Supercomputer On the Cheap

jbrodkin writes "You don't need Ivy League-type cash to get a supercomputer anymore. Organizations with limited financial resources are snatching up IBM supercomputers now that Big Blue has lowered the price of Blue Gene/L. Alabama-Birmingham and other universities that previously couldn't afford such advanced technology are using supercomputers to cure diseases at the protein level and to solve equally challenging problems. IBM dropped the price of the Blue Gene/L to $800K late last year before releasing a more powerful model, Blue Gene/P, last month. Sales of Blue Gene/L have more than doubled since then, bringing supercomputing into more corners of the academic and research worlds."

From TFA

[DaveCar (189300)]

At its highest price, the Blue Gene/L cost $1.3 million per rack

Pamela Anderson eat your heart out!

Re:

[IBBoard (1128019)]

And knowing most super computers, both would be far too large, ugly, and filled with silicon.

Re:From TFA

[mwvdlee (775178)]

On the plus side; most supercomputers are fully hot swappable, try doing that with women.

Re:

[Gazzonyx (982402)]

On the plus side; most supercomputers are fully hot swappable, try doing that with women.

My experience says the hotswap turns to a dual cold shoulder; It has something to do with an error when malloc fails to make sufficient room to store correct name, or a null pointer is dereferenced when trying to remember name. Oh well. There's still hope.

while(1)
{
myGirl = myGirl -> cuteFriend;
delete myGirl -> last;
}
myGirl -> isHappyEnding = !(myGirl -> isHappyEnding);

Re:

[suggsjc (726146)]

It appears that you have some problems with your logic as you will just stay in that while loop indefinitely (yeah right). Here is the updated code, and man is it complicated! But if you learn one thing from this, its that it only gets more expensive...

// initialize variables
myGirl = arg[0];
acctbal = arg[1];
girl_count = 1;

while (!screwed) {
date_cost = 20;
while (!bored && !dumped) {
date_success = date(date_cost);

if (date_success) { date_cost = date_cost * 1.75; }
else { dumped = true; }

Re:

[hitmark (640295)]

sorry, i value my life to much for that.

Re:

[Frumious Wombat (845680)]

Let's not forget that with Pam, you only got one rack. IBM gives you *several*.

Of course, they're all blue, but picky, picky.

Re:

[kalirion (728907)]

I'm sure Pamela's rack has gotten her way more than $1.3 mil.

I'm the laughing gnome, you can't catch me

[Dogtanian (588974)]

At its highest price, the Blue Gene/L cost $1.3 million per rack

Pamela Anderson eat your heart out!

my rack is bigger than yours it brings the researchers to the yard i could teach you but i'd have to charge... *dances*

I hear that David Bowie has a thing for Blue Gene computers:

"Blue Jean^wGene, I just met a supercomputer named Blue Gene
Blue Gene, She got a camouflaged face and no money"
Remember, they always let you down when you need `em"

(Guess IBM's reliability sucks, then...)

"Oh Blue Gene
Is heaven any sweeter than Blue Gene?
She got a one-petaflop 294,912-processor, 72-rack system configuration harnessed to a high-speed, optical network,
She got a turned up nose..."

Re:I'm the laughing gnome, - SGI Octane Songs

[Hollinger (16202)]

This reminds me of the ill-fated SGI Octane promotional songs from the mid-to-late 90's.

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/songs/sgi/inde x.html [digibarn.com]

I'm going to avoid a direct link to the MP3s just to be nice to the host, but here's the first stanza of one of the songs:

"I Have a Dream"
I have a dream
and its two CPUs
What this will mean
Is no more desktop blues
Modeling and rendering
Designing analyzing
Just pick any two
I have a dream
and its two CPUs

As an SGI fan, I got a kick out of these. :-)

Re:

[Assassin bug (835070)]

Is this in the voice of Elma [scarlet.nl] Jetson [wikipedia.org]?

"Supercomputer"

[pzs (857406)]

Anybody can have a supercomputer on the cheap because the definition of supercomputer changes every 3 seconds.

Peter

Re:"Supercomputer"

[Ginger Unicorn (952287)]

i think my PS2 is supercomputer isnt it? Weren't the US government going to restrict exports on them as they were considered munitions or something daft like that. Same thing for old Mac G5 as i recall. Might be a stupid urban myth though.

Re:

[cerberusss (660701)]

i think my PS2 is supercomputer isnt it?

Hah! These old and heavy IBM PS/2's are deadly weapons once loaded into my bolt thrower. Imagine using Blue Gene and my goal of World Domination is coming nearer.

Re:"Supercomputer"

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Might be a stupid urban myth though.

Nope, at least on the PS2 count (I don't know about Mac G5s). Back in 2000, Saddam Hussein was purchasing Sony PS2s by the thousands [freerepublic.com], which were then banned from export, due to them being classified as munitions.

Re:

[Calinous (985536)]

Altivec on the G5 processor could do quite a bit of calculations - no wonder if they were banned for that performance

Re:

[clickclickdrone (964164)]

>they were considered munitions
Certainly true that firing a PS2 out of a big gun was about the best thing you could do with them.

I remember

[Solandri (704621)]

Way back when I was in jr. high around 1980, my friends and I were going ga-ga over the latest issue of Byte magazine at the library. It had a chart listing various computers (processors) and their FLOPS [wikipedia.org]. The 6502 (Apple II) and 8088 (IBM PC) were listed at less than 1000 FLOPS (they didn't do floating point so it had to be emulated in software). We were drooling over the Cray Supercomputer which was listed at 1 million FLOPS, or 1 MFLOPS.

A 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo rates around 500 MFLOPS. An nVidia 8600GT

Re:

[BrianHursey (738430)]

I think the super computers are a thing of the past. Now days clusters are the way to go. Much cheaper and flexible.

Re:"Supercomputer"

[jcgf (688310)]

Every time there's an article on supercomputers someone brings up clusters. As has been pointed out before, a cluster only works for easily parallelizable problems where you can divide your problem into many subproblems that can be divided amongst your nodes. This is not a problem with supercomputers as you have much faster communications amongst processors (ie they're not just cheaply connected with cat5 ethernet cable like beowolf) and thus you can solve problems on a supercomputer much faster in this case.

Supercompters aren't going anywhere fast.

Re:

[hackstraw (262471)]

I think the super computers are a thing of the past. Now days clusters are the way to go. Much cheaper and flexible.

Yes, no, maybe.

I guess the best definition of a cluster vs a "real" supercomputer is distributed memory connected via some kind of interconnect vs a large shared memory SMP. A blue gene is a distributed memory system connected via interconnects. The Cray XT4 and XT3 are distributed memory systems connected via interconnects. Actually, I think that SGI is the only guy that really makes large

Re:

[solevita (967690)]

I think you mean that anybody can have an old supercomputer. The ever changing definition means staying on top requires a little more than $400,000.

Re:

[f97tosc (578893)]

Anybody can have a supercomputer on the cheap because the definition of supercomputer changes every 3 seconds.

Although presumably the definition is revised up in terms of performance... It is not like everyone is sitting on old slow computers which suddenly become supercomputers by definition.

Beowulf!

[rgravina (520410)]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Taking about supercomputers...

[zeromorph (1009305)]

Wow moderators, since when are old lame jokes redundant? (He's the first to post our beloved Beowulf-phraseme in this discussion.)

And he's even right, clusters are the most frequent architecture in the TOP500 [wikipedia.org]:

373 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500 with a stable share of 74.6 percent.

Overclocking

[Hoi Polloi (522990)]

I'm just waiting for tomshardware to publish an article on overclocking one of these. "We get awesome framerates in Quake!"

Normal business...

[IBBoard (1128019)]

Isn't this just normal business? "We're about to bring out the P series, so lets sell off the L series 'cheap'".

Having said that, I don't suppose nearly half price is that bad an offer, even if $800K isn't exactly 'cheap'!

Re:

[DaveCar (189300)]

Maybe it's supercomputerspam (tag anyone?).

What with the IBM Saves $250M Running Linux On Mainframes [slashdot.org] story earlier it looks like IBM is pimping out their wares here on Slashdot.

They are probably behind the milfy bewbs too (is it too hard to put those two word into a lameness filter?)

Stanford will always have the biggest

[bblboy54 (926265)]

Stanford still has the the best idea [stanford.edu].

Re:Stanford will always have the biggest

[bunratty (545641)]

Distributed processing is fine for "embarrassingly parallel" problems where the compute nodes don't need to communicate with each other. However, many problems solved by supercomputers or large clusters need communication between the compute nodes, so aren't amenable to distributed solutions.

Re:Stanford will always have the biggest

[Nefarious Wheel (628136)]

A friend of mine once ran the massively parallel supercomputer centre at LaTrobe. He told me of how the transputer-based Connection Machine would run blindingly fast in parallel, only to have the lights slowly wink out until one small corner of the display was the only thing lit. He said it was disappointing, and rather funny, how parallel jobs tended to go linear over time.

Yep, sometimes you just need a few processors running very fast cycles.

Sigh... we miss you, Seymour Cray. Wish you hadn't taken your Jeep out that day.

Re:

[bunratty (545641)]

That's the exact opposite end of the spectrum from embarrassingly parallel problems. In embarrassingly parallel problems you have so little data dependency that tasks can run independently or nearly independently. In you friend's case, the tasks were so interdependent that all the tasks were waiting on one task to finish, so there was nearly no speedup from adding more processors.

The bottom line is that the best solution to some problems is a grid of loosely connected computers. The best solution to others

Re:

[Beatlebum (213957)]

The Connection Machine used up to 64K 1-bit processing elements configured to work lock-step with a single control unit (SIMD).

The transputer was something completely different. It was a 32-bit processor with four high-speed connections to other transputers. This could be used to implement a MIMD processing network.

The CM scaled well on data parallel applications, the transputer was more suited to course-grained parallelism.

Re:

[Frumious Wombat (845680)]

That's why it's a pity that SGI (much as I dislike Irix) got so thoroughly thumped. Those 8-proc O2000 nodes connected into a distributed shared memory system which looked like a single, flat, address space for many purposes were nice machines, and relatively simple to program. Affordable BlueGenes, Altixes, and E25Ks (affordable being a relative term) are still useful due to their simpler to use shared design, over purely distributed code.

For what? Supercomputers do only one job

[freedom_india (780002)]

Supercomputers and Mainframes are for totally different purposes.
A supercomp will do one and only one job parallely to finish it off much faster than any other computer.
A M/F can handle multiple jobs at the same time with lesser speed, but with considerable stability.

For many companies, one S/390 running OS/390 or even an AS/400 (not related) is more than enough for their entire Notes setup.

A supercomputer cannot be used to do that 24/7.

They are fast racecars which cannot race outside of circuit.

Re:

[jd (1658)]

You'll be fine. Just remember, fuel should use a reliable delivery protocol and not UDP, and on no account use roofnet for a rollcage.

academic and research? try finance

[Gothmolly (148874)]

These days, $800K for a supercomputer is going to be snapped up by financial institutions far faster than academic and research. Didn't Mitsubishi just close its research plant? Banks and financial companies DEVOUR data, they're the real customers for this sort of thing. It's nice to speculate on the Folding@Home numbers you'd get, but these things are going to be used to make real money.

Re:academic and research? try finance

[locokamil (850008)]

If the price goes even lower, perhaps they will. I find it difficult to see this happening though: the financial firm I work for has swung from supercomputer to linux clusters, and is showing no signs of going back. The TCO for a bunch of linux blades is just so much lower than a supercomputer... and because banks are so conscious of their bottom lines, they usually don't improve things if they are already working.

How are these named?

[RandoX (828285)]

The previous one was Blue Gene/L and the current one is Blue Gene/P. Was there a Blue Gene/M-Blue Gene/O, and they just weren't released as production configurations?

JUST IN TIME!!

[armodude (1133725)]

FOR RUNNING VISTA the way it was meant to be run!!!

That's nothing....

[E++99 (880734)]

If $800,000 is still too pricey for you, you can get a Cray supercomputer on eBay for $800:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Cray-J90-Supercomputer-1-CPU-2 -Memory-Modules-J-90_W0QQitemZ8816248638QQihZ014QQ categoryZ162QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem [ebay.com]

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

And here's [ebay.com] two whole ones currently listed for $51 (though reserve's not met). Shipping on 3tons has to be pretty expensive, not to mention powering them =)

supercomputer now 100+ teraflops?

[peter303 (12292)]

This has been a marketing ploy for decades: calling a supercomputer from a few years ago a cheap supercomputer. Well, its no longer a supercomputer.

In the early 1980s a 60 megaflop Cray-1 defined "supercomputer" and the video processing in my cell phone is faster than that.

The new prize is a petaflop, with anything within a magnitude of that range a true super- at least for this year.

Blue Gene vs PVM

[jshriverWVU (810740)]

I've been to several universities and I think it's safe to say all had some form of "supercomputer" for their CompSci department. A lot of it has to deal with how you define a super computer. Granted 15+ years ago Supercomputer meant Cray or IBM, but since Beowulf and the concept of using inexpensive parts to form clusters. MOsix/PVM/MVP, etc are all technologies that can allow people to use "the old labs computers" as a cluster, or get funding for some new hardware that's becomes a cluster.

It's a lot ch

Re:Obligatory

[Tap13579 (1135331)]

Will it blend? That is the question.

Re:

[djdavetrouble (442175)]

Will it blend? That is the question.

no.

Yes it does

[DrSkwid (118965)]

and Eric's been running Plan 9 From Bell Labs and Inferno on the one he has access to at IBM.

http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Re:ivy league cash?

[necro81 (917438)]

If you search through the whole top500 [top500.org] list, you'll find these Ivy Leaguers with Blue Gene computers:

#93 Harvard
#382 Princeton

But, there are plenty of other US schools on the list with Blue Gene computers (and a many outside the U.S. as well):

#5 SUNY Stony Brook
#7 Renssellaer Polytechnic
#63 California-San Diego #374 Boston University
#376 Iowa State
#379 MIT
#383 Alabama-Birmingham

Re:

[Andy Dodd (701)]

In most cases, they bought supercomputers before IBM started making "cheap mass market" units. i.e. they don't have BlueGenes because they have custom one-offs.

I know Cornell Theory Center has a few supercomputers that were top of the line when installed, but I think they're getting a bit old nowadays.

Yup, Cornell has dropped off of the top500 for now. They held the #6 rank in 1995, were last on the top500 list with a ranking of 496 in 2006, and last held a top 100 ranking of 49 back in mid-2003. Just li

Don't feed the trolls

[Lucas123 (935744)]

Feeding trolls can be a dangerous business as they will eat most anything, from garbage to fine cuisine. And, once they get a taste from your hand, they'll come back for more. It's best to keep them starved, cold and shivering underneath their bridges.