Truly Off-The -Shelf PCs Make A Top-500 Cluster 231
SLiDERPiMP writes: "Yahoo! News is reporting that HP created an 'off-the-shelf' supercomputer, using 256 e-pc's (blech!). What they ended up with is the 'I-Cluster,' a Mandrake Linux-powered [Mandrake, baby ;) ] cluster of 225 PCs that has benchmarked its way into the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world. Go over there to check out the full article. It's a good read. Should I worry that practically anyone can now build a supercomputer? Speaking of which, anyone wanna loan me $210,000?" Clusters may be old hat nowadays, but the interesting thing about this one is the degreee of customization that HP and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science did to each machine to make this cluster -- namely, none.
Practically anyone? I think not. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless "practically anyone" has the funds, the storage room, and the manpower to maintain this monstrosity, there is nothing to worry about.
And even if anyone could build a supercomputer, what's there to worry about? We don't live in the "War Games" world where supercomputers play chess, tic-tac-toe, and start nuclear wars for fun.
This just goes to show you (Score:4, Insightful)
Now all we need are ways of getting local connections significantly faster (Did someone say Gig Ethernet) to allow faster communication between the nodes and we will be able to scale beyond several hundred and break the top 100. I hear 1gig NICs will be falling in price to under $100 US retail soon...
How fast do you connect to your cluster ?
Re:Imagine... (Score:2, Insightful)
- A Beowulf cluster of E-machines?
Maybe so, but this cluster still made into the top 500 most powerful computers.I dunno. It's kinda lacking when you compare it to all the other Beowulf clusters we've considered.
Now, imagine a cluster of Athlon 1.4GHz machines doing the same thing ... now there's a drool factor, and probably cheaper to boot!!
Re:Practically anyone? I think not. (Score:3, Insightful)
Knowing nothing about it, I would nonetheless guess that it's rather non-trivial.
Keep in mind that nukes were invented without the aid of a Beowulf or a Cray.
Re:An interesting project (Score:2, Insightful)
That is a serious problem though, and one I assume Beowulf clusters will take care of, what if a node goes down in the middle of processing, how does the cluster respond to it ?
Re:This just goes to show you (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear Gigabit switches won't be...
Yawn. Another One. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know this Beowulf business is getting to be pretty staid and routine by now.
In fact, I'd almost say it would be newsworthy if there were any organization (university, company, govt lab) that had not yet built "a supercomputer from the COTS components".
What I'd like to see now is more metrics (some of which the article does, admittedly, reveal).
- hardware cost per FLOP (everyone already tells you this)
- FLOPS per human time to build
- FLOPS per sysadmin time to maintain
- FLOPS per kilowatt of electricity
- FLOPS per cubic foot of rack space
- can it run smoothly if Bad Andy goes behind the rack and unplugs a few network connections, a few power cords to some nodes?
Everyone knows that you can spend your own time scouring dumpsters for cast-off computers and coaxing them to life, bringing up an old 486 with an ISA 10bT card as a member of your cluster. Unless you're doing it for your own educational benefit, it's just not worth it.Don't get wrong. I love these clusters and want to use them. It's just that, in 2001, their mere existence is no longer as exciting as it was in the mid 1990s.
Now days, I care more about ease of use and ease of maintenance, taking the low cost of a Beowulf cluster as a given.
With the size of these clusters going up and the ratio of hardware cost to human time constantly decreasing, I'd be more impressed to see how a system with many hundreds of nodes was brought up in a short time, never rebooted for a year, even as 13 of the nodes developed variously problems and become unproductive members of the cluster.
Re:amd for less (Score:2, Insightful)
Also why have a mb with integrated sound (and video) - this is a beowulf cluster, not a John Cage album...
graspee
For those wondering about nuclear testing... (Score:5, Insightful)
While great at highly parallel tasks that require very little synchronization between threads (think code cracking), nuclear testing (and almost all other fluid dynamic problems) generally requires all of the cpu's to have high speed access to all of the memory. So one needs a huge shared memory system (think Cray or Sun StarCat).
And for this reason, I find the top 500 list to be a bit misleading in these days of massively parallel systems. Its great as a test of how many flops the system can crank out, but it does not take into account the memory bandwidth between the cpu's, and that is often more important than raw cpu horsepower.
Power consumption of old CPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there anything like a MIPS/Wh rating for CPUs? (Would thermodynamics dictate a certain minimum?)
With a seperate power supply and hard disk per CPU (i.e. complete box) I would imagine that old PCs generate a *lot* of heat per CPU cycle.
Has anybody done measurements/calculations on this?