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There's A Cluster of 750 Raspberry Pi's at Los Alamos National Lab (insidehpc.com)
Slashdot reader overheardinpdx shares a video from the SC17 supercomputing conference where Bruce Tulloch from BitScope "describes a low-cost Rasberry Pi cluster that Los Alamos National Lab is using to simulate large-scale supercomputers." Slashdot reader mspohr describes them as "five rack-mount Bitscope Cluster Modules, each with 150 Raspberry Pi boards with integrated network switches."
With each of the 750 chips packing four cores, it offers a 3,000-core highly parallelizable platform that emulates an ARM-based supercomputer, allowing researchers to test development code without requiring a power-hungry machine at significant cost to the taxpayer. The full 750-node cluster, running 2-3 W per processor, runs at 1000W idle, 3000W at typical and 4000W at peak (with the switches) and is substantially cheaper, if also computationally a lot slower. After development using the Pi clusters, frameworks can then be ported to the larger scale supercomputers available at Los Alamos National Lab, such as Trinity and Crossroads.
BitScope's Tulloch points out the cluster is fully integrated with the network switching infrastructure at Los Alamos National Lab, and applauds the Raspberry Bi cluster as "affordable, scalable, highly parallel testbed for high-performance-computing system-software developers."
BitScope's Tulloch points out the cluster is fully integrated with the network switching infrastructure at Los Alamos National Lab, and applauds the Raspberry Bi cluster as "affordable, scalable, highly parallel testbed for high-performance-computing system-software developers."
Raspberry Pis?
Woot
Did they make a Beowulf cluster of those?
No one said anything on topic so far.... just mean the topics not fucking interesting by any stretch.... fucking slashdot quality going down hill.
That they had to resort to this with the dismal budgets while our rivals are building the worldâ(TM)s fastest computers.
When somebody buys 750 all at once.
It was my experience that pi's are hard to buy so i gave up trying to get one. Mind you when people use ancient rasbian os and make 'secure' email servers on port 26 and then get called out for issues it is good to see that somebody is using them properly instead of poorly.
Well.... it looks like itâ(TM)s totally appropriate time to say this now.
Fuck Net Neutrality! Murcia! Fuck Yeah!
computing is cheap now, so what?
And Msmash
This would be an amazing side project for someone to do at home. And it wouldn't break the bank (too badly... maybe the cost of a new car). What a talking point that would be at a job interview.
That's basically 750 x $50, ~$40k - for that price you should find something powerful without having to deal with the burden of handling 750 machines (plus the R.Pi cpu is not a ferrari)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
As in bidirectional communication I assume!
Twinstiq, game news
Is that similar to a Raspberry Trans?
If you cannot get 1000's of slow cpu's to scale, then wasting debug time on the big fast server is really a waste. Today's programmers need to learn how it used to be. Even with using RPI's they have an advantage. The network is much faster than what we had 20 or 30 years years ago. Internal busses are faster, ram/memory is faster, caches are faster. This is a smart way to spend money for a bringup development environment on the cheap.
Are they running 64-bit os? If so, they can tap into significant performance from the arm-64/NEON/SIMD/crypto instructions, etc.
You don't need a supercomputer to figure out that the headline is poor usage. The Chicago Manual of Style will do that for you.
10 CPUs with 72 cores each is 720 cores.
750 SOCs with 4 cores each is 3,000 cores (and RAM and motherboards included).
The point is to have a massive number of cores in a large number of machines, to simulate a large number of machines, at the budget point. Your idea would have 75% fewer cores.
> shared memory
Yep, that's another problem with your idea. It would no longer be an accurate simulation. Well except your plan doesn't include any RAM at all. Or motherboards, networking, etc. You're going to need to buy 750 network cards to simulate 750 machines, motherboards each capable of holding 18 cards, a number of storage devices, etc. So maybe FIVE 7290 CPUs with exotic motherboards plus RAM, network cards, storage, etc. Five 7290s would provide 360 cores, vs the 3,000 cores they got with the Pis.
Now AFTER the research yields fruit, in a couple years someone might want to put the ideas into production using fifty 72-core processors which may cost $2,000 each.
10 CPUs with 72 cores each is 720 cores.
No it's 1440 cores. Plus you can run more than one MPI instance on a each physical or virtual core.
Learn how to use a fucking apostrophe
Once researchers get something running, they stop optimizing even if is it only a few times faster no matter how much better it could be. This cluster just encourages that behavior.
pure unsubstantiated bullshit pulled straight from your ass
I would think that this could be solved more efficiently, albeit less fun, by a virtual cluster. The hardware is different enough from the real supercomputer anyway that performance benchmarking is probably out of the question.
The Chicago Manual of Style will do that for you.
Maybe you need a supercomputer to figure out that books don't do any "figuring out"
1440 is NOT 3000!!! AND
your power budget went to
hell in a hand basket.
One other thing, your being
a DICKWAD.
What kind of FLAMING DOUCHEBAG moderates the FP as redundant? Probably some stupid 16-year-old that got modpoints for his first time and is trying out all moderation classes.
1. Don't mod something down just because you don't agree with it.
2. Choose an appropriate moderation type. You could call this post a troll.
3. The editors are COMPLETELY RETARDED, and it really helps when someone gets an FP pointing out their mistakes which someone with an elementary school education would not have made.
No a single shared memory device will use less energy than a cluster plus networking equipment needed to run it. Plus you can run more than one process on a physical or virtual core. So you will have no problem simulating a job requireing 10-100 times the number of physical cores.
Nice apostrophe, bro!
Go swallow your own cock.
Or you could use a single Xeon Phi, emulate the 750 Raspberry Pi's and the networking and still consume less power with more performance for a lower price.
1kW at idle is a lot. You could cut that down by shutting down Pis in banks as they went unused, and firing them up again as needed. It wouldn't require very much more hardware, just some microrelay boards which can be driven by some of the Pis themselves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's A Cluster of 750 Raspberry Pi's at Los Alamos National Lab
I saw a bunch of them at the grocery store before Thanksgiving, next to the apple ones.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Emulating the cores would falsify what they are testing since this would reduce a lot of possible race conditions (among other things). Virtualization is nice but it's not an end all solution.
Purely out of academic interest, how fast is this thing? How does it compete with, say, a 16 core Xeon or Threadripper workstation?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Emulating the cores would falsify what they are testing since this would reduce a lot of possible race conditions.
No it wouldn’t. It would make race conditions more likely to trigger.
And running 1.2GHz 4 core STB processors over 10/100 ethernet is going to be similar to clusters of dual socket 3GHz 54 core processors with 25+ Gbps interconnects? (aka Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs. Nobody is planning on building an ARM based supercomputer with only one CPU per node, let alone with IO limited smartphone/tablet/set-top-box oriented SoCs)
There are some timing interconnects on the BitScopes which Bruce uses to sync the signals, reduce the processing requirements.
We've heard him speak about it here.
Have to get him talking further on that side of it.
The first bi-sexual supercomputer cluster?
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I think this was also on slashdot last year:
https://robertmcgrath.wordpress.com/tag/the-megaprocessor-laughs-at-your-puny-integrated-circuits-stephen-cass/
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
moderation is for assholes , but ...
here you don't get moderated, you get rated ...
one might say you seem to be over reacting a bit
but thats fine, i divide my days between standard and less bad too, if this is your biggest problem today then it can't be that bad its not like you get money or anything for it, right ?
i like the "green computing" approach here btw
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
They are testing how their software scales to a massive amount of cores. This you cannot do on a single Xeon Phi. The speed and available bandwidth is irrelevant for that, it is of course relevant for other test cases but that is not what they test here.
No because if a single core emulated 10 other cores there will i.e never be a situation where those 10 cores execute an instruction all at the same time. The laws of physics you know.
Someone should invent software for emulating a CPU, that way you could use one machine to emulate many.
I'd call it a virtual machine.
And you cannot (as of yet) effectively simulate the kind of massive scale out that places like this code for.