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Transmeta Meets Blades
Posted by
Hemos
on Sat May 18, 2002 06:11 PM
from the are-there-any-vampires dept.
from the are-there-any-vampires dept.
The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance.
" Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.
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Slashdotted ALREADY?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdotted ALREADY?!? (Score:2)
I've got to wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got to wonder why they are using Crusoes. It's a good chip for the application, don't get me wrong... but the last I heard the main advantage it has over StrongARM is x86 compatibility, which shouldn't be an issue here.
Re:I've got to wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
But this does explain why it's been very important for Linus to push MP in the kernel.
Re:I've got to wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've got to wonder (Score:3, Informative)
A Pentium III still needs way more energy than a Crusoe. You have to keep in mind that those energy savings of Intel ships are usually accomplished by lowering the processor clock rate which will not help very much if you need processing power. The Crusoe also changes the clock rate, but does so dynamically, so that you always have the speed you need. Additionally, it has far fewer transistors and therefore needs less energy even at full speed.
Re:I've got to wonder (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously you are not familiar with the ARM family of processors - they are very similar to the Crusoes, and in particular they don't require any active cooling either.
Re:Sorry, but ARM == No floating point hardware! (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, finally that's a legitimate response. It's true ARM doesn't include an FPU. However, the last I checked (and I'm not real up to date on it) using libfloat it had emulation good enough to keep up with IA32 fairly well on FP.
I imagine, though, this is probably the reason. It seems reasonable that Supercomputer work would require some FP, although I don't know for sure.
Re:Sorry, but ARM == No floating point hardware! (Score:2, Informative)
Actually I found some specs, SA@600MHz uses 450mW, so you could power 4 for the same price as one Crusoe. Perhaps it's a political thing, I'd certainly rather Transmeta get the business than Intel, but I still don't see the technical justification.
Re:Sorry, but ARM == No floating point hardware! (Score:2)
Get a clue (Score:3, Insightful)
Get a clue. The Crusoe consumes about 2 watts. Very nice compared to Pentium-class room heaters, yes, but I asked why they choice Crusoe over StrongARM, not Crusoe over IA-32. A 600mhz SA uses 450mW, so you can run roughly 4 of them for the same power and heat as one Crusoe.
The advantages that Crusoe has are two - first, as I mentioned originally - x86 compatibility. This is not a help for a supercomputer - you're going to be compiling everything from source anyway. The other advantage, that I forgot, is that the SA doesn't have an FPU. That, at least, is a legitimate reason to consider the Crusoe, but I'm still not sure the decision actually makes sense - the SA is a very nice chip and if programmed right it should have no problem keeping up with the Crusoe even on FP, figuring that you can use 4 times as many SAs for the same heat and power requirements.
Re:Get a clue (Score:3)
Others make Intel server blades, but I don't think I've seen any that are based on ARM.
I think that goes a lot of the way towards answering your original question.
ObDisclaimer: I work for RLX.
Re:Get a clue (Score:2)
Actually something like this [slashdot.org] could easily be used in a similar system.
It must be said! (Score:2, Funny)
Forget Beowulf (Score:5, Funny)
Cube of Crusoes (Score:4, Interesting)
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
Re:Cube of Crusoes (Score:2)
Re:Cube of Crusoes (Score:2)
I was also thinking like a mini Borg ship you could hold in your hand. I think it would be really satisfying to have a big mass of processors in your hand, not like these wimpy delicate little things we have now in their static-proof baggies. Also, once we've conquered the 2nd dimension (ie. we've hit fundamental size limits, like 1 molecule thick wires), 3rd dimension is the next logical step. And vascularization like that found in the brain is a pretty good way to cool things off.
Interestingly, what separates us from the Neanderthals is an extensive system of veins in the back of our head designed to cool the brain. It was an important evolutionary step that allowed us evolve a lot more cerebral processing power.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
transmeta.com (Score:5, Informative)
It all comes down to "power consumption, size, reliability and ease of administration", apparently.
And the marketing people at RLX Technologies [rlxtechnologies.com] should be shot for not having a press release up for this, as it's all based on their product...
huh? (Score:2)
could someone explain how a microprocessor is administered?
Re:huh? (Score:2)
I imagine that with supercomputing, or any significant concentration of complicated hardware, hardware administration is a significand cost.
Admin a CPU by hot-swapping it (Score:4, Interesting)
could someone explain how a microprocessor is administered?
In a large cluster, the question is not whether a processor has failed, but how many have failed. Such clusters generally make it possible to swap out a failed processor while the program is running. Chips that last longer will reduce the dependency on expensive technicians to keep coming in and swapping in new boards.
Parent
Re:transmeta.com (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, silicon is silicon. Pick your chip and reliability is all pretty much the same. Failures are almost 99.9% power supplies, support items like Caps, resistors, and edge connectors. When a chip fries, the root is almost always static or support electronics. (Well, there is overclocking).
Low power/small size is a good thing. I guess the right choice boils down to balancing watts and bucks for FLOPS per node.
Anyway, I like the point about "stop using more transisters to make it go faster" bit. What a hoot. That't exactly the point of building a cluster. More chips, more transistors, more FLOPS.
Re:transmeta.com (Score:3)
That's exactly why he likes designs that don't use more transistors per cpu. The heat and power consumption of a P3-P4 class chip may not seem all that bad when you have one in your PC, but when you have 100s of them racked up it can become a very serious problem.
Green Destiny (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Green Destiny (Score:2, Funny)
Li Mu Bai died one day, but yet his spirit lived on and he still fights today as a Giang Hu soldier - destroying script kiddies everywhere.
Now only Lo, Jen and Shu Lien have the root passes and the universe is safe.
Post-X86 clustering (Score:5, Insightful)
The only trick would be getting the things to work properly in a headless configuration -- Apple won't ship them without a graphics card, but I'm relatively certain that you could get a LinuxPPC installation to work even without the card installed.
Re:Post-X86 clustering (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Post-X86 clustering (Score:2)
No mac has ever been able to boot without some kind of graphics hardware. Not while running MacOS, LinuxPPC, or anything else. This is of course, completely ok. They will still run headless. That is, don't connect a monitor, and then they're headless. Just imagine that the graphics card isn't installed. If you ever see the window manager using more than 1% CPU, I'll eat my hat.
I could be mistaken, but I was also pretty sure that there is no standard PC hardware that will boot without a graphics system either. The operating system has nothing to do with it.
Anyway, as someone else pointed out, three blades stack in 1U together. Your CPU density is still better with transmeta.
Someone else pointed out that Transmeta chips could run code morphing software that supports G4 instructions. This is the dumbest thing people keep saying about Crusoe. Of course it *could* run different code morphing software, but it never will. It cost Transmeta as much to develop that software as it did to develope the hardware. There is *no* *way* that anyone will ever write the software that will allow Crusoe to emulate different types of chips. Too expensive.
Re:Post-X86 clustering (Score:3, Informative)
Thats wrong. The rest of your post also.
double x[veclen];
double y[veclen];
double scalar_product = 0;
for (int i; i less_than veclen; i++) {
scalar_product += x[i] * y[i];
}
This above is scalar code. Any compiler aware of a vector processor compiles that to a singel vector processor instruction. At least that was the case 14 years ago when I worked on vector processors.
I'm not sure if Altivect is a true vector processor, I think it supports like MMX only very limited SIMD processing, but I'm not sure as I say.
Operations on "arrays", hence vector processors, are very easy to map on vector processing units.
Regardless if it is as easy as above or if you have offsets or gaps like i+=3 in the loop above.
Same is true if the result is a vector again of course.
Manual vector processing instructions get interesting if the loop aove would calculate a vector and that vector was nput for a further stage.
Like this:
Vector a, b, c, d, e;
Scalar i, j, k;
a = i*b + j*c;
e = a + k*d;
Ususlay you would have loops calculating that, the second loop would run after a is completely calculated.
If there is a second vector processor (or just a unit on the processor) you can feed a dirctly into it tocalculate e.
AND THIS is hard to figure for a compiler. Probably youment that. As all vector units are different in that respect there exist fortran libraries with standard subroutines for that.
angel'o'sphere
Mainframe? (Score:3, Interesting)
Clustering is a very good and very cheap and superior alternative in some cases.
In the cases where you really need a mainframe, no cluster is going to help you. Mainframes aren't even really that fast. What they are good at is having tons of I/O bandwidth, even between nodes.
If we quit comparing clusters to mainframes, then people might take clustering more seriously. They are not intended for the same classes of problems.
I have an OpenMosix cluster at home, and I work with an Origin 2000 at work. (If anyone else uses IRIX you know that you work *with* IRIX, not on it, it has a mind of it's own
Excellent point! (Score:2, Informative)
However, don't write off clusters yet; have you looked at The AGGREGATE? [aggregate.org] The link points to Klat2 (Gort, klaatu barada nikto! Sorry) which is a very photogenic aggregate-based machine. The techniques these guys are developing may bring high I/O throughput into clustering at mainframe levels eventually.
I think you're confused... (Score:2)
Where did you see anything about Mainframes?
These clusters are NOT designed to take over from Mainframes, but from Supercomputers. Totally different animals.
Re:I think you're confused... (Score:2)
I've seen the two used almost interchangbly when referring to modern large systems.
What would you call a cluster of Origin 2000s with a single system image? A supercomputer? Then my point still stands, as long as we are talking ethernet as a system interconnect for this type of clustering, it's not in the same ballpark as far as classes of problem.
Re:I think you're confused... (Score:2)
I have as well, it's a common mistake for nontechnical types (particularly reporters) to make. But they are very different systems. Mainframes have massive redundancy and i/o bandwidth. Supercomputers also have lots of redundancy but they are typically not built for I/O bandwidth at all, but sheer number crunching power. Mainframes are designed to run large databases, supercomputers to do complex mathematics, so you get very different designs for different problems.
The Origin2000 is, if I'm not mistaken, the latest iteration of some of the old Cray designs, and those are definately Supercomputers, not Mainframes. That said, you are of course absolutely correct that ethernet is a major limitation of the sort of cluster we are talking about, and the Crays are still a much better bet for a subset of traditional supercomputer jobs. This is changing, though, as more and more effort and thought goes into improving them.
Interesting Wording... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, so it is true... Linus is a robot.
Re:Interesting Wording... (Score:2)
As a matter of fact, it doesn't. In a list, a comma before an "and" is optional, but makes no difference in the meaning. Now, if, instead of commas, they had used parentheses, it would have made much more sense, and would have been genuinely readable. i.e:
"Gordon Bell (one of the creators of VAX) and Linus Torvalds were at the
In it's current form, it is too vaguely punctuated to determine the meaning (except we know who Torvalds is so we interpret the intended meaning of the statement). I.E.
"Gordon Bell, one of the creators of X, and Y
For X & Y simply insert some noun which represents both a product that is created, and something that is not created. 'the Pinto' being a reasonable example. It might mean he created the car, or the animal. Obviously we would all make a asumption, but the point is grammatical correctness...
Why limit yourself to x86 (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all in the pre-processing with the crusoe, x86 is just there for slideways compatibility and doesn't need to be a limiting factor. When you're using a custom computer, whether it's one or a thousand crusoe processors, wouldn't it make sense to try for some compiler efficiency based on the actual hardware instead of the 8086 legacy?
Why Crusoe? Administration Costs? (Score:5, Interesting)
240 computer blades in Green Destiny x 6,480 hours uptime (9 months) = 1,555,200 computer hours of uptime
Assuming the only thing changed on the blade is the CPU -- and North Bridge chipset, since the Crusoe includes
a North Bridge on die and the P-III does not -- at full blast the Crusoe consumes about 1.75W of power and the
P-III + NB consumes between 4.5 - 8 W, depending on chip model. However, the 4.5W number is an approximation
from the 0.13 micron ULV P-IIIM chip running in "Battery Saving" mode, or SpeedStepped down to 300 MHz. Running
at full 700 MHz tilt, with NB, we are still talking 5.75W of power consumed.
1,555,200 * 0.0175Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $2,721.60 electricity cost/year (Crusoe)
1,555,200 * 0.0575Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $8,942.40 electricity cost/year (Intel)
A saving of approx. $6,200/year in direct electric costs.
However, the big savings comes from the heat dissipation of the units. While the newer LV/ULV P-IIIs do not require
active cooling, they still run quite a bit warmer than the Crusoe units. As a result, you don't stick a rack
full of them in a room that isn't temperature controlled. The difference in the air conditioning bill can
easily reach tens of thousands of dollars.
In business, there are two types of money/budgets. One-time grants and acquisition budgets are large chunks of
cash. Recurring expense and operations budgets are smaller. Being able to get a large chunk of cash to BUY a
cluster/supercomputer is one thing. Being able to go back year-after-year and get the funds to keep it running
is another project altogether. $15,000 - $20,000/year for electricity used in running/cooling computers is a
LOT of money to some people. This doesn't include construction or maintenance costs on a custom facility/room.
As far as reduced administration costs go, many conventional supercomputers required chilled water and other
special considerations for operation. People with experience managing things like Sun E15000s and Cray T3Es
are few and far between. They are the last of the "high priesthood" of computer administrators and cost a LOT
of money to employ.
A blade server, on the other hand, is a bunch of x86 computers running Linux -- nothing a couple of grad students
can't learn the ins-and-outs of over a term. Maintenance contracts, spare parts, etc. are also TONS cheaper for
the blade/cluster solution as opposed to high-end SGIs, Suns, Fujitsu and Cray super-computers.
Another site with a bit of good supporting information is [pcstats.com]
PC Stats.
You missed a decimal place. (Score:2, Informative)
1,555,200 * 0.00175Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $272.16 electricity cost/year (Crusoe)
1,555,200 * 0.00575Kw * 0.10 (dollar per KwH power cost) = $894.24 electricity cost/year (Intel)
This savings is absolute dollars is much less significant when you divide by 10.
Re:Why Crusoe? Administration Costs? (Score:2)
The ULV P3M runs a 100 MHz bus, like the 633 Crusoe but the 677 Crusoe runs a 133 MHz bus like some of the LV P3Ms.
The final problem with the P3M is the thermal diode. To control heat, once the core CPU temp reaches a certain number (100 deg F, I think -- the "maximum junction temperature"), it clocks down to reduce heat. Again, that's fine for someone typing in Word or Excel. It can clock up for the 3 seconds needed to run that macro, but for sustained high-performance computing, it will be a problem.
I'll agree that Intel is very competitive in the laptop CPU market and their LV and ULV, SpeedStep enabled chips are great in that market -- hell, I'm typing this on an IBM laptop with a SpeedStep enabled 1 GHz P3M, and it blows the doors off the Dell P3-450 I just got rid of.
However, for sustained computing where you aren't relying on user input to clock-down between, I think the fewer transistors on the Crusoe generate a hell of a lot less heat and use lots less electricity. Transmeta has some nice thermal photos on their website, but I believe they are comparing with the "old", non-SpeedStep P3M and not any of the LV/ULV stuff.
Alpha's might be cheaper in the long run (Score:3, Interesting)
New metrics? (Score:4, Funny)
Following Feng's lead, the whole supercomputing industry has reacted to this new paradigm shift. Industry leader Cray [cray.com] has ceased development of its upcoming SV2 [cray.com] and has designed a system based on the reliable commodore 64. Explained lead scientist Joel Grey, "We managed to get a C64 computer out of the dump, and bought 1,000 surplus 'Barney' solar calculators off of ebay for $30".
The new system, dubbed the SV64, [pattosoft.com.au] is not quite as fast as the SV2, but exceeds at new metrics: Converted to run on solar power, and having spent the last 15 years in an uncooled closet continously generating the "experiencing technical dificulties" logo for a local community access TV station, the new computer shatters existing power and reliability records. "With an expected retail price of less than $1M USD, we expect this computer to eclipse [Japanese rival] NEC's lead and become the platform that will be used to perform most of the world's weather, biological, and nuclear simulations well into the next decade", said Grey.
Wall Street analysts pointed out the the system has never needed maintence, nor suffered downtime, nor needed the services of an UNIX system administrater, and as a result, the total cost of ownership should remain low. Shares of component manufacturer Commodore rose 10 points to 10 1/64 in heavy trading today.
Re:New metrics? (Score:3, Funny)
Olympic Speedskating will be judged, not on speed, but on fashion, sweating the least, and the contestant who books the best airfare to the event.
North Korea became the second country to land a person on the moon and return them safely to earth. Although technically the rocket blew up on the launch pad, it was still considered a sucessful mission given the impoverished country's lack of funds, the technical embargoes placed on the country by space-faring nations, and the total lack of a Korean space program.
Life insurance companies will now pay benefits for near-death experiences, close calls, and "getting really scared".
sorry... I just prefer the normal metrics of FLOPS, MIPS, bandwidth and topology for my supercomputers...
Gordon Bell of Microsoft? (Score:2)
Re:Gordon Bell of Microsoft? (Score:2)
Microsoft pretty well understands it role in the computing world - in their vision they cover the middle 90% of needs in terms of most anything. For example they see themselves as providing software to the middle 90% of machines in terms of power (not counting the very bottom or very top).
Despite ad-campaigns to the contrary Microsoft knows there are some niches that they will really never compete in - either from desire (very small computers) or out of inability (very large computers).
Sure, you probably *could* make Windows run on that cluster, but really in a realistic sense Microsoft knows that Windows isn't going to take over the clustered computing market anytime soon.
weird tco estimation (Score:2)
They compare tco for 24 node clusters of different architectures of beowulfs against the bladed cluster. The biggest expense by far for the traditonal systems is sysadmin time, over half, this after they spend most of the article talking about power. They estimate sysadmin costs for each of the traditional beowulfs at $60k over a 4 year period, while the bladed cluster at $800. Where does the $800 come from? They say that they haven't had to do any maintence on their system in the 9 months its been running! That doesn't sound like a very scientific data sampling to me.
There are other bladed designs, non-transmeta based, presumably the sysadmin costs would be the same. The last chart demonstrates that sysadmin costs are what's important, and that power, space, and downtime not nearly so.
Re:weird tco estimation (Score:2)
OK, where can I find (Score:2)
Re:Wow, just.. (Score:2, Funny)
It kind of reminds me of a Star Trek convention I went to (the ONLY one I ever went to...) where they had a costume contest. 249 out of 250 people the day before said 'I bet Ill be the only Klingon there!'