend your time on pointing out one troll over and over again. We don't need it. Trolls have probably been part of slashdot longer than you, slashdot survived just fine to let you join, and it'll probably survive just fine without your "help" polluting every page some *more*.
Of course what you factor in the disruption to my typing flow to go press Shift+4, are you really saving that much time?
Does that disrupt your typing flow? I guess you could practice typing certain characters some more. It's not like '$' jumps to another key on the keyboard every minute.
Not really, he was being a dick then, just as you're being a dick now.
Rather then discuss the topic you're whining about a text representation of a name? You are really fucking pathetic, what's next? Crying because someone uses "lol" instead of "I am laughing out loud".
The market for Windows HPC is in the world where programmers are expected to be productive - not hand coding the re-invention of the wheel and the abacus. Languages, IDEs, APIs, frameworks like .Net. Microsoft has been in the tool-making business for over thirty years now, and it has not been an insignificant part of its success
I never said anything about the "M$" thing, you've got me confused with the person I originally replied to.
And here's the link to that thread I mentioned. I remembered it because I replied to you.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Unbelievably, he is proud of this fact as evidenced by his sig and homepage.
I don't need to validate the accuracy of my comments when they are proudly displayed for all to see by the idiot in question.
You are right I got you mixed up, sorry about that. Replace "you're" and "you" with "he is" and it all makes sense.
I suppose thats marketing as all m$ stuff. Linux/Unix clusters are mature and work for real in most research labs.
m$ must be sponsoring this thing so it doesn't look so bad. they'll 'innovate' another 1000x before anything gets productive.