$24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer 379
An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US DOE) signed a $24.5 million dollar contract with HP for a Linux supercomputer. This will be one of the top ten fastest computers in the world. Some cool features: 8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors. Nice quote: 'Today's announcement shows how HP has worked to help accelerate the shift from proprietary platforms to open architectures, which provide increased scalability, speed and functionality at a lower cost,' said Rich DeMillo, vice president and chief technology officer at HP.
Read Details of the announcement here or here."
Other OSes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Other OSes (Score:5, Informative)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
It runs AIX.
2. Compaq AlphaServer SC ES45/1GHz
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Haven't used it, but I'm guessing Tru64.
3. IBM SP Power3 375 MHz 16 way
NERSC/LBNL
Once again, AIX.
4. Intel ASCI Red
Sandia National Labs
A poor home-grown OS (no offence) called Cougar or TFlops which doesn't even support X11 or sockets.
5. IBM ASCI Blue-Pacific SST,IBM SP 604e
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Can you say AIX?
6. Compaq AlphaServer SC ES45/1GHz
Los Alamos National Laboratory
I assume Tru64.
7. Hitachi SR8000/MPP
University of Tokyo
No idea. Sorry.
8. SGI ASCI Blue Mountain
Los Alamos National Laboratory
IRIX.
9. IB SP Power3 375 MHz
Naval Oceanographic Office
Don't know for sure, but you can bet it's AIX.
10. IBM SP Power3 375 MHz 16 way
Deutscher Wetterdienst
Again, I'm sure it's AIX.
All Unix. No, no linux on there yet, but Pacific Northwest will be right up there near the top, and Lawrence Livermore is also probably getting a linux cluster of almost that size pretty soon. That will make two in the top few slots.
No Windows on these puppies!
Re:Other OSes (Score:2, Interesting)
Another thing that I just thought about, maybe someone can answer for me. What about OS/390? I thought that was their big mainframe OS. Is this a speed issue with the OS, clustering limitations (certianly not) or maybe ease of use (people would rather deal with *nix than a 'frame OS)?
Any input?
Re:Other OSes (Score:5, Insightful)
Supercomputer != Mainframe
Supercomputers are just for calculations on massive arrays. Mainframe OS's are designed for government & large corporation databases, etc. They are heavily loaded with "frills" that are unneeded on a pure number-cruncher; they improve database reliability and do many other useful things in the data-processing environment, but they're just wasted cycles on a supercomputer.
Re:Other OSes (Score:3, Funny)
A poor home-grown OS (no offence) called Cougar or TFlops which doesn't even support X11 or sockets.
Yeah, everybody knows any computer that can't support netris or even plain old tetris is poor indeed.
Re:Other OSes (Score:2)
Re:Other OSes (Score:2)
Are any Search engines running Windows yet? I would assume the msn.com search engine runs Windows, but I don't know for sure... If so, I'd believe it's the only one.
There are some facts that speak so loudly that MS Marketing can't overcome no matter how hard they try.
Re:Other OSes (Score:2)
Teoma [slashdot.org] is using ASP, which I assume is running on top of IIS...
Re:Other OSes (Score:2, Insightful)
4. Intel ASCI Red
Sandia National Labs
A poor home-grown OS (no offence) called Cougar or TFlops which doesn't even support X11 or sockets.
Why does a parallel machine need X11 or poor (slow) communication primitives? Why should a full OS run on all the processors ? The OS really needs to get out of the way of the computations where every microsecond counts.
charmer
GOOGLE! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:GOOGLE! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GOOGLE! (Score:2)
However, the software is built to handle node failures, so they probably just swap out a couple a day.
Not sure Google qualifies as a supercomputer in that it isn't general-purpose... I don't think you can run a simulation on google.
Re:GOOGLE switch to FreeBSD! (Score:2)
Linux IS Unix (Score:4, Informative)
BSDI is Unix
HP-UX is Unix
Solaris is Unix
Sun-OS is unix
Digital Unix...is Unix
FreeBSD is Unix
NetBSD is Unix
OpenBSD is Unix
A/UX is unix
Xenix is unix
Unixware is unix
SCO Unix is Unix
NextStep is unix
Unicos is unix
Irix is unix
Ultrix is unix
and yes, Linux is Unix.
It may not be Unix(tm), but it certainly is unix, at least as much as any of the above operating systems are. Whether or not an OS has one line of code from Thompson and Ritchie or BSD is irrelevant. What matters is what kind of a system its code implements. The code for Linux, including all of the GNU components and other userland parts, implement an operating system that is at least as similar to any of the above mentioned OS's as they are to one another. I don't know just exactly how compliant Linux is with the various posix standards, but I have heard it referred to as posix compliant, and I know that NO version of unix is completely compliant.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....its a duck.
Lee
Re:Linux IS Unix (Score:2)
BSDI is Unix
HP-UX is Unix
Solaris is Unix
Sun-OS is unix
Digital Unix...is Unix
FreeBSD is Unix
NetBSD is Unix
OpenBSD is Unix
A/UX is unix
Xenix is unix
Unixware is unix
SCO Unix is Unix
NextStep is unix
Unicos is unix
Irix is unix
Ultrix is unix
Linux is Unix.
But just remember: GNU is Not Unix
Re:Linux IS Unix (Score:2)
Wow... good thing they chose linux... (Score:5, Funny)
$24,500,399.98
Which was juuust over budget!
BTW - Can you put in code during the "post slashdot story" to automatically close the <I> tags? I don't think that would be too difficult to add...
Re:Wow... good thing they chose linux... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow... good thing they chose linux... (Score:2)
No, they'd have 1400 wasted CPUs, because, after all, a CPU (and memory, and disk, and power, and...) running XP is wasted.
Design ? (Score:2)
Cause if they put WinXP Pro on it, the project would cost: $24,500,399.98
If one of the design goals is raw performance (and it likely is), the number might be a lot higher with XP on it.
Re:Wow... good thing they chose linux... (Score:2, Funny)
ObSimpsons (Score:2)
--Homer
Re:Wow... good thing they chose linux... (Score:2)
Re:Wow... good thing they chose linux... (Score:2)
Sigh... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sigh... (Score:2)
Clusters such as this take hours to power up & down. They are rarely turned off.
is it just me... (Score:1)
Uhmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Scheduled to be fully operational in early 2003...
Won't it be obsolete by then?
can i haggle the sticker price?? (Score:1)
A lower cost? Hell...maybe I'll pick one up after work today. With a price tag of only 24.5 million, you're actually making money with this purchase (or, as cases dictate, losing money by not taking advantage of this offer)!
Sheesh. I think 'reduced' cost is more appropriate.
Cool (Score:2, Funny)
"I have GOT to get me one of these!"
-- Will Smith, "Independence Day"
(42 Karma, don't mod me)
in the immortal words of the old man... (Score:2)
great good googly moogly.
awesome, lets just hope it functions as it is designed to, could be a huge publicity boost for Linux....
11 responses... (Score:1, Redundant)
Ahhhh... I see... (Score:5, Funny)
psxndc
1,800 intel processors? (Score:1)
Let's see the story when they make one with 1,800 AMD processors!
Re:1,800 intel processors? (Score:2)
Re:1,800 intel processors? (Score:5, Funny)
Palo Alto, CA: In the news today, 26 researchers, who had been constructing a new super computer for the government running on 1,800 AMD processors, were killed today when they fired up the machine for a test run. Apparently, they had forgotten to turn on the water pumps for the computer's cooling system before starting up the computer. Thousands of megawatts of electricity were instantly turned into heat energy, resulting in a contained explosion that vaporized all the researchers instantly, and turned the building into a pile of melted plastic, metal, and concrete.
One local, who wishes to remain unknown, said when interviewed, "It was crazy! I mean, the whole building just melted. The heat waves coming out of the building were staggering, it was all I could do just to run into the nearest air-conditioned Starbucks and catch my breath."
Re:1,800 intel processors? (Score:2)
Re:1,800 intel processors? (Score:2)
May I make a suggestion then? Next time, put a metal (aluminum, silver, copper, etc) heatsink in between the fan and CPU, it might hold out better than foam.
Re:1,800 intel processors? (Score:2)
Sweet (Score:3, Funny)
That answers my question of what I would have done if I won the Powerball last night
Wow - that is a big swap space! (Score:5, Funny)
So does that mean it has 3.6 Terabytes of swap space?
Re:Wow - that is a big swap space! (Score:2)
Re:Wow - that is a big swap space! (Score:2)
Cute, but swap is optional as far as I know.. When you have enough memory, or when you want real-time (at least in solaris or qnx), then simply leave it out.
-Michael
Re:Wow - that is a big swap space! (Score:2)
No it does not mean that, you could use just 1MB and still be able to make full use of it.
Insanely expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Insanely expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Insanely expensive (Score:2)
Sorry, chief, that should be 1.2GB of RAM.
What all of your calculations don't include is the standard 200% markup that companies apply when supplying something custom-built to the gummit. Anyone remember the $7000.00 screwdriver ?
Re:Insanely expensive (Score:2)
Of course, the "journalist" who first picked up and ran with the non-story apparently never bothered to check... or, perhaps, did check but decided that it'd hurt the story.
Re:Insanely expensive (Score:2)
each node has 1.25gigs of ram, not 12 (Score:2)
Re:Myrinet has done gigabit for ages (Score:2)
All these questions need to be adressed before you can complain. And this of course doesn't mean i don't agree with you, they can always save a lot but they just like paying more, for some reason. I've seen companies spend 1 million for some task, and another company spend 10k for the same task. Yet the 10k solution was no worst.
Support is one reason. (Score:2)
Figures for the layman (Score:4, Funny)
2) 170 TB can hold 42.5 thousand times the contents of the entire Library of Congress books
3) 1 TB of RAM may let you run as many as 13 Windows applications simultaneously.
Re:Figures for the layman (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Figures for the layman (Score:2)
Effect on linux ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will HP come up with something revolutionary in linux development while constructing this system or is the tech used conventional - just on a bigger scale ?
Re:Effect on linux ? (Score:2, Interesting)
David
Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:5, Interesting)
This raises an interesting question, though. If you want to build a high-performance compute cluster nowadays... what do you build it out of? The old answer, Alpha, doesn't really apply any more.
Sun is optimized for communications bandwidth, not FLOPS, and I'm not sure if SGI even _offers_ machines that huge. HP is betting on IA64. And x86 is competely unsuitable, for memory space reasons if nothing else.
What am I missing?
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2)
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2)
NUMA doesn't touch the address space problem, or the processor-type problem. It's just a way of arranging the memory hierarchy.
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2)
Also, WRT address space, I would think memory access on these things is quite heavily abstracted for any userland tasks. When you reach outside of any one machine on the cluster, conventional memory access methods probably go out the window anyway. The ASCI Red was just a bunch of P6's soldered together after all, and it doesn't seem to be having too many problems.
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2)
I seriously doubt that any x86 cluster uses a unified address space from any given task's point of view.
Abstracting memory accesses could let you make your real address space a window into a larger one, but that would have some pretty nasty overhead.
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2, Informative)
SGI (Score:2, Informative)
Re: your less-than-insightful comment on x86: Intel's ASCI Red has 9472 x86 CPUs. Guess what - they don't share 4GB memory...
Like the other poster said: look up NUMA.
nic
Re:SGI (Score:2)
*sigh*.
If you're dealing with problems where you don't need to have the entire data set visible to all processors, great; use x86.
If you need to map the entire address space, you need more than the 36 or so bits that x86 offers you.
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2)
Re:Banking heavily on McKinley not tanking. (Score:2)
Extreme Tech article [extremetech.com]
Re:IBM? (Score:2)
Supercomputer(s) (Score:3, Insightful)
I am impressed, however, with any of these clusters, and am amazed at the cost savings. But, you have other concerns with a huge cluster: redundancy, heat, energy usage, space requirements, etc.
Re:Supercomputer(s) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Supercomputer(s) (Score:2)
When you need your "supercomputer" to have more synergy than simply sharing the same power supply, people still go with traditional big iron like cray, sgi, ibm, and nec. These codes require tight coupling and sharing of data between nodes and processors and can't afford to spin NOP cycles as the latency over Myrinet kills their performance.
Yes, clusters do run some codes extremely well. These are the ones that don't require much node-to-node communication and only use the interconnect to setup the executables locally. RC5 and SETI would be a great example of these. But what if a RC5 key depended on the answer to the results of a key from its nearest 8 neighbors? Suddenly the clustered interconnects are swamped and REAL performance becomes a low percentage of peak.
In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)
"8.3 Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second, 1.8 Terabytes of RAM, 170 Terabytes of disk, (including a 53 TB SAN), and 1400 Intel McKinley and Madison Processors."
Microsoft finally release the baseline specifications for there next generation operating system...
Re:In Other News... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In Other News... (Score:2)
THEIR next generation.
Don't they teach their/there/they're in school anymore? Must be dumbing down the curriculum.
Here's another supercomputer running Linux (Score:3, Informative)
What about this one? [wired.com]
3:00 a.m. March 22, 2000 PST
The University of New Mexico and IBM are teaming up to build the world's fastest Linux-based supercomputer.
Named "LosLobos", the new supercomputer is scheduled to be fully operational by the summer
Whats the current status?
Re:Here's another supercomputer running Linux (Score:4, Funny)
What about this one?
Named "LosLobos", the new supercomputer is scheduled to be fully operational by the summer
After getting stuck in an infinite loop playing "La Bamba", IBM Engineers smashed it into little bits.
Re:Here's another supercomputer running Linux (Score:2)
Begs the question... (Score:2)
What's "a computer" (singular)? The "details" links are a little short. 1,400 processors, wow. How many kernels? 1? 1,400? What's the topography? Will it use resources completely dynamically, or can you split it into fixed side sub-units? If you can hot swap parts, can you turn off e.g. half of it and still feed the other half problems? Are various parts of it drawing from independend power sources? Is there a single point of control, or are there multiple master processes?
What I'm getting at is: at what point does a multiple processor "supercomputer" start to be indistinguishable from a "distributed computing network". Imagine a Beowulf cluster of SETI@home networks, for example. ;-)
Re:Begs the question... (Score:2)
Not all that surprising... (Score:2)
Most supercomputers have been using Unix (and the many varients thereof) for a long time. Unix has always seemed to be able to handle multiple processors efficently. This is just the rich man's version of a beowulf cluster
'Open' (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately there is no fully open hardware platform at the moment, and closed hardware is less of a problem than closed software, but still this sounds like marketspeak.
Top500 slashdotted... (Score:2, Funny)
Anyone else find it amusing that the link to the top 10 fastest computers in the world appears to be slashdotted?
Pib.
I want A beowolf cluster of these (Score:2, Insightful)
If you find that interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
TeraGrid is the name of the soon to be world's largest computing cluster that will be completed in 2002. It will contain approximately 3,300 Itanium(TM) and McKinley processors on IBM servers running Linux connected through a Qwest fiber-optic network. Once completed the TeraGrid will be capable of a massive 13.6 teraflops and will have access to 450-600 terabytes of data.
This is a huge step (for Intel at least) in acceptance of the Itanium processor into the server market. Intel is fueling the program by providing optimized compilers and software as well as various customized tools.
It is being funded by the National Science Foundation by a $53million grant. Various researchers will have access to the system to perform a variety of simulations. Possible uses include :
-Molecular modeling for disease detection
-Drug discovery
-Automobile crash simulations
-Climate and atmospheric simulations
-any other approved scientific research purposes
The TeraGrid will be unique because it will link together various computing clusters at different locations rather than host them all at the same location. Globus is providing open-source protocols that will determine how the grids will communicate with each other. These open-source protocols will create a "plug-n-play" type effect where more machines could easily be added to the network.
The largest section of the TeraGrid will be hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There will also be portions of the TeraGrid at the University of California San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory, and the California Institute of Technology.
Itanium not proprietary??? (Score:2)
Last I checked, only intel made itanium architecture chips, chipsets and firmware, and all the machines are intel reference designs. How is this not a proprietary platform again?
Even Sparc is less proprietary then this. It's unfortunate that intel and HP can blatently lie, and people will eat it up.
How Tought Is It? (Score:2)
It may have fancy hardware, but is it any good in a fight [theonion.com]?
Distributed Computing (Score:2)
How long before distributed computing networks such as those used in the projects by United Devices, SETI@Home and KaZaA :-P are included in the supercomputing list?
Ah, but the question is... (Score:2)
IABCOT (Score:2)
If you imagine a beowolf cluster of these.... (Score:2)
I'll smash your face in.
Imagine... (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean they didn't take the way out? (Score:2)
Licensing (Score:2)
Re:And this would be even faster (Score:2, Funny)
Yah, because they need the horsepower to run solitaire...
Don't listen to this! (Score:2)
On my system, at least, this would make the system unusable!!! 'exec' is a shell builtin that calls execve() to replace the shell process with another process. 'true' just returns a true value to a shell script, and does nothing really.
Be careful of this troll.
Re:Someone's going to say it sooner or later... (Score:2)
I would expect these over-generalized, broad assumptions from Mr. Katz... not from Slashdot readers. There are folks out there currently researching many dimensions of the scalability of Linux [sourceforge.net] that delve deaper than the challenges creating of a supercomputer.
it's nice to see these companies working together to further common platforms.
Don't be so quick to buy into the Mr. DeMillo's corporate rhetoric. Pacific Northwest made an educated business decision (*that's* why this is a good thing). For Linux to be truly embraced in the business world, organizations must realize the business value that this OS can provide for their company. Companies do not undertake large expenditures such as this to 'further common platforms'.
Re:Surprised it's intel based... (Score:2)
Re:big deal is (Score:2)
Read the link. It's being installed in the Molecular Science Computing Facility, located within the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.
Quote: "The Molecular Science Computing Facility provides the advanced computing capability needed by staff and users of the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) to address "Grand Challenge" scale environmental research problems."
Re:big deal is (Score:2)
Well, it's being installed in the Molecular Sciences Laboratory, so...
nntp (Score:2)
Wow, I bet this thing could handle at least an eight day retention of a full alt.binaries feed.