Virginia Tech Announces Supercomputer Plans

CousinVinnie writes "Previously noted in this Slashdot story, the administration of Virginia Tech has announced they're puchasing 1100 G5's (another story) in hopes to build a top-10 supercomputer by October 1. Tech will be spending $5.2 million over five years on the project, which should help it pull in more research money." Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site.

This is quite cool but...

Does anyone know who else was considered for this contract? I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!

-WS

Re:This is quite cool but...

Itanium: er, um, we have a new architecture! I think RedHat has a port to it.

G5: We have a PowerPc system that has been extended to use 64 bits. Your old software will run. Your new software will run faster. We have MacOSx, BSD, and Linux available, natively compiled.

There is also something to be said for the G5's parallel memory busses. It divides the ram in half, each half feeding 32 bits of the processor. You could theoretically keep your instructions on one side and data on the other, and pipeline the snot out of it.

Re:This is quite cool but...

multibanked ram is nothing new. it's been around since the 486 days for consumers (iirc), and much earlier in big machines, i'm sure. afaik, most mobosthese days are at least 128bits wide.

Yep, my old Macintosh 9600 had a 128-bit wide memory bus if you used identical ram in each of the 12!! RAM slots.

Re:This is quite cool but...

identical ram in each of the 12!! RAM slots

Dude, look at an old sparc sometime. Sparc 1/1+/2 had 16 ram slots, circa 1990. Of course, you had to fill 4 at a time. The max is 128 MB i think.

~Will

Re:This is quite cool but...

Apparently the PHD's at Virginia Tech disagree with you 5.2 million ($) times. Or 1,100 times, depending on your view of the world...

FIRST reliable supercomputing facility...

Or so they claim here. [vt.edu] It seems they have all their bases covered and don't give a damn about ECC for a reason.

[Srinidhi Varadarajan, an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, and Jason Lockhart, director of the College of Engineering's High Performance Computing and Technology Innovation, initiated the venture at Virginia Tech. Varadarajan is an expert in reliability, a key issue in successfully exploiting terascale computing.]

They keep on going:

[Component failures are endemic to any large-scale computational resource. While previous generations of supercomputers engineered reliability into systems hardware, today's high performance computing environments are based on inexpensive clusters of commodity components, with no systemic solution for the reliability of total machine.]

And now for the solution for your reliability problem.

[Virginia Tech has the first comprehensive solution to the problem of transparent fault tolerance, which enables large-scale supercomputers to mask hardware, operating system and software failures - a decades old problem. It's a software program called Deja vu, designed by Varadarajan. He also integrated the software with Apple's G5s. This work will enable the terascale computing facility to operate as the first reliable supercomputing facility, according to Varadarajan, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award recipient.]

So maybe, just maybe, you and other people could:

1. READ before posting.

2. Then READ a little more.

3. Did I say READ already.

-sigh- Whatever.

Re:This is quite cool but...

I think they are excellent machines, but not for science.

Yeah, Macs are really bad for scientific research work. [apple.com] No one with a brain would ever use a cluster of them for science. [apple.com] Science requires the Wintel hegemony [apple.com]. -1, troll it, baby.

Re:Apple marketroid

Well I don't know about other science work but my dad does AIDS research and they use Macs exclusively in their labs for all of their model simulations and experiments. There's apparently a lot of biology research software that is available only on the Apple platform as well. I guess maybe because of their ties to educational institutions over the years?

Re:Apple marketroid

Wonderful: three pointers to Apple's web site, pointing to pages with slick corporate "interviews". Do you actually work for Apple or are you just insanely zealous?

There are an awful lot of scientists using Macs for their research and work. I use them almost exclusively now after retiring my SGI's in favor of the OS X boxes and judging from the meetings I attend, I would say Macs have anywhere from 10-40% penetrance in science depending upon the subfield. For instance the last vision meeting I attended (ARVO, the big one for the vision research community), there were Powerbooks and iBooks everywhere. Probably a good 33% of the laptops I saw.

Re:This is quite cool but...

I think they are excellent machines, but not for science.

Well, like ...

One night, I was processing these gene sequences on my Itanium cluster, you know? When all of a sudden it went berserk, the screens started flashing, and, like, the whole result set just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good result set! I had to cram and resequence it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed thesis wasn't nearly as good, and I blame those Itaniums for the funding didn't get, and tenure I lost.

I'm happy to report that my sister and I now share an Apple G5 cluster. It's a lot nicer to work on than my old Itanium farm was, it hasn't let me down once, and my papers have all been really good.

Thanks, Apple.

Ellen Feiss, PhD

Re:This is quite cool but...

Read the tech doc and see where that Hypertransport link is. In the Opteron, its between CPUs, which allows for a very low latency pseudo-NUMA setup. On the G5, its between the Northbridge and the Southbridge. Even low end Athlons these days have Hypertransport links there.

Re:This is quite cool but...

Dell and HP were considered, and Apple won based to a large degree on delivery date. There are more issues to computing than benchmarks, and in the issue of deliverability, Apple won. If you RTFA on the CT, they say it was on the speed and memory of the G5, but the geek grape vine, and hints from the Roanoke times article said availability to get it up in time to make the next top 500 comuter listing we big factors.

Both Dell and HP have recently announced large clusters, so that may be why they were unable to deliver in time.

Re:This is quite cool but...

Does anyone know who else was considered for this contract? I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!

Well, considering that the G5 has many of the architectural features of those $40k SGI Octanes that I purchased a few years ago, I would consider that pretty impressive. In short, Apple designed the G5 machines with completely independent busses, so that saturating say an I/O bus will not have any effect on the throughput of say memory to CPU. They are pretty impressive and I can see why many folks who are currently using the Octanes etc... would want new G5's.

So, you have a UNIX box with true plug and play, 64-bit, nice GUI, full CLI access, Firewire, USB, REALLY nice archetecture etc...etc...etc... All that makes for a pretty convincing argument for clusters moving to the G5's

Argument for G5 here.

I'd love to see the arguments for the different platforms!

I think the argument for G5 came from here [mac.com].

Yikes..

1100 G5's...that should corner the market for about a week...and give Apple a small boost to it's bottom line..

cray

Burns: [throws his glass at Homer]
You call this Postum?
[bashes a 5-feet high pile of paper]
Burns: You call this a tax return?
[bangs a CRAY with his cane]
Burns: You call this a supercomputer?

Performance comparisons...

The comparison is like Apples to Oranges. Most people end up asking "Orange you going to build a beowulf cluster of those Apples?"

You should watch out

Jokes like this can get you put away in the punatentury for a very, very long time.

Re:Performance comparisons...

I hear this comparison of apples and oranges all the time.

Aren't both fruits that grow from trees?

How about comparing sea water and comets?

Maybe...

Maybe Apple will use this G5 cluster against a single-processor itanium to show that, yes, they ARE the fastest personal computer!

The only problem will be finding a desk big enough to fit the guys...

Re:Maybe...

Well, reguardless of the performance of the itanium vs. the G5 cluster, at least you'll be saving on your electricity bill by going with the 1100 G5s....

Apple ... supercomputer...?

Not to sound like a troll, but isn't the Apple a bad machine to use for this? It's big, the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud, and it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market. Yes, OSX/Darwin does work fairly well, but I'd think that the entire purpose of this computer originally would make it ill-suited to this task.

Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power, or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis. Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.

This just seems like the wrong way to do something thats hallmark has been in being cheap.

Re:Apple ... supercomputer...?

the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud

Apple specifically engineered these systems to be quiet - the compartments are set up the way they are so they can get maximum airflow with minimal blowing. Just because you think "loud" when you hear nine fans doesn't mean they're actually any louder than anything else. You're spreading FUD.

it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market.

Perhaps your definition of "embedded" is different from mine, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit this application. This is a supercomputer cluster. However you are correct that these machines were designed to be desktop computers. Apparently that's not all they're good for.

Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power,

Yeah, so does Apple, but these are faster.

or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis.

If Virginia Tech wants to order 1,100 of them, don't you think Apple would be flexible if this was a concern?

Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.

This is an interesting point I hadn't considered. Feeding 110v into each of 1,100 individual power supplies can't be as energy or heat efficient as what you describe. However, it's possible that they will actually be doing this - I don't think I've seen it mentioned anywhere.

Another consideration - apparently VT was pressed for time [appleturns.com] and they needed something that would be available quickly; Apple was able to deliver quickly. This may explain why they'd be more inclined to use stock off-the-shelf boxes instead of something more customized.

Re:Apple ... supercomputer...?

Apple has won other contracts by being able to act quickly. When the Postal Service needed to set up an intranet, everyone said one to two years. Apple using WebObjects was able to do it in 6 months. At the time the Postal Intranet was the largest in the world.

Anyone have any real specs?

So far we've seen that it's a cluster and what the building blocks are. What's the interconnect? What's the OS? What are the nodes using for a network filesystem? Are they at all? Is this intended for parallel jobs or for embarassingly parallel work?

Re:Anyone have any real specs?

The interconnect is Infiniband by Mellanox [mellanox.com]. These things get 10Gbps bandwidth with 6us latency under MPI. Very decent stuff. There is more information at the site above.

Note that 1100*$3000 = $3M. This doesn't include the 4GB RAM, but also doesn't include any volume discounts. Thus the interconnect may cost about $2M.

Oh, and to the guy who said "4 Athlons + Myranet is the same price as one G5" -- can I have some of what you're smoking?

Re:Anyone have any real specs?

OS is SuSE as it supports Infiniband.

Well, according to this story [technewsworld.com], the cluster will be running "a beta version of the latest release of OS X", presumably a beta version of Panther.

If this is true, I'd bet, and this is purely a guess, that Panther and XCode [apple.com], the new development tool built by Apple, have some support for cluster applications. With technologies like Rendezvous on top of Mach/BSD, it could mean beowulf style supercomputers that are both fast and easy to maintain.

Specs from an involved student...

My boss here at VT is a volunteer for this project... they've been designing and building rackmount shelf-type units to store all these new G5s, as well as helping with the cooling system. Here's some info he gave me.

The cluster will eventually run Mac OS 10.27... he said eventually, and Jason Lockhart, the project leader, is a friend and fellow Linux geek of mine (please don't hammer his inbox ;-), so there's a chance that he might use some PPC distro at some point.

Interconnectivity will be done with Cisco equipment, among the onboard gigabit LANs. Infiniband cards will also eventually be installed for 10 Gbit throughput.

You guys can offer alternative solutions and troll this as much as you want, but this is what VT is going with. In my opinion, it's not a bad choice... the New IBM PPC chipset is balls-to-the-wall computing, and Apple's 'stock' offerings in the G5 (Gbit ethernet, serial ATA, etc.) are all strong selling points. The fact that this cluster is intended for intense vector and matrix-based algorithms is another bonus, b/c of the PPC vector processing unit.

Apparently Apple shifted us up to the top of their production ladder, in order to make the contract, thereby extending the wait times for consumers itching for a G5... I find that a little humorous. Can't wait to see gigaflop statistics!!

Rumors getting closer

In talking to the person who is recruiting me to help lug the computers around when they arrive, the OS is to be OS X 10.2.7 on arrival, with plans to upgrade to Panther upon it's release. Straight out-of the box releases, with NetBoot planned to be used to distribute the images to each computer. This contradicts the rumors I've heard before, but is closer to a source who is on the planning team, who is too damn busy to talk to a luser like me.

Those who are possible volunteer recruits, there is an info session in Andrews ISB in the Corp. Research Center at 7:30 tonight and tomonrrow night (same presentation both nights). You *cannot* be on wage for VT to be elegible. I'm not sure if GAs count as this, since I'm not one, I didn't check.

Read the previous /. article first

There was a lot of inside info from people who work at Virginia Tech or go to school there. Lots of speculation and rumor, too, if you're into that sort of thing.

"speculation and rumor"?? On /.?!?

Lots of speculation and rumor, too, if you're into that sort of thing.

This is slashdot! We're all about speculation and rumor. Innuendo, too, especially on the weekends.

Oh, and sentence fragments.

:-)

why g5

support microsoft! do it with ten times as many xboxes!

:) But seriously why would they specifically choose g5's....they must have done a bit of research before dropping 5 million on them

Obligitory Troll

Slashdot summary:
1) Itaniums are for pussies.
2) Go Apple!
3) Opterons still kick the G5's butt.
4) I can't wait to run doom3 on my backordered G5.
5) People griping about apples proprietary hardware and software, and how this cluster could have been built cheaper from oem parts, and ebay ethernet hubs.
6)Dumb lists summarizing other trolls.

Even more info ...

Here's the article from which the Collegiate Times article has paraphrased: http://www.technews.vt.edu/Archives/2003/Sept/0356 6.html [vt.edu]

What the hell do you do with 1100 mice?

Post suggestions here!

Re:What the hell do you do with 1100 mice?

I don't know what you'd do with them, but I'm sure some wanker on here is already complaining there aren't 2200 buttons. ;)

Memory ?

From one of the articles "For the supercomputer to break the top five supercomputers in the world, it would have to possess 10 teraflops of memory."

It's obviously why Apple

I would bet Apple would gladly cut a fantastic deal to get their model in the news as being part of one of the fasters supercomputers. They likely paid very little for the hardware.

It's a no brainer...

PowerMac G5s?

Why aren't they waiting for the Xserve update? Rhetorical question, but still...

I haven't seen one, but it looks like the PowerMac G5s are about 4U wide. 1100 x 4U = 4400U / 42 per rack ~= 105 racks.

Not only is this going to take up an enormous amount of room, but the power and cooling requirements are going to be crazy as well. And they don't have rails so getting them in the racks, and working on them once in the rack, is going to be a PITA.

1100 G5 Xserves would need only about 25 racks. Many fewer UPSes and A/C units to power in each rack. Much easier to install and work on.

I know Apple is gung-ho about this validating their "Fastest PC Ever" claims. But it seems a little poorly thought out on the University's part even if they got a sweet up-front price on the machines. Remember: the system price is a small part of TCO.

Re:PowerMac G5s?

Why aren't they waiting for the Xserve update?

What, there's an Xserve update?

Take a look at the heat sinks in a G5. If you can figure out how to get that into a 1U enclosure, you might want to work for Apple in the hardware design group.

-jcr

Re:PowerMac G5s?

To get it into 25 racks, you need to get it into a 1U form factor. At that point, cooling becomes an issue - you have 40 750W power supplies *per rack* then. We're talking about a space about the size of a phone booth, and the heat equivalent of 20 hair driers on HIGH all going at once. It's gonna get TOASTY at that point. Even if you consider a 2U and expanding out to 50 racks, that's still a lot of heat per square foot.

Remember - the CPU and the memory are going to generate the same number of BTU/hour whether in a tower case or a 2U rack. And going to the *as yet unannounced* 2U just makes the cooling problem worse...

Yes, we thought a LOT about these sort of issues.

Re:PowerMac G5s?

Perhaps they have entered the Reality Distortion Field (TM).

Apple's platform will probably work here, and once they prove it does, they will open a new segment of buyers, and gain plenty of positive attention. Apple's (recent) record suggests they will exceed expectations.

As to the cost...the good PR that they can derive from a working G5 supercomputer is easily worth $10m on hardware. At the end of the quarter it's hardly noticable to a company sitting on $3,500,000,000.00 in cash.

Apple gets to show MSFT they can scale OS X way past Windows. IBM gets to show Intel what it thinks of the Blue Lightning License arrangement, and Apple and IBM, by virtue of being together, get so give MSFT the finger...from way up the (top500.org) list. Not bad for their first try at this.

...and think about it from Jobs' perspective: This will be the biggest "Apple Computer" ever made. His ego can't handle this thing not kicking ass.

--
Don't forget that Pixar's always looking for high power hardware and they've got lots of new money.

Their Website

Pudge thinks their website isn't good enough. What does he want? Some flash? Maybe some pop up ads to spice it up. Whatever happen to simple being good and fancy being woooo pretty but useless. Oh wait, that still hasn't changed.

Not really a dupe

This isn't really a dupe, as this is a mention of the first official words form the school on the subject. Officials are finally speaking (and in some cases backing off) of the cluster in public.

Imagine a....

Imagine a cluster-computer post where nobody asks me to imagine a ....

Oh, nevermind.

Floppy memory??

From the second article:
For the supercomputer to break the top five supercomputers in the world, it would have to possess 10 teraflops of memory.

I think that they mean 10teraflops of computing power, as opposed to 10terabytes of memory -- since the later would require each CPU to have 10GB of ram in it. Nonetheless, the anomaly tells me that this is a reporter not used to computer issues. (too few computer geeks at the college paper).

Ever changing focus shift..

Anyone get the feeling that Apple might be pulling a Be, Inc and is trying to pull off a focus-shift?

Remember Be, the "multimedia" OS turned "Internet Appliance". Remember the death of Be. (damn, that stings. I miss the BeOS.)

Now witness Apple:
For decades, seemingly the darling of the press-production (DTP) world, catering to artists of all magnitudes, it was the computer you used to create real, bona-fide art. It attracted the freaks, the hippies, the art chicks. For many people, this was unnerving. Different people get "different" looks.
Now who's Apple targetting?
With OS X, I'm thinking geeks. We're different people, too, but in a, well, different manner. Instead of the artists, Apple's going for traditional suits, the realm of IT. It may be a matter of sheer survival that Apple penetrates here, because they don't stand a chance in these days of "homogenous" work environments.. Out with Apple (even if it works) and in with Dell WinXP machines! Linux faces the same dilemna, although Linux has some other benefits/detriments for it's widespread adoption. If Apple can show it's worth in the server room (just like Linux is doing), then maybe, just maybe, they'll start looking at Apple on the corporate desktop (just like Linux is doing).
Now, the idea of catering to suits is somewhat.. frightening. The whole damn market is different. They don't care about "look and feel", they care about numbers (see economic downturn, outsourcing to India, massive layoffs, H1B abuse, etc). This means Apple will have to change from being "cool" to utilitarian. But wait, I think I just painted myself into a corner here... Wasn't that the point of Apple? To be a tool and not an obstacle? Instead of creating computer art, we're now creating databases? Maybe Apple is on to something here...

Are they buying the chips from Apple or IBM

because I know that Georgia is buying a 256 node cluster and at least some of them will be G5's from IBM running linux.

Wayback machine

This was also discussed even earlier.... on Slashdot in July [slashdot.org] in a discussion of grid computing....

"Beef up their Website"

Can someone explain the " Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site" comment? It loads perfectly fast [vt.edu] for me. It looks pretty good. It even runs PHP, so it couldn't be a "They shouldn't use ColdFusion" type remark.

Am I missing something, or was that just a completely random comment?

Re:"Beef up their Website"

It had better run freaking fast. Virginia Tech has had an OC-3 for at least 6 years, and I think they're upgrading to hook into network virginia's bigger pipes.

For those out of the loop, network virginia [networkvirginia.net] is a partnership between verizon (local loops), sprint (borders and pipes), and Virginia tech (expertise and tech support). A few years ago, they had 2 OC-3's from Northern Va to roanoke, 1 to richmond, and 1 from roanoke to richmond. Their updated network topology map can be found by clicking here [networkvirginia.net]. The bottom one is the latest one. At any rate, they've got multiple OC-12's running from Nova to Roanoke, mainly because of VT. Tech may already be hooked into the OC-12's, i'm not sure.

Also, I'm not sure about how much will be lost in clustering, but according to the CT article today, the dual 2.0 Ghz G-5 can pull 14 teraflops by it's self. If we're getting 1100 of them, say, drop ~10% for overhead, that would still put us up at 14000 teraflops, which is ahead of ascii white and behind los alamos.

Also: regarding power requirements and all of that - we have several state of the art facilities on campus for this kind of stuff, including the VT Corporate research center and Torgersen hall (home of the center for advanced computing and where we keep all the fun VR rooms and stuff). There's a power plant on campus. We never lost power when I lived in a dorm, not during snow storms or huge thunderstorms or anything. It supplies power for most of blacksburg, too. Shameless plug, but that's one selling point for the company where I work, netmar [netmar.com], because we get our power from the VT power plant, and it's about 2.5 blocks away, we hardly ever lose power for more than 2 minutes, so we haven't had to put our generators to work in forever. Nowadays, we just test them with the remote start to make sure they're working, and to scare people that are hanging around the generator hut.

Anyway, VT has no problems finding a place for these things to go, and will have no problem providing power for them. Climate control should be no problem, either. For starters, it's easy to cool things in blacksburg, cause it hasn't been above 100 degrees in 100 years here.

Some people in my econ class today were talking about why are we doing it, and what's it going to be used for. Really, I think we're doing it to get grant money and sponsorships/funding, because with the economic situation in VA, we're scrambling to find money. We've had to drop teachers without replacing them and cut back on services all over (no more trash cans in dorm hallways, you have to take your own trash outside, can't afford the maintinance staff). Also, the Vet school will get a lot of use out of it. That's the "virginia-maryland regional college of veteranary medicine". They're looking for ways to cure problems with small bacteria instead of drugs (i'm not clear on the particulars, that's the impression i got). They're going to try and track what happens to something when it's introduced into an animal or something. Anyway, they'll use it, as will VT's engineering school, which, despite being tied for like 73rd on the list of top schools, and inexplicably 55 positions behind UVA, is an excellent program and produces excellent engineers.

~Will

I agree

I just graduated from there and that website, while not ugly, is non-sensically arranged and the search comes up with some of the most ridiculous links. The department does have some nice clusters already set up though as well as a sweet 3d visualization studio [vt.edu]!

Sounds fine

There are a bunch of people posting gripes that this was a bad idea. But I don't think it's that bad. We should at least withold judgment until we see some data. One thing's for certain, it will outperform YOUR cluster.

Among the top complaints were:

You could buy several AMD's for that.
You might be able to, but the G5's they are buying already have 2 very good processors. As long as they're dividing up tasks among processors, it's nice to have all the memory management and overhead taken care of at a level of two processors per node instead of one. To be honest, I've never seen it done before, and it could have very interesting results.

The Mac's aren't designed for this sort of thing.
We don't know all the details of this cluster because they weren't all mentioned in the story, but my hunch is that Apple might cater to them a little if they are offering to dump $5 mill on a cluster. They might package the cases differently (sans curvy plastic or with shared power supplies).

Anyway, when it comes to speed of high precision calculations, the G* chips have proven their worth. And most High Science applications fall into that range of operation. We all know that clustering and distrubuting is touchy. The cost and speed don't scale linearly. And the cost vs speed ratio definately doesn't scale literally.

There is a possibility these computer science professors know something. So we might want to see how this thing performs before we rush to judgement.

I keep overestimating slashdot...

Lots of "WHY?" questions, with lots of pointless trolling on the G5; but none of them actually look for answers. Mostly just more idiots who can't understand that a good vendor is important; that their own time is important; that ease of use is even more important now than it ever has been before. Luckily, these same idiots spend all their time setting up sendmail over their 14.4 modem. As for the G5, here are some strongpoints for it: - A fast memory pipe (1GHz) - Good heat management (9 fans but it's quieter than its predecessor) - Damn good FP performance (To get comparable FP performance on intel, you have to use the -fviolate-ieee flag on gcc, think about that) - Vendor-installed, vendor-supported Unix, with the vendor employing the entire OS's development team. - Fast system interconnects with network & I/O - Easy system setup (this matters a lot when you've got 1100 of them) - Proven apple reliability (and if you're going to fight this one, have something better than "is not!") (again, very important when you've got 1100 of them) Oh yeah, and OS X. Mach microkernel, Rondezvous, and distributed builds in the default toolset. Again, the idiots I mentioned above wouldn't have a clue about this stuff. As for _why_ VT getting this, VT's one of the largest engineering schools in the country. We've gotta simulate airflow over wings, heat propogation over materials, and other stufff this CS major doesn't understand. And we've got big development in bioinformatics. All kinds of CPU to crunch. AFAIK, the cluster's being paid for by federal grants or something like that. And now fools, flame me. Prove me right.

TCO

They got a great deal from Apple on the machines, and when it falls of the bottom of the top 10 with the next release,they will have 1,100 machines to sell. Considering the excellent deal they got from Apple, plus a grant or 2 they picked up somewhere, they get great advertising for next to nothing. Of course I'm making this up....

The real news isn't the super computer

I think we can all agree that the shocking thing here wasn't that they were building the super computer as much as it was that a campus rumor was true!

What will happen next, dogs and cats living together? Mass hysteria?

OS X 10.3

As it turns out, this is the minimum recommended system configuration to run OS X 10.3 Panther.

Beowulf Cluster

Wow, imagine a Beowulf cluster of-- oh, too late.

Not a personal hit

You know every time Apple Does something to improve it market share, company have a tendancy to want to do this ... its good buisiness sense, every PC troll comes out and puts em down. I never really thought PC users were generally self protentious peaople but for the most part they are. after reading this -> http://www.applelust.com/oped/amc/archives/amc0307 18.shtml article that goes into the facts, a word pc trolls dont like to hear, about the early dual g5-xeon comparison it made how bad you people really are clear to me. YES im sitting here running windows xp on my Athlon x86 PC but i , like unlike many i guess, have a mac sitting in the other room. At the end of the day the G5 is an emensly power full computer. even the dual's are used to genetics can u imagine what over one thousand of them can do? Just except the fact that appple has sold some computers and find more posts to troll

What's the long-term plan?

I have a sneaking suspicion that these computers aren't going to be used as a supercomputer for long. I bet they set this up, get on the supercomputer list, and then in six months or a year farm out the computers to use in computer labs around campus. Besides, I haven't heard a compelling reason why VT *needs* a supercomputer.

No G5 For You

This means that those of you who ordered your G5 early and expected to get one in early September, you are SOL. Your machine is goint VT. You have to wait another month before you get your machine.

-Matt

The G5 really is all that.

Read why here [macedition.com].

Time for a new icon

Now that we have G5s don't ya think it would be a better idea to use a G5 pic instead of the G4 icon? e.g. http://www.apple.com/g5processor/ [apple.com]

cool, but...

what about photoshop benchmarks?

::ducks::

Umm... OK....

So I read this "The project comes at a time when the university's academic departments are struggling to fulfill students' educational needs in the wake of a $72 million reduction in state support."

and then I wonder why you would spend $5mil dollars over the next 5 years to build a supercomputer? It seems like a better idea would be to reach out to the slahsdot/linux communities and see what kind of equipment they could get donated/free and then build a semi-super computer with that - or hell even just buy a shitload of cheap pc's to do it with....

maybe i'm just missing something...

Damn,

The moderators are getting so bad, they're making the submitters produce dupes for them in advance...

I wonder how much *wind* this will create

considering the G5's 'smart' airflow design [apple.com], engineering the case like one big air channel, I would imagine that 1100 of these, if aligned correctly, could sum up to quite a nice breeze...

Ray Rah VPI!

Maybe VT can use the new computers to beef up their web site.

May I mod that completely unneccessary stab at my alma mater as -1 Flamebait?

While I was a student at Virginia Tech ('94-'99, including a year of co-op) as a Computer Engineering student, I was always impressed by the diversity of computing resources throughout the university. Each department generally sided with a single environment (DECstations to FreeBSD PCs for CS, Windows (AutoCAD) for Engineering, Macintosh for Math & English), although all were supported. Even all the way back to the mainframe and its dumb terminals, which students used to sign up for classes. The general student at Virginia Tech learned, by necessity, how to do the basics across a variety of systems.

I'm happy to see Virginia Tech continue its push forward. "Commodity supercomputers" through clustering almost always refer to Intel-architecture systems. Why not Apples as well? It's a brilliant move forward, not only for the computational power this involves but also from a P.R. perspective... would all those high-school techies have heard about this if they chose an Intel architecture solution? And Apple will get good P.R. as the building blocks behind a supercomputer.

What will it be used for?

As for what this Super-duper-computer will be used for:

As The Apple Turns [appleturns.com] reports here [appleturns.com], that the supercomputer cluster's main purpose will be to "impress the living crap out of everyone."

Just thought you'd all like to know

ECC - why is this important?

OK, apart from being a nice thing to flame people with, what is this ECC talk?

Why is it so important?

Are there other "supercomputers" running without it?

Is there a good reason to disregard it and go with G5 anyway?

Tech Tech VPI!

Go Hokies

I was down there last week for the game, and the school is definitely transforming. also the links in the article point to off VT network sites, so is the comment warrented?

$26 million?

Berkeley did it on $500 grand with their SETI@home project.

dual use for these machines?

would it be possible to use the machines both as lab machines for students AND as a cluster? I mean does the gear that networks them necessarily prevent them form being used as individual machines? sorry for the n00b question but it sure seems like VT would get a lot more for their money that way.

It's all well and good, but...

Why does the G5 say "G4" on it?

Re:repeat story

Yeah, and his story says it was reported earlier, if you read it...

Re:Virginia Tech

humm someone have a problem with rednecks?
Maybe a little to close to home? Or is the poster from WVA?

Re:Overpriced G5s

Wait a minute - you're complaining about the cost of a G5, but go on to suggest they buy a Myrinet, a rather expensive interconnect. Something doesn't compute here.

Re:Overpriced G5s

to get any reasonable super-computing power out of it, you would need a low latency (expensive) interconnect.

Well, that very much depends on what type of computing you're doing. Some scientific computing is more tolerant of high-latency environments and would rather have the bandwidth.

I can't seem to find the quote from any of the articles right now, but VT is planning on using an Infiniband interconnect from Mellanox. While I don't know the relative price points, they are touting the fact that this is a high-speed interconnect that's faster than Myrinet or Quadrics at a fraction of the cost. I can't say for sure, since the Infiniband cluster we're helping to build at Stanford is not yet assembled.

This should be interesting to watch. I'll be very interested to see the $/gigaflop ratio for VT's cluster (though that doesn't have a bearing on the interconnect).

Re:But WHY?

Since it's based on a Power4 core, I think you should ask IBM that...

Re:1100 G5s or PC processors ...

the system/390 is based on power4 cpus, isn't it? The G5 is based on a power4 core. I don't see your logic.

As another /. user pointed out, G5's do have an upgrade path. It's an IBM mainframe...

Re:Too expensive

G5: Deliverable today

Opteron: Still under development.

Now tell me, on the Good/Fast/Cheap curve you design parameters lie?

Be nice to Tech

It may be true that all dirts roads lead the VPI, but all white lines lead to UVa...

The money came from a grant

The alumni have other causes to spend their money on, like renovations to the football stadium.

Re:Overpriced G5s

Well, there is the small matter of thermal dissipation--heat to polysyllabically-challenged types like yourself. Those AMDs you're babbling about would cook themselves; the traditional advantage of PowerPC processors for clustering is in the fact that they run MUCH cooler.

Even if you could make the AMD-based cluster run, you'd have spent so much on cooling that the G5s would end up being cheaper. Just ask DOD...

Re:Well,

hahaha when has the answer to life NOT been told to us by the simpsons?

maybe not as cheap as you think

Just the motherboard and chip for a dual 1.6 GHz opteron runs you $1394.99 [pricewatch.com] if you need PCI-X (which is probably necessary with the interconnect you want). And on top of that, you need the network cards, memory, case, hard drives, etc. etc.

You could easily get to Apple prices going with AMD.

Re:Overpriced G5s

OK, a few relevant points here:

• Myrinet sucks. No, really. It does. It eats CPU when sending data. It generally does not perform as well as Infiniband. It has higher latency. Once you start using this for real work (outside of what are known as "embarassingly parallel" problems, which are fine with 10baseT), those factors will play into your performance to a huge degree.
• AMD fanboys, take note: The G5 does have superior floating-point hardware, for either double precision superscalar or vector single precision work. If they're doing floating point the G5 is a clear win.
• The memory bus on the G5 is a bit better than on the Opterons - especially once you start doing threaded work, the dual unidirectional buses essentially allow cache transfers at the same time as memory transfers, and a whole bunch of other possibilities.
• Lastly, what are you smoking? The only way an AMD becomes competitive with a G5 (machine to machine here) is if you build the AMD yourself and leave out the stuff the G5 has in it. Are you suggesting that Virginia Tech build 1100 Opteron, no, 4400 Opteron systems (you said 4x, not me!) themselves? That's crazy. They want somebody else to build and test the machines, and that somebody to be responsible when they fail. Of course such a real-world advantage has little to do with the bubble most /.ers live in, because they build their Athlons themselves. Perhaps the reality distortion field merely applies to introducing reality to people who have never seen it before.

Re:Overpriced G5s

Myrinet eats CPU when sending data?? You must be using the suckiest driver and firmware possible. And Infiniband has lower latency than Myrinet???? Infiniband is a combination of protocol and hardware and actually Infiniband has slightly higher latencies than the best MPI implementations on Myrinet. Myrinet is a just a piece of hardware. You can write firmware in Myrinet to do almost everything in the Lanai processor present in the card itself, without consuming any CPU cycles. The performance you get out of Myrinet entirely depends on the libraries you are using.

Re:Overpriced G5s

How about resale [ebay.com]? When the projects wind down and things need upgrading, they can get maybe over half a mil' in return for offloaded desktops (or at least scrap aluminum), as opposed to 57 cents for a bunch of beige schrapnel.

Re:1100 G5s or PC processors ...

This is a common mistake: confusing a supercomputer (or worse, a cluster) with a mainframe.

Mainframes have one job: to move data from point A to point B as quickly as possible, while doing a relatively minor amount of processing on the way. Mainframes are what you use when you want to process every ATM transaction that happens around the world, all at the same time. In fact, your average mainframe is not really any more powerful than a dual- or quad-CPU Intel server, raw processing wise.

Supercomputers are the exact opposite. They're stacks and stacks of CPU's that process largely independent chunks of data. They do huge amounts of processing on each chunk of data. They do *not* move data particularly well. In many cases, supercomputers are held together with Gigabit Ethernet. That's not exactly *fast*...

Different computers, different tasks.

As an alumn...

As an alumn, I am irritated with the decision. As a cluster developer of 5 years, I'm highly irritated with the rational of the G5. It's one thing to develop a system for the intention of doing research, it's another to base a decision on "..delivered by Oct. 1..". The question you should be asking is, which is more important - getting on the list? or doing the research? Seems to me that there is a more cost effective solution, that provides higher capacity, greater throughput, and more overall compute capability at lower cost... I'd personally suggest VT slow down, rethink the cluster, and buy something that fits the needs of the school and research programs-therein.

Side Note: While Tech has a great football team, the football program is (other than special discounts to students, and using the VT name) completely independent of the school. The football program is a business venture that does not interact with or require school permission, nor is it governed by the school boards that Steger answers to.

Use Linux!

Re:enjoy your tuition increases kids

Why is this a troll? I think it is very relavent. Universities around the country have been hitting financial troubles, and they ALWAYS pass this off to the students in some form. Most students are there because of scholarships, part time jobs and financial aid. Very few are there completely on Mommy and Daddy's dollar. When a University builds something like this it is pretty cool, but who is paying for it? I doubt the administration will be taking a pay cut in order to pay for it. Maybe they'll just fire a few professors and put some more on research and grant writing full time, leaving fewer teachers for students. Or maybe they'll just charge every student more money under something like a "reasource fee". Point is, is it really financially responsible for the University to built this big computer?

Re:enjoy your tuition increases kids

It is a troll because the money for the supercomputer came from a NSF grant for that specific purpose. Furthermore the university expects to make a five-fold return, as have most universities in the top-x supercomputers.

Have you ever been to VT? We've got construction going on all over the place. The football stadium is about to get another "upgrade" after having received on just a year or two ago. We've got major construction going on in at least 3 different places, not to mention many smaller construction projects.

Meanwhile teachers are getting let go, classes that were taught in 30-person rooms 3 years ago when I started, are now taught in 400+ person lecture halls.

Does it suck? Certainly. However the money for the construction projects, football stadium, and supercomputer are all from grants, donations, and other means intended for a specific purpose. They can not legally take the money from a supercomputer grant or football stadium donation and use it to pay a teacher's salary.

We have uneducated rants in the school paper at least once a week saying "why are we upgrading the football stadium if we cant pay teachers!@#$"

Yeah, it does suck, but the university has no choice in the matter.

Re:what are they going to name it?

Well, no. It'd be deep BONDI blue, if it were 1997 (hint: it's not). Nowadays, it's Deep Titanium or Deep Snow, something Virginia has never seen.

Re:what are they going to name it?

Just call it the Big Apple.

Re:what are they going to name it?

Considering that these towers and every mac product in the current line is either silver-colored or white.. I don't see how pink factors into anything here. If colored computers are so "gay" then what do you think of makers like Alienware that build PCs which are yellow or green?

Re:PC Upgrade Woes

Woohoohooo

I always found this post to be absolutely idiotic. It still is of course, but almost pissed my pants laughing :-))))

Re:Hmmmm

yeah, because we all know that Va Tech needs a supercomputer for students to do karaoke.

What da hell will make /. change its G4 thumbnail?

Come on /. Would you please grab a damn G5 thingie offa something somewheres and quit using G4 thumbnails in Apple stories? It sticks out like a green sore thumb and it's embarrassing for /. Time to roll with the changes.

Re:Hmmm

Their is one problem with the new 65's.

Okay. And there is at least one problem with your perception. I'd say that if that logo on the side of the machine looks like a "65" to you, then your opinion that the entire machine is "ugly" is easily disputable.

I suggest LASEK/LASIK.

Re:what are they going to name it?

How a bout Titan, ok it's made out of Aluminium...
I got it:

The Aluminati Cluster

And I bet the first they're going to compute would be the question to "42".

Re:Maybe an Insiders perspective on VT's Decision.

Moderated at:
-1 Doesn't Reaffirm My World View