Can You Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of These?

Hell O'World writes: "Scientific American has a story on the history of Beowulf Clusters. It's written by the guys who built the Stone SouperComputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Nice example of how old hardware can be put to use to make new breakthroughs. Nothing radically new, but hey, it's 4AM Saturday morning, what do you expect. :)

I like the incremental upgrades

The incremental upgrades that they do are pretty slick. The StoneSouper is a heterogeneous cluster. Each hour the machines do a speed analysis on themselves to track their performance, then when new equipment comes in, they know which nodes to replace. Makes sense because at some point in time the electricity used by the slower nodes becomes very costly in relation to the amount of work contributed to the cluster as a whole. It is real slick, and as they point out, the cluster is always improving. It becomes better and better over time, unlike some conventional supercomputers which slowly lose their value over time.

4 AM Saturday morning as opposed to...

4 AM Saturday afternoon? :)

Re:The Ultimate Beowulf Project...Consciousness!!!

They are already doing this here [cmu.edu], here [umich.edu], and here [umich.edu], using macs and pcs and unix boxes (UNclustered) to run "Cognitive Architectures"--simulated virtual agents that (to one extent or another) behave as real people do in simple and complex virtual environments. The problems that are being addressed out there do not require as much computing power as you might think, and the research is studying complex tasks (flying airplanes, air-traffic control, learning, memory, etc.) There is little brute-force search required in the search for 'consciousness', which is what these distributed client systems (ala SETI@home and the gene folding project) do best. The largest leaps forward have been made looking at small manageable problems that don't generally require a supercomputer. If you were able to create a giant distributed model of the brain, it very likely would be equally as difficult to understand as our own brain is; and in order to build one (for spectacle's sake or something), you would need to know a lot about the details, like local connectivity patterns.

That being said, I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.

Posting an article

OK, where is it written that you must post an article at 4 AM anyway? Will CmdrTaco just beat you mercilessly if you don't? If its something you realize you have to apologize for, try just not posting it. This article I don't particularly mind, but just for future reference. Thanks.

Scary

What truly scares me is how folks like this are lusting over something they could never even utilize. I could *maybe* understand someone's desire for a Cray (and even that's a stretch), given the company's interesting history (and even more interesting founder, Seymour Cray). But a cluster of PCs?? What's so great about having racks upon racks filled with x86 systems sitting in your den that will recieve little or no use? And really, what's so great about a Cray in your own home? What are you going to run on either? Distributed TTYGNOME? And no, you're not going to be able to recompile the Linux kernel in two seconds with -any- cluster. You're better off builing a nice desktop PC and a companion server. Lust over the 100 GHz PC that you'll be running in just 8 years.

s/beowulfcluster/cluster

For the 6.022x10^23rd time, not all clusters are "Beowulf Clusters".

it's 6pm Saturday you American freaks!

*hehe* c'mon... catch up... we're going out drinking...

God help us if computers ever unite against us

When computers get together to make decisions, they form a Beowulf cluster. When humans get together to make decisions, they form a comittee. Need I say more?

Surprised?

4 A.M., Saturday - Article on the history of Beowulf clusters.

Now, let's look into the future....
5 A.M., Saturday - Article on the history of First Posts.

Who know knows what 6 A.M. will hold?