Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer 387
Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."
Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
(Okay, now back to responsible mature posting)
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot to provide a link to that...
Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Newbie translation please? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. A single processor will perform several steps in one cycle. Typically, the steps are something like:
1. fetch (an instruction from memory)
2. decode the instruction
3. execute the instruction
4. access (some memory location)
5. writeback (some values calculated during this cycle)
In reality, this cycle is usually more complex and processors are designed to predict certain events in order to pack more into a single processor cycle. On top of this, note that the processors used in this machine are all dual-core processors. This means that instead of the 4 processors listed on the hardware manifest, it's really more like 8 processors (well, not quite).
No.
Hey, those computer engineering classes I was forced to take as a part of my CS major have actually proven useful! Oh wait, this is Slashdot.
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A modern processor may in fact take a dozen or more clock cycles to finish a single instruction. However, by utilizing pipelining, reordering and multiple execution units, a single core may be working on upwards of 50 instructions at once. The resulting throughput can be several instructions per clock on each core.
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If you throw more transistors at the problem, and/or different architectures, you can complete instructions in a single cycle. (Especially e.g. register-to-register instructions where the answer comes out of the i
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NCSU Computer Science Dept. has PS3 cluster topping out at 218Gflops using 8 PS3s. PS3's are not $500 each, so that quite a bit better in terms of bang fot the buck. It's even better than the reduced price PC from Newegg.
http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/ [ncsu.edu]
http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/coe. html [ncsu.edu]
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
No, stay with us on Slashdot!
not so impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
True supercomputing machines (sun, ibm) have a little bit better interconnectivity between the components than a mere 1Gb/s line. This can serve its purpose though, VASP will run wonderfully on it. GAMESS probably as well.
B.
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stable? (Score:3, Funny)
Still, meh indeed, scrape together the piles of computers your average
How does it compare to a PS3? (Score:2)
Re:How does it compare to a PS3? (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm surprised you didn't see that in your search.
Re:How does it compare to a PS3? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I expect the design is very well suited to clustering. The PPUs handle all the data dispatching & balancing with the SPUs left to do the leg work.
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Others have pointed out that this is useful for tasks where the interconnect speed doesn't matter. I'll point out that the first "node" only costs $765, and the next seven are $564 each (then you need a bigger switch). Of course, the 8-way version won't fit in an airplane's overhead luggage compartment anymore. You might want to add a UPS.
I seem to recall a post earlier this year about some other university building something similar using two quad-core CPUs on each motherboard. Their version, too, wou
Which is fine (Score:4, Informative)
Now if you have a job that doesn't use a lot of inter-node communication, like say 3D rendering, then a cluster is a better answer. Normal hardware with Ethernet interconnects. Works great and is cheap since you can use commodity parts. But don't confuse that cluster with a real super computer, you throw one of those intense inter node problem at it, it'll fall over because the interconnects are too slow.
Unfortunately these days people really blur the distinction. You'll see systems on the top 500 list that are really questionable. It'll be commodity hardware connected with something like infiniband. Ok, great, that is faster (both more bandwidth and less latency) than Ethernet, but it still isn't necessairily up to what you'd get from a real supercomputer.
However in the case of this deal, no, not a super computer. It's a small cluster and they are just calling it a super computer as marketing, effectively.
Re:not so impressive... (Score:4, Informative)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPU x 4
It's two clicks from the summary.
Slack++
**Lets chop that price down...the newegg,com way** (Score:5, Informative)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPU [newegg.com] $67.50 * 4 = $270
Main Memory: Kingston DDR2-667 1GByte RAM [newegg.com] $48.49 * 8 + $4.99sh = $392.91
Power Supply: (can't beat price): $76.00
Network adapter (node to switch): (cant beat their price) $164.00
Network adapter (switch to node): (cant beat their price) $15
Switch: Trendware TEG-S80TXE 8-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch [newegg.com] $46.99+$7.04sh = $54.03
Hard drive: Seagate 7200 250GB SATA hard drive [newegg.com] $69.99
DVD/CD drive: (can't beat their price): $19
Cooling: (can't beat their price): $32
Fan protective grills: (can't beat their price): $10
KVM: (can't beat their price): $50 Grand total (incl. 15 in hardware): 1416.89 $1000 saved by using Newegg!
Re:**Lets chop that price down...the newegg,com wa (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, they are if you cluster them, that's the trick. Here they used: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ AM2 CPU [calvin.edu] and they reach a very good performance with it, compared to the price [calvin.edu].
I think it's a nice thing, and can be useful for a lot of things especially if you are on low budget. If you cluster Opterons or something it'll get pretty fast expensive.
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No, processors ARE NOT supercomputers (actually, the are not computers at all). But if you put enough of them together in the appropriate way, they BECOME a super computer.
Super computers are no longer made from special purpose hardware. Now it makes much more economical sense to build them from general purpose hardware like those Intel or Power PC processors. Look at the Marenostrum [www.bsc.es], a super computer here is Spain.
On an airplane? (Score:4, Insightful)
With security concerns nowadays, it's the amount of cables coming out of it that worries an airline, not the size or weight of this machine.
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I agree with your main point t
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Check in on an airplane ? (Score:3, Funny)
Cool achievement nevertheless.
Re:Check in on an airplane ? (Score:5, Funny)
How is this interesting? (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:How is this interesting? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure. But then your cat would have to moonlight as a mouser, run errands for the neighborhood dogs, and -- worst of all -- give up catnip; all in order to pay for the project.
I would not want to live in the same house as a sleep deprived cat going through catnip withdrawl.
Wussywulf? (Score:3, Interesting)
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they require special clusterish programming
So ? On an SMP machine you need special SMP-ish programming. Great fun if your memory bandwidth runs out...
Some problems run naturally on distributed systems, some on shared-memory systems. It's a matter of choosing the right machine for the task at hand. Programming in MPI isn't that hard, and unless you are network bound (either bandwith or latency) it scales well. That is the equivalent of an SMP-machine not being memory bound (bandwidth, latency, coherency,...)
Re:How is this interesting? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How is this interesting? (Score:5, Funny)
Would your cat be alive at the end of the process? We wouldn't be sure till we opened the case.
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Sure and Fluffy could probably mount a jet engine on a bicycle too. But could she make either the motherboard farm or the jetsicle actually do anything non-lethal? For more than 15 seconds?
I think it's an impressive accomplishment and worth noting. Doesn't look like it would fit in any of my suitcases though. Not without dissassembly at any rate.
heat buildup issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
B.
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I think this onehttp://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf
B.
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
But (Score:4, Funny)
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Only prior to Service Pack 1.
Re:But (Score:5, Funny)
Lame. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, our whole research lab is filled with PXE booting MicroATX computers connected via ethernet. And I guarantee that four "nodes", aka Linux PCs, are cheaper than $2500. Whoop-de-freaking-do.
Re:Lame. (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. After I saw the component prices I was left dumbfounded. I mean, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processors at 165 dollars a pop? A kingston 1GB DDR-667 stick of RAM at 124 dollars? Are they on drugs? I mean, I've just bought an Athlon 64 X2 4000+ EE for 68euros (the 3800+ was selling for 59 euros) and each kingston 1GB DDR-800 stick for 46 euros. Where did all the rest of the money went?
Re:Lame. (Score:4, Funny)
This story is literally a 'nothing to see here, move along' one.
the google way (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've often wondered the same myself. Sure, you can get some speed optimizations by running a slimmed-down wire protocol over the Ethernet, but it's intuitive that any additional hardware between nodes adds latency. Unless NIC hardware is essential for something like buffering, I'd think some sort of PCI bridging driver would be much better suited for this sort of setup.
If anyone's heard of anything like this please share. I'm off to do some more Googling for it myself.
-S
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Not to rain on their parade, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Eh, it's got about double the GFlops of Deep Blue...
1999 called (Score:3, Informative)
List of #500 on the TOP500 by year
Year .
06/1998 - 15.0 GPLOPS | Southwestern Bell, USA. . . | HPC 6000, Sun
11/1998 - 20.5 GFLOPS | Koeln Universitaet, Germany | HPC 10000 Sun
06/1999 - 34.2 GFLOPS | CIEMAT, Spain . . . . . . . | T3E900 Cray
11/1999 - 38.4 GFLOPS | Bank, United States . . . . | HPC 10000 400 MHz, Sun
06/2000 - 51.2 GFLOPS | EDS, United States. . . . . | HPC 10000 4
Actually... Microwulf might well be revolutionary (Score:4, Insightful)
Microwulf could make all of the above common. For the price of a high spec PC. The commodity nature of it could bring super computing and super computing applications to the masses.
Then you can scale your application from microwulf to miniwulf to superwulf with little more effort than installing it on the bigger machine.
Course, they'd have to produce a commodity pre-built system.
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The more computing power is available in the world, the less it will be used to its potential. If everyone had an Earth Simulator in their basement, how much of that power would be wasted?
Not saying that proliferation of computers is bad, just food for thought.
-:sigma.SB
P.S. SETI@home, Folding@home, etc. are cheating. :P
Re:Actually... Microwulf might well be revolutiona (Score:5, Informative)
Revolutionary? Everything old is new again...
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/ [mini-itx.com]
http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mi
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/ [ibm.com] -- a 7U chassis that holds 14 blades, and is a bit spendy, but not completely unreasonable for some situations
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8177 [linuxjournal.com] -- My personal favorite, this page talks about several small portable miniclusters that have been made over the last six or seven years...
Yes, 8 cores of Athlon64 is faster than 8 cores of low power VIA CPU's from several years ago, but the concept isn't revolutionary, and there isn't a lot of headline worthy engineering that goes into a project like this... I'm sure it's a very handy tool, and I'm not suggested it shouldn't have been built, or that it was entirely trivial to build, but in the end, it's just four ordinary motherboards and ethernet.
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but in the end, it's just four ordinary motherboards and ethernet.
Sure, and I've built similar (bigger & faster) custom systems. But I'm expensive and the knowledge I have is uncommon. Your average Windows admin wouldn't have a clue. This could be a cheap drop in commodity supercomputer.
Hell, the IBM SP was a commodity pre-built supercomputer. This is much cheaper.
but the concept isn't revolutionary
No, the concept hasn't been revolutionary for decades, the effect might be though.
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A lot of what us humans do in life is "because we can". This doesn't appear to be any different.
(It slightly amused me that the captcha to log in to post this post was "differer".)
It's about the possibilities, not the technology (Score:5, Interesting)
While it does not have the interconnect of "true HPC" hardware (a bit of a fleeting distinction, but bear with me) it'll surely be suitable for a lot of the simpler, yet still compute-intensive tasks out there ("simple" here meaning not needing a lot of intra-node communication).
On the flip side, it might fuel the "hell, I'll just build my own cluster"-mentality going around these days. I work in the HPC group at a university, running linux clusters, IBM "big iron" and a couple of small, old SGI installation, and we certainly see a bit of that going around. Problem is, sure, the hardware is cheap and affordable, but getting it to run in a stable and sensible manner without spending large amounts of time just keeping the thing together is a challenge, mainly due to the immature state of clustering software. As many researchers are not exactly keen on spending time solving problems outside their specific field, they're usually better off letting somebody else administer things, so they can just log on and run their stuff.
But for individuals and small groups of people who are computer savvy enough to handle it, things like these are definately a "good thing" (TM).
4 psus, isn't that a waste? (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at this design: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/ [mini-itx.com]. It uses DC-DC converters on each motherboards (mini-itx, so low power), a single 12V PSU and a UPS for regulation:
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Another group is producing much the same thing commercially, in a nice case and all. A 4 node Core 2 1.8Ghz with 1 gig ram per node and 2x 250Gb storage is about $7000 (USD)
(Wonder how that stacks up to what he built speed/cost wise, though I'd bet the Via cluster beats all in power use (140W max load))
See the link at Mini-ITX
http://www.mini-itx.com/2007/02/26/the-octimod-min i-itx-cluster [mini-itx.com]
Company s
Mod parent up (Score:2)
For a more hands-on approach, maybe these 200W+ DC-DC converters will do: http://www.mpegcar.com/acatalog/200w_and_above_PSU .html#aD220PSU [mpegcar.com]. The 220W version is rated at 95% efficiency... can't go wrong with that!
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An single core of a core2 at 2Ghz is about 8 times faster in fpu stuff like rendering than a 1.4Ghz C7. The integer part is more competetive, thought.
GigaFlops (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not really... (Score:2)
gigaflops? (Score:3, Insightful)
this is
i thought performance was measured in fps?
Re:gigaflops? (Score:4, Funny)
Holy Grail (Score:2)
Definition (Score:2)
Any currency? (Score:2)
Proper name (Score:2)
So...? (Score:2)
On that note... hard drives are good to have for all nodes, imo, since you may be doing things that make 'fetch/store data over the network' a bad strategy.
The entire point of the Beowulf model is it's cheap, easy, and fun. While it's great to see people building cute little clusters like this one, I wouldn't exactly call this a brea
Less powerful than other deskside machines? (Score:2, Flamebait)
So a Dual Quad core Xeon a super computer too?
Orac from Blake's Seven (Score:2, Funny)
Intel Core 2 is Faster (Score:2, Informative)
Gigaflops? (Score:2)
From Wikipedia: Supercomputer
The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand "TFLOPS" (1012 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-,combined into the shorthand "PFLOPS" (1015 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.)
It's not exactly a good quote, but looks to me like we're bumping the lower edge of the petaflop scale these days. Thats six decimal places people.
Price/Performance not new... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice, but a little low on RAM? (Score:2, Insightful)
cute, but no supercomputer (Score:2)
Four motherboards on a dodgy plastic frame (Score:2)
I repeat, wow!
How exactly does this qualify as newsworthy?
This is almost as bad as the time some goose bought a mini mac and before the sales launch was a week old he'd gone and ripped the guts out and stuck them in a frickin' PC minitower case so he could "run a cheap server". What a dingbat.
On second thoughts, the mini mac destroyer's effort was *much* worse than this, at least there is some merit to what these guys did and they didn't go and wreck a nice piece of kit in the process. It's just not exa
Lousy Latency Performance, Though (Score:3, Funny)
Beowulf = pain in the a** (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, and try writing your own lam-mpi code sometime...
GPU based supercomputing (Score:3, Interesting)
The basic Tesla unit c870 = 518 Giga flops for ~$1300.
Tesla s870 = 2 Terra flop for ~$12000 (still desktop size)
NVidia Tesla [nvidia.com]
PS3Wulf (Score:3, Informative)
The PS3 comes out of the box with a Cell uP [wikipedia.org] that gets something like 20 GFLOPS [stanford.edu] on each $500 PS3. It's already networked into clustered supercomputing [wikipedia.org] like this MicroWulf.
A $500 PS3 has 20 of the 26.5 GFLOPS the $2800 MicroWolf has. MicroWulf runs Ubuntu, which can also run on PS3 [psubuntu.com]. If people can port Linux libraries like Mesa/OpenGL/X to the PS3 SPEs, where most of the power lies, then we'd be looking at $25:GFLOPS, not the $94:GFLOPS on the MicroWulf.
And while taking a break, you can play Gran Turismo 5, and 40 more games you can afford with the money you save on HW.
Math geek field-day! (Score:2)
What's going to be used for? Well, Prime number hunting, pi crunching, computing obscure mathematical constants 99.995% of the US hasn't heard of before....creating my own fractal Deep Field images...trying my hand at cracking RSA numbers with GGNFS [ttu.edu].
to name a few
I have to mention... (Score:2)
Re:What would you do with one? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've thought several times about building a small cluster, just for the experience and the nerd factor. But I never do because I also get in to the issue of just what am I going to do with it once its finished, other than heat my workshop.
Re:What would you do with one? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:But.. (Score:5, Funny)
Minesweeper under Vista - No
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Re:Definition? (Score:5, Informative)
In the past, this could only be achieved by having custom CPU's to perform pipelining or parallel processing. Processors in the Cray supercomputers had extremely deep vector pipelines, which was good for three-dimensional simulations like CFD or computer animation. But other systems followed the parallel processing method. The Connection machine had 2^16 one bit processors which was good for encryption/decryption. Other systems used standard CPU's (Intel 80x86's, DEC Alpha's and M680x0's) connected together through a high-speed bus network.
The different types of systems could be defined according to how these processed instructions/data.
SISD - Single Instruction, Single Data - Early home computer
SIMD - Single Instruction, Multiple Data - Vector processors
MISD - Multiple Instruction, Single Data - Fault tolerant systems
MIMD - Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data - Parallel processing CPU's
Some systems had hardwared interconnect configurations - either a 2D square grid, a 3D square grid or torus network, or even star networks, while others had dynamic routing capability. Transputers only knew about the adjacent processors in the four compass directions (NESW).
But all of these techniques have been incorporated into mainstream CPU's now - you now have dual-core and quad-core CPU's that can be used by laptops.
Modern day methods are to make the systems super-scalar. Multi-core CPU's can be arranged side by side onto multi-CPU boards which in turn can be rack mounted into chassis which communicate through high-speed interconnect systems. There is no limit on the number of racks that can be used except space and money.