First 96-Node Desktop Cluster Ships 323
Panaphonix writes "The Register reports that Orion Multisystems is shipping the first 96-node desktop cluster. 'With the new, larger system, customers get pretty much the most powerful computer around that can plug into a standard electrical socket.' According to the spec sheet, the DS-96 runs Fedora Core 2 and gets 110 GFlops sustained, 230 GFlops peak."
Imagine a Beowulf... (Score:4, Funny)
I FAIL IT!
mmm clusters (Score:2, Funny)
dup (Score:2, Informative)
Wrong term (Score:5, Funny)
Still The Wrong term (Score:3, Funny)
"In October, you'll be able to choose between"
"is shipping the first 96-node desktop cluster. '"
Re:dup (Score:2)
This is a notification that they finally released it. By your post I know it's 7 months later than scheduled.
Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone summarize why there is such a huge difference?
Re:Question (Score:2)
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
Linpack is what is usually used to measure sustained performance on HPC systems.
Re:Question (Score:4, Funny)
Peak: Taking it off some sweet jumps.
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
It might be that their peak number is derived assuming code particularly favorable to the processor architecture in use - say using SSE to do the floating point math. This can easily produce the factor of 2 difference.
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
When they say that this line of clusters can "make or break" Orion, I am right now, leaning for broke. For the cost of this machine, one can get a real cluster with a lot more performance. I know this thing is nice because of the power requirements and the fact that you don't need a dedicated server room to store it, but for $100,000, you can get Microway to build you a pimptacular cluster with Dual-Opteron nodes, high-speed memory and a phat interconnect with either myrinet or infiniband. You will get a lot more work done for the same price.
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot a couple of things:
* HVAC costs
* Realestate costs
Remember, this is a deskside cluster. Try that with your dual-opteron cluster. And try adding up all the costs.
What?! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Question (Score:2, Insightful)
cooling & UPS too (Score:2)
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:2)
I for one wouldn't buy one of Orions desktop clusters. I'd say most all research on latency effects of running GbE (not really that interresting) could be done on regular workstations running LAM (the desktop cluster in question also uses LAM).
I'm not against Linux clusters. I'm using t
Re:Question (Score:2)
It uses 10GigE on the backplane. For good measure it has something like 80 GB of disk on each node.
Re:Question (Score:2)
Even with "10GigE" I wouldn't expect an MPI barrier to take less than 10 us. Ethernet just isn't designed for low-latency applications. Most parallel applications send lots of messages (Like Cannon's algorithm for parallel matrix multiplication sending
Re:Question (Score:2)
Huh?
Re:Question (Score:2)
Don't worry, you did not ruin anybody's dream. You bleated about 10 usec network latency and otherwise don't seem to have a clue.
Re:Question (Score:2)
Re:Question (Score:2)
Re:Question (Score:2)
A GFlop would be one billion floating-point operations. No telling how long they would take though. (i.e. a GFloph machine might take one hour to do a billion floating-point operations.) Much less meaningful, but still valid.
It's like horsepower. "One horsepower is the amount of work necessary to lift 33,000 lbs. one foot in one minute."
My pet mouse could lift 33,000 lbs. one foot with enough gearing on his exercize wheel. Now, i
Practical measures... (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting practical uses for Personal Cluster .. (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, does Blender run on it at least? Can I do anything interesting from an 'immediate-personal' perspective with 96 nodes, and I don't just mean run Quake, or fire up "make -j 96" and such things..
What sort of interesting modelling software is around? Could I use it to design stuff on a personal, non-hard-core science perspective? What are the practical uses for personal cluster computing?
Re:Interesting practical uses for Personal Cluster (Score:2)
distcc, yeah. Parallel make, no.
Re:Interesting practical uses for Personal Cluster (Score:2)
Re:Interesting practical uses for Personal Cluster (Score:2)
Needs silencing! (Score:2, Interesting)
550 dBel noise? Perhaps the producers should look into Metal cooling [slashdot.org] ?
Re:Needs silencing! (Score:2)
Re:Needs silencing! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Needs silencing! (Score:3, Informative)
Sound pressure level [wikipedia.org] 50dBA at operator position
Sound power [wikipedia.org] 55 bels
There is a difference.
FPS (Score:3, Funny)
Inefficient ? (Score:2, Insightful)
General CPU's just don't have the punch that special purpose or Fpga processors do.
Re:Inefficient ? (Score:2, Insightful)
And FPGAs or special purpose CPUs don't have the generality that normal CPUs have. There's also the small point about the Merrimac system not actually exisitng.
PS. Thanks for linking to Roland Piquepaille's fucking blog. He doesn't get nearly enough links on Slashdot in my opinion.
Wha...? (Score:3, Insightful)
They're just general purpose, whether they be scalar (CPU) or vector (GPU), so an FPGA that is specifically optimized for a specific problem will kick the general purpose processor's butt - in that specific problem.
But try running Quake III on an FPGA - it will be killed by the CPU in processing and killed by the GPU in graphics. Assuming you can even cram everything you need to be a CPU or GPU i
Re:Wha...? (Score:2)
Oh, you mean, like this? [uni-sb.de]
Re:Inefficient ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wanna know what it looks like? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wanna know what it looks like? (Score:2)
Funny, I assumed it looked like this [slashdot.org].
Suspicious (Score:3, Insightful)
What kind of CPUs are we talking about ? I'm assuming we're talking non-shared memory here, and therefore nodes that "retain" their own identies. But then isnt each cpu running it's own kernal ? That is.. This ISNT SMP , right ?
I think the details could be a lot clearer here. The lack of tech specs or simple explinations, and excessive use of buisness speak "Efficiency" "unprecendented power" etc. makes me a tad nervous.
Re:Suspicious [Transmeta] (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, Efficeon performance is quite good on the type of repetitive loop-based code this system is intended for. It may not surpass an equivalent Athlon 64 or P4 based system, but in terms of bang per watt, it's not bad.
A personal renderfarm? (Score:2)
- Greg
p\/\/n3d (Score:2)
Now I just need a desk big enough, and a power lead heavy enough to let me class this as a desktop machine.
Re:p\/\/n3d (Score:2)
Too expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
I expect this thing to be marketed towards scientists in small or medium businesses that aren't employing many/any IT staff, who use commercial computer models to do things like theoretical chemistry (Gaussian, ADF etc), bioinformatics (Phase, BLAS, Paralign etc), fluid dynamics, statistics, crypto, you name it. I don't expect to see any of these types of systems used in normal supercomputing sites, where people write their own (parallel) code and skilled staff maintain the cluster.
Re:Too expensive (Score:2)
This system is not designed to deliver the most FLOPS per dollar. It aims to address the heat dissipation, space, and noise concerns that arise using lots of MMCOTS boxes. Factor in the Watts and it starts to look really good.
My big concern is that Transmeta recently announced that it was getting out of the chip making business. Unless another company licenses Transmeta's silicon design, Orion is going to run into serious supply-line shortages.
Re:Too expensive (Score:2)
"ATi Mobility(TM) Radeon(TM) 9000--64MB integrated DDR" What??? This is not a workstation class card. Why not an nVidia Quadro card? I am sure heat and power are an issue but if it supposed to be an all in one desktop machine it seems like a poor choice.
Altitude (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never seen that before.
So you cann't use it on a plane.
Re:Altitude (Score:2)
Re:Altitude (Score:3, Informative)
They're fully scalable so you can add performance as your needs expand. It can be used on site: in the office, the laboratory, on a boat, or even aloft in a plane.
Ain't that sumpin.
Re:Altitude (Score:3, Funny)
Heck, it probably wouldn't fit on the seat-back "table" anyway...
Re:Altitude (Score:3, Informative)
And? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you buy a 96-CPU setup when you could buy a 6-GPU setup and match the same theoretical performance? (All jokes aside about the costs being roughly equivalent, they're nowhere near the same.) 6 top of the line 6800s would run you about $3600. Even if you added top of the line parts for the rest of the system, you'd be looking at about $1600 per system. Add $0 for the linux distribution to drive the whole thing, and you're at a grand total of $10K.
I'm not impressed.
Re:And? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And? (Score:2)
Which means that right now, you have to do a little bit of leg work yourself in terms of getting the data to and from the GPU (in textures). I can find out if there are any toolkits later today and let you know, though.
Re:And? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
No, because graphics hardware cannot do arbitrary computation. At least not at anything like the FLOPS it achieves doing graphics.
I've attended a workshop on using graphics hardware for accelerating other computation and it's mostly hype IMHO. It amounts to rendering images of your problem, then doing feature extraction on the image. So the *effective* FLOPs, i.e. the amount dedicated to *your* task ra
The Islands of Patmos Super Computing (Score:3, Interesting)
Intended uses (Score:2)
Multichannel EEG processing in Canada vs Chile (Score:5, Interesting)
So, if I spend $100K on the Orion DS-96, that leaves me more than enough for a 250 channel geodesic EEG system [egi.com] which would allow me to compute self-organizing maps of the human mind based on flashing the 1.6 million mindpixels [mindpixel.com] I have collected over the past five years to various volunteers [english teachers], AND still have 56.73 years worth of rent left!
Too bad no bank will loan me $377,000 for a computer and an EEG system and the time to play with it...
Slashdotted! (Score:4, Funny)
How blissfully ironic!
Give it to me in terms I can understand. (Score:2)
Re:Give it to me in terms I can understand. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Give it to me in terms I can understand. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Give it to me in terms I can understand. (Score:2)
Or powerful enough to build Gentoo in under 48 hours?
Now THAT would be useful.
Re:Give it to me in terms I can understand. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Give it to me in terms I can understand. (Score:2)
How quickly can it start OpenOffice.org?
Re:Just imagine... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Just imagine... (Score:2)
Re:Just imagine... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just imagine... (Score:2)
Leave the OCR'ing for Google.
Re:Fedora Core 2? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fedora Core 2? (Score:2)
More Importantly... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More Importantly... (Score:2)
Re:$100,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a bad deal.
Only on /. (Re:$100,000) (Score:5, Funny)
You can tell you're on /. when dividing 1e5 by 1e2 to get 1e3 gets modded up to +5 insightful. :-)
Re:$100,000 (Score:2)
Where's the rest of the cost coming from?
Re:$100,000 (Score:2)
Re:$100,000 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$100,000 (Score:3, Insightful)
What are you talking about?
The now (in)famous Apple cluster cost them about 5 million for 1,100 nodes or $5K/node.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/G5cluster.html [weblogs.com]
And that was supposed to be a good deal.
Re:Standard comments (Score:3, Funny)
12. List of common Slashdot posts
Re:Cool . . . (Score:2)
Re:Great for researchers (Score:2)
the
bleedin'
obvious
Re:pong (Score:2)
Re:pong (Score:2)
1) Visual rendering - what the player sees. VERY heavy. That's what standard networked "client" does.
2) Bot AI - Way too "lightweight" as for my liking. Generally quite light.
3) Token world - actual "physical model of the world", managing players and bots, calculating collisions, area damage etc, where the real game goes on. The "display client" gets only camera position and a handful of stats, while all the rest goes on behind the sc
Re:Seti (Score:3, Funny)
Re:yeah (Score:2)
Re:Underwhelmed (Score:2)
Re:Apple? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Linux community and the notion of desktop.. (Score:2)
Re:The Linux community and the notion of desktop.. (Score:2)
Quebec is a country, it's just not free yet...
Re:The Linux community and the notion of desktop.. (Score:2)
Re:a) it was quiter (Score:2)