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Building a Teraflop Donated Beowulf Cluster
A number of people have written in about the new Teraflop Project aka Project Übermensch. It's an interesting idea-these folks want to get essentially the equivalent of 10757 AMD KII 350s, and turn it into a monster Beowulf cluster. In exchange for donating a machine to the project, you get a month of full bore processing power from your old machine, as well as a for-life e-mail address. They've got an address on the site to send machines to-but how often do you think one of these things is gonna break? I'd hate to sys-admin thousands of old boxen.
Back in MY day, when we wanted to scam free hardware, we had to go to the trouble of getting several dialup accounts and spamming USENET. And we had to write our own spam scripts! All this for a couple dozen NeXT cubes!
Sheesh, hardware scammers have it way too easy these days. Young punks. Hmmph.
traceroute www.teraflop.org...
www.teraflop.org = 208.222.100.35
If you open up http://208.222.100.35/, you see an offer for free business website hosting. If you open up http://www.teraflop.org/ you see their page. Clearly, they're using HTTP/1.1 - too cheap to use an IP address per virtual host.
TERAFLOP.ORG was registered 5 days ago. I'd bet they haven't even paid for the domain yet.
As noted, their POC is a hotmail address.
Uh, guys???? Do you think this could possibly be a um, SCAM???
Sheeeit. Their total outlay is $0. If even one person is stupid enough to send them a computer, that's a pretty hefty profit margin. Why is this on slashdot?
Here's a better approach. You donate a 100-bogomip machine, they knock off 15 bogomips for networking overhead, claim 40 bogomips for their own use in exchange for the trouble of building and maintaining the system, and you get to keep 45 bogomips. That is, you get the right to use 45 bogomips-worth of the system's cpu load, forever if you so choose. (Assuming Beowulf system administration allows this kind of control...)
You can buy, sell, rent or barter your bogomips. You can donate fixed time periods of your bogomips to worthy causes (seti@home, the mersenne guys, the rc5-cow guys, whoever).
Several shared beowulfs might come into existence and there could be a whole beowulf-share economy with cryptographic protocols for electronic bogomip transfers. It would be cute.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
If that's not enough, we will give you or the recipiant of your choice the equivalent of one month of your old machine's full bore processing power.
So, if you donate a K6 II 350 box, you'd get about 4 minutes of time. Of course, most people would plan on donating much weaker PC's... Granted, it would have a LOT of RAM if you needed it for some project, but you could just leave you box running for a for a month yourself at least a dozen times over before they could ever complete this thing...
Having worked on a system with 12,280 cpu's, I can
say right now with confidence that hacking together 10000+ odd intel systems simply won't work.
First, I worked on the QCD Teraflop system http://www.ccd.bnl.gov/RIKEN_BNL/riken.html
It consumes a substantial amount of power, generates a lot of heat and has a lot of components. Component reliability is a major issue. We don't have 10000 disk drives, 10000 network cards, 10000 power supplies, 10000 everything.
Keeping all the pieces up and running requires careful engineering, checkpointing results at intermediate steps (the checkpoints can be BIG), etc, etc.
It won't be done with el-cheapo PC hardware.
slashdot.com All the news that isn't.
If you read the article, it says you get a month's equilavent of your original machines power.
/10757 = 4.01 AmdMinutes.
:)
so, a month of an average AMD350 is
30*24*60 = 43,200 AMDMinutes
which is worth
43,200
So, the proud donater of a 386SX25, could get of the magnitude of 1 second
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
Let's have a show of hands: how many of you have actually seen a Beowulf cluster? Where I work (Caltech's CACR), we have a 114-node system, and it's pretty damn big. You can't just have all of the nodes packed densly: you need to be able to access the backs for networking, power, etc. It takes up a pretty sizeable amount of floor, and reaches up to the (rather high) ceiling.
Here's a couple of pictures. The one up top is just one side of it.
These guys want to make one that's over 100 times as big! Can you imagine the network cable nightmare? Not to mention the power requirements. Makes you feel sorry for the technician that has to set it up.
The other big problem with a large cluster is network latency. You can reduce the effects of this by passing larger packets of info, but there's still a limit that you reach. Just because you make something 100 times bigger doesn't mean it'll be 100 times better.
I also think that the software configuration would play a major role in the efficiency. I'd rather trust trained scientist (not me; I'm just a student), who's been working with large-scale parallel machines for years to set this up, not some tech guys who thought it'd be a neat idea. But maybe I'm just pessimistic.
Still perfectly happy with my 1-node PII... -ElJefe
If you read more closely, you'll find that one gets 'credits' for each computer one donates. Imagine how much time you'd get if you donated a 386..an hour perhaps? There is no way they can allocate one month of computing to each donater and expect a few hundred donaters.. This is most likely a scam, or perhaps a little-thought out, but good-intentioned project a couple of bored techs thought up. A bit too idealistic and very improbable.
Howard
Favorite
Where they are going to get a couple of megawatts to run this thing. Also, enough airconditioning to get rid of a couple of megawatts of heat.
Clearly the networking of this many machines will be impractical for most mathematical problems, I guess this will only be good for problems which could already be tackled by d.net or seti.
from their " "we'd be really happy if" page.
:)
..................................@ @
We'd all be happy if...
(wishes here)
or if we had a bunch of media attention so we could get all these things, that would be nice too.
i guess they got the media attention?
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
The system is not located at 611 main, that is our office front. current location of the cluster is currently top-secret (for lack of proper security) and with good reason. Once we have completed phase 2 of our security upgrade we will publically release the location of the system.
- Eric J Sayward
This project has spawned alot of doubt. We have spent the last 6 months designing it and how it would be built. Once we reach a break point of 10+ gigaflop cpu power we can put it to good use and make enough money from it to speed up it's growth and design. We admit it is a project that seems to be impossible and welcom the challenge as we have met many in the past with success. We are a company dedicated to making the impossible a reality and If it looks like a scam than don't donate your pc. When LINUX was first put on the internet people had their thoughts on that as well and now it's one of if not the greatest OS in exsistance so why cant we build the worlds largest super-computer? It's not about what we can't do, it's about the fact that we can do it but not without help. If I could afford all new CPU's and Mother Boards ect. I would and It would be alot easier. But our company budget is not large enough to buy 10,000+ AMD CPU's. Our goal is to use this system to better humanity by using it for medical research, educational use, advancement of science and whatever other uses we can find that our government has obviously fogotten about. Did you now that our government has miles of underground computers that are used for traking satalites, runing national security and everything else under the sun to benifit them. This is our chance to have a public super computer. Imaging If it cures cancer, or aids. What if we descover Inteligent life on other planets (god help us if we are the supreme beings in this universe). We are asking you to open your eyes to what we can do. I'm really sick of people telling me it can't be done. If I had listened everytime somebody said that to me in my life I would have ended up dead or in prison by now, that or a total mental case. If you think it is a scam than call me (608) 782 3006 ... Eric J Sayward
My name is Eric J Sayward head of the Übermensch project. I find your lack of faith disturbing. Do you have any Idea what this system will be doing? Have you ever donated to cancer research, or helped in the advancment of science? Obviously you have been scammed in the past and must now think that everything is a scam. When we get security up to par, I will personally give you a tour of the facility just to prove to you that we are no scam and that things which everyone thinks are impossible really are possible. Everyone laughed when we said we were going to the moon ! think about it.
Eric J Sayward
P.S. note that said person did not speak with us personally... and on top of that posted anonamously.... Pictures of the system will be up soon.. and also if said person had half a brain the would have taken pictures of our building not the one next to it.. the airconditioner is not ours with the bag on it.. ce ce ce some people I tell ya