Slashdot Mirror
Low Energy Supercomputing
Faith Singer at TACC writes "The term 'supercomputing' usually evokes images of large, expensive computer systems that calculate unfathomable algorithms and run on enough energy to support a small city. Now, imagine a supercomputer, but run on the electrical equivalent of three standard-size coffee-makers. This year's international supercomputing conference, SC10, will feature the Student Cluster Competition that challenges students to build, maintain, and run the most-cutting edge, commercially available high-performance computing (HPC) architectures on just 26 amps."
Amps = current, not energy....
Can I use as many volts as I'd like?
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I don't know about computers, but you can get a lot of productivity out of humans with the power produced from three coffeemakers.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Current * voltage = power. In the United States, alternating current from the wall is nominally 115 volts, and 115 V * 26 A = 2990 W. So I think the actual figure was supposed to be 3 kW of power. Run this for one eight-hour day* for 24 kJ of energy per session.
* This can be business hours (if interactive) or the most efficient cooling hours (if batch).
The computational hardware (processors, switch, storage, etc.) must fit into a single rack. All components associated with the system, and access to it, must be powered through the two 120-volt, 20-amp circuits, (each with a soft limit of 13 amps) for a total of 26 amps, provided by the conference. Power to each system will be provided via metered power distribution units The equipment rack must be able to physically hold these metering power strips.
This makes it even harder since theyir hardware has to be power balanced between the two power strips. They'll have to come up with some dynamic load balancing between cluster nodes based on power consumption. I guess dual power supplies might help (do dual power supplies draw perfectly balanced power between both power inputs?), but at a loss of power efficiency.
...Stony Brook University, and the piece that's missing from the summary is 26 amps@120v, (dual circuits, soft capped at draw of 13 each)
Links to more info from the conference: SC10 CC Page, rules, and app list.
The competition is harder than it sounds, you have to build a cluster from the ground up, fit it into the power requirement (which means stripping out redundancies among other things), strip down a distro (we used Debian as a starting point), get the apps optimized, and then run through the data sets. Your team needs to *understand* the apps, the OS, and the hardware in order to win. There are several people from various teams from past years who have moved on to doing their PhDs in comp sci based on work from this competition (At Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UMich off the top of my head).
It's important too, in a few ways. For one I know I learned more about clusters the first day I started working on the team for this competition back in 2007 than I ever knew before. That knowledge has led to research fellowships, jobs, and knowledge of what I want to (biochemical modeling). It's an experiance that very few undergrads get, and I think that's a shame.
For the industry it's an important highlight of what can be done with a lot of dedication and a focus on wringing the most from your hardware and software. and in doing that we showcase a lot of work that people dont think about. For example our cluster last year ran off a single disk, plus a large ramdisk as scratch exported over QDR infiniband to the compute nodes. No, it's not new, but it was novel to a lot of people who dropped by our booth.
For another, the ASU team was the first time *I* and many others ever saw a windows cluster in the wild.
Competitions like this are important, they showcase technology and introduce it to undergrads early, with positive benefit!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series