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More on Virginia Tech G5 Cluster: 17.6 Tflops 390
daveschroeder writes "BBC World's Click Online has a video report (with text transcript) on Virginia Tech's new 1100-node dual 2.0 GHz G5 Terascale Cluster. The report quotes the performance as 17.6 Tflops. As a point of reference, the cluster would be number 2 on the most recent June Top 500 list, behind only Japan's Earth Simulator, and considerably more than doubling the performance of the current number 3 1152-node dual 2.4 GHz Xeon MCR Linux cluster. Assuming the performance figure accurately reflects the LINPACK score (which it should; since the deadline for submissions for the upcoming list of Oct 1 has already passed, one would imagine VT would quote that figure), and depending on new entries for November's upcoming list, the cluster should almost certainly rank in the top 5 - all for only US$5.2 million. The video report is available in Windows Media 9 and Real formats; the relevant portion starts at 13:00."
Better links for Windows Media (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.bbcworld.com/content/template_clickonli ne.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=3 [bbcworld.com]
Dude.... (Score:2)
Re:Dude.... (Score:2)
Heist (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Heist (Score:2)
You know, to buy 22" LCD displays, iPods and Powermacs. And a Ferrari.
Re:Heist (Score:2)
Re:Heist (Score:2, Funny)
> reply(i)
> }
Congrats. You've managed to snag yourself exactly ZERO machines. Try this instead:
for(i=1096; i >= 0; i--){
reply(i)
}
Re:Heist (Score:2)
Re:Heist (Score:2)
Yes, but, (Score:2, Funny)
Twice as fast...? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I understand this correctly, it's saying that a G5 is more than twice as fast as a dual 2.4 GHz Xeon? (1152 dual 2.4 GHz Xeons vs 1100 dual 2.0 GHz G5s -- there are fewer G5s and they run at a slower clock speed.)
This is a pretty staggering statistic. I hadn't really believed the hype about how fast the new G5s were.
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:2)
Think of computers like cars. The Honda S20
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not so sure. It's almost winter, and this house can get pretty cold...
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:2)
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:2)
Uh, yeah
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Twice as fast...? (Score:2)
I think the official meme has always been "up to twice as fast" (insert alternative value of choice for "twice"), which keeps it fair. The two platforms perform differently for different applications, obviously, and a given PC might outperform a given Mac at one thing, while the same Mac outperforms that same PC at something else.
Moreover, lots of Mac peo
New top-500 list will be announced around Nov 18 (Score:4, Informative)
Look for another (less speculative) story on Slashdot around then.
Are they all running Panther? (Score:2, Flamebait)
If the original XServers were too costly and low performance (since they came with a G4) wouldn't a G5 server (since the performance is apparently much better) be a great option for small/medium size businesses for a web/
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
This bothers me as much as people synonymizing Red Hat with linux for x86, and Internet Explorer with the internet; and yes, you sound just as dumb when you jump into a discussion on PowerPC based supercomputers running linux and equate the entire PowerPC world with Yellow Dog as somebody who jumps into a conversation about the internet and equates it with AOL version 7.0.
Just FYI, Red Hat is the only major linux vendor out there that doesn't support PowerPC. Very few people u
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
No idea why I brought that up now ;-)
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
The GUI doesn't suck up any additional resources, except perhaps a small bit of RAM that is wired. Everything else will get swapped to disk and the GUI only sucks up CPU if you use it. So why is OS X a poor choice?
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
BTW, if someone was interested in building a custom OS X, they can just use Darwin, which omits all of the Apple niceties and for which, of course, source is available.
Project leader speaking at conference Oct 28 (Score:5, Informative)
He'll probably reveal some of the technical details, such as the version of Mac OS X used, at that session.
Also, according to a blog [oreillynet.com] at O'Reilly:
Next year, all the little known details [about the cluster] will be revealed in a new book. By that time we'll know what the project means for supercomputing and for Apple.
Re:Project leader speaking at conference Oct 28 (Score:2)
According to this press release [vt.edu] (at the very bottom), they're using Linux, not OS X.
Re:Project leader speaking at conference Oct 28 (Score:2)
The quote is from the Mellanox CEO and he is probably using Linux to appeal to a wider audience than Mac OS X would.
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
Or less...
The power of this err... is nothing compared to the power of the force (marketing).
Just think of all the free publicity they have got so far.
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
When you fill out the form to check your G5 serial number, be sure to leave out any dashes.
Re:Are they all running Panther? (Score:2)
I would not be surprised if the first generation of G5 XServes are 2U cases, so that there is enough s
High speed interconnect? (Score:2)
http://doc.quadrics.com/Quadrics/QuadricsHo
5.2 million (Score:2)
Re:5.2 million (Score:2)
"Sun Microsystems, for instance, is designing a supercomputer under a $50m (31.6m) grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) that will contain 100,000 processors, according to Jim Mitchell, who heads up Sun's labs. The whole thing could conceivably fit into a room."
5.2 million is a lot less then 50 million.
Re:5.2 million (Score:2)
But it doesnt add up...? (Score:2)
The thing is, that only comes to 17.27TFLOPS, and in addition it does assume that the original spec scores were accurate. [theregister.co.uk]
Would anyone care to shed some light onto this?
Re:But it doesnt add up...? (Score:3, Informative)
Would anyone care to shed some light onto this?
I can shed light to this extent: a linear scaling between processors and processing power is only realized in the most idealized of situations (those known as 'embarrasingly parallel'), where each job is small and completely independent of other jobs. The funny thing about embarrasingly parallel tasks is that they do not need a fancy parallel computer; they can just as easily be accomplished on N separate 486 machines, if N is sufficently large.
The upshot
Re:Nice (Score:2)
I said nothing about Apple, I merely commented on a benchmark procedure. It is you who are carrying the baggage of preconceptions; release yourself, my friend!
How does it not add up? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since the call for papers for the new Top 500 list was Oct 1, and the BBC show aired on Oct 9 with a companion BBC News story [bbc.co.uk] dated Oct 12, you'd hope that VT was simply regurgitating the figure that has already been sent to the Top 500 organization.
And why are you trolling around with one of those super-old benchmarking stories? We've already established that every manufacturer does what they can to show their products in the best possible light. At least Apple documented their test [veritest.com] results [apple.com] and methods in full.
So acually, your logic doesn't make any sense: you jump to the conclusion that it's not real results - even though real results already exist and have been submitted, and the entire story is pretty much about that process, making performance figures a critical piece to get accurate - and that they must have just multiplied some benchmark number by 1100. Then, even though the subject of your own post indicates your recognition that "it doesn't add up", you still apparently assume that the results are somehow doctored, this time for the worse, and you manage to weave in one of the stories that tries to make it look like Apple lied with its benchmarks - which it didn't - which is unrelated to the current issue! How does it "assume" the original scores were accurate?? YOU are assuming that they're just multiplying. You might have been onto something if the multiplication actually came out, but it doesn't, meaning that is NOT what they did.
Bravo, +1 Troll.
For those on APPLE computers, the REAL file (Score:2)
Skip ahead to 13:00
Since the freakin' Windows Media files won't play on OS X.
simon
Re:For those on APPLE computers, the REAL file (Score:2)
Because the most popular audio codecs used for Windows Media files are not supported in the OS X Windows Media client. Nor are they supported by MPlayer, or VideoLan Client (VLC) for that matter.
Perhaps when Windows Media Player 9 comes out for OS X (supposed to be "soon") this will be fixed.
simon
Re:For those on APPLE computers, the REAL file (Score:2)
Re:For those on APPLE computers, the REAL file (Score:2)
BJs for Geeks (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact the heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60 mph winds [bbcworld.com]
Interesting math (Score:3, Interesting)
So, you supercomputerusers out there - build a 1PFLOPS cluster NOW!
Re:Interesting math (Score:2)
And 5m Bucks for the cluster? 2000 machines a 2.500$.
SOmewhere something doesnt fit there. Sure, they have gigabit ethernet on board, but the switching architectuer alone should cost at least a few millions.
Not to mention the building.
Re:Interesting math (Score:2)
First of all, the cluster only has 1100 nodes, not 2000. Mind you, the price for the default config is $2,999 which gives us $3,298,900.
On the other hand, the education price is 2,699, giving us $2,968,900.
Mind you, they probably don't need mice, keyboards, DVD-R drives, or even graphics cards on most of them. In fact they only really need motherboard, CPU, and RAM (although a lot more than the default config), case and a small hard disk. Factori
Re:Interesting math (Score:2)
FINALLY!! (Score:2)
Finally I'll be able to play SimCity 4!!
17.6 TFLOPS is Rpeak, not Rmax! (Score:3, Insightful)
No *real* Rmax linpack scores are known yet, and from what i figured the submissions on Oct 1st are just for *inclusion* in the list, real Linpack scores can be submitted till shortly before (or even on!) the conference mid-November..
This article is BS and should be removed...
P.S.: 4 FPops/cycle per clock with 2 FPUs i hear you scream - Impossible! - That's due the Multiply/Add FMAC thing that counts as 2 FPops!
Re:17.6 TFLOPS is Rpeak, not Rmax! (Score:2)
(Yes, we all know Rpeak is meaningless. Still.)
When's a Tflop not a Tflop? Dan does the math (Score:2)
I had this pointed out to me in May of 2002 when Apple introduced the Xserve... in this Slashdot thread [slashdot.org].
Apple's page about the G5's execution co [apple.com]
Re:When's a Tflop not a Tflop? Dan does the math (Score:2)
Each processor can do 2 fpu instructions/clock. So each computer can do 4 fpu instructions/clock.
Re:When's a Tflop not a Tflop? Dan does the math (Score:2)
Each computer can do 4 fpu instructions/clock.
(and those are double-precision 64-bit flops).
There are 1,100 computers. Times 4, that gives us 4,400 flops per clock.
(Note: given 1 DP flop per clock per FPU, this ties in nicely with my use of 4,400 as the number of FPU's, in my comment.)
4,400 flops per clock * 2 billion clock cycles per second = 8.8 trillion flops per second.
I'm still getting the same number
Re:When's a Tflop not a Tflop? Dan does the math (Score:2)
(Of course, there may be other fused 2-operation things it can do in one cycle... but it seems unlikely that code would consist of them so completely as to attain that theoretical peak.)
666 (Score:2)
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
The first poster is correct, results from this machine can not be trusted as being 100% accurate. It may be that they can live with the lack of accuracy, but it's definitely something that they will have to figure into their work. With 4.4TB of memory, they are going to have soft memory errors on a VERY regular (daily?) basis,
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
Simply run the matrix multiplies twice and check if the result is the same? (no, and i dont need to explain why)
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because it's in hardware doesn't mean it's free. The ECC logic is going to add a small delay to each of trillions of memory accesses. Plain memory can most likely be tuned to run faster than ECC memory.
If you're running a constrained problem and can verify the results at the end, a single error check in software could consume far less overall time than the continuous ECC hardware checks. The software check would probably catch other types of errors as well (including many errors caused by software bugs).
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2, Interesting)
BTW, an acquaintance told me of her ILLIAC IV days. With 64 independent processors it was the fastest pre-Cray machine, but sometimes did produce wrong values. Standard practice was to have 3 processors run the same problem and compare the results at the end, deciding that the 3x performance hit was worth it, if the results actually meant something...
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
Data isn't returned corrupted, it don't come back at all
if you used computers in the early 90s, it was AKA 'PARITY ERROR'
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
ECC can also detect (but not correct) 2, 3 or 4-bit errors in each block, though that would be unusual.
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
And they have random data corruption ALL THE TIME.
It's amazing that no one seems to care about random data corruption. Random, unexplainable crashes.
Guaranteed to happen. Your non-ECC memory flips bits all the time.
Solaris doesn't even log ECC corrections until it it happens repeatedly to the same bit. That's because bits get flipped all the time. Physics and all that.
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
Martin
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Either that's a typo or the most ironically appropriate ascii bit error in the history of computing.
Re:Can the results be trusted? (Score:2)
Because nobody is checking to make sure their data isn't silently corrupted. And the corruption might be extremely minor - one bit flipped in audio or video might never be noticed. Or it might corrupt data that won't ever be looked at, or at least not for years. Or it might introduce a wrong answer one someone's homework, and they never realize why they got it wrong. Or it crashes a random application and no one suspects a thing.
The error rates on good hardwar
Re:It runs MacOS X !!! (Score:3, Informative)
It has been said thousands of times by now I'm sure.
Running Mac OS X does not mean running FreeBSD Mac OS X is a system of frameworks running on top of a Mach Kernel. The only thing that relates Mac OS X to FreeBSD is the userland. In addition to the userland you have: Cocoa, Carbon, Aqua, Java, etc. The FreeBSD portion is minimal.
And yes, if you want you can run this lower level unix without the rest of Mac OS X. It is called Darwin [apple.com]. It runs on Intel and PPC if you're wondering. No, this doe
Re:17.6 Tflops sounds more like an Altivec number (Score:2)
Scientific Computing has always emphasized numerical linear algebra. An entire strain [wikipedia.org] of supercomputer processors was developed to support such requirements.
Besides, the final "score" will be produced by benchmarking with LINPACK. It's not merely a matter of taking manufacturer supplied numbers, multiplying them together, and claiming a spot.
Re:17.6 Tflops sounds more like an Altivec number (Score:2)
Re:17.6 Tflops sounds more like an Altivec number (Score:2)
Ow, my electric bill! (Score:2)
The dual G5 that should be arriving soon (are you listening, Apple?) has, if I recall, a 600 watt power supply. 600 watts * 24 hours = 14.4 kwh per day.
Yowza.
Um... yeah, I think I had better leave all the power-saving features turned on, and put it to sleep at night and all
Re:Ow, my electric bill! (Score:2)
You also have to remember, though, that 600w is the output rating of the supply - not necessarily how much it draws from the AC line. Switching power supplies (especially those made
Re:Power consumption (Score:2)
numbers ok....reading is wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, you reckon wrong... (Score:2)
"The Supercomputer, unofficially nicknamed Big Mac, was built in just three months. Right from the start there were major hurdles that could only be overcome with significant construction in and around the building. Running 1100 computers in a 3000 square foot area sends the air temperature well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact the heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60 mph winds. So specializ
Re:How much power ?!?! (Score:2)
That would be smart use of technology.
Re:How much power ?!?! (Score:2)
Places have done this, but to do it you need to design (or re-design) the heating system to do it. And then, in five years, when you upgrade the computers to newer, smaller, cooler (overall) models the entire system fails.
It's a good idea, but computer speed/heat needs to stabilize first. Which isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Re:How much power ?!?! (Score:2)
Re:VT Power Plant (Score:2)
It's probably the same problem the North East had a few months ago. One set of power generating equipment goes out and several closely related systems do the same. This is because when one part of a grid goes down the demand suddenly shoots up in another part, overloading circuits. These circuits automatically shut down to avoid burning up. When enough gets shut down the power plants also shut down to avoid mucking up th
Re:What will they do with it afterwards? (Score:2)
Re:Quicktime (Score:2)
Thanks for the link. I have no immediate plans to install WMP and Real.
Re:The most important benchmark (Score:2)
Re:The most important benchmark (Score:2)
The dual G5 puts out nearly 16 units a day, which is about the same as my other machines combined (dual 500 MHz G4, dual 800 MHz G4, 500 MHz PowerBook G4, 2.5 GHz P4, 266 MHz G3 iMac).
If the VT cluster was working on n
Re:Non-upgradable? (Score:2)
Re:Non-upgradable? (Score:2)
Cooling would be a bit*h, but maybe you could rig up some sort of cogeneration plant, using the immense amount of heat generated to produce electricity, heat your dorms in winter, etc.
Re:Pains a Mac user (Score:2)
Re:Not the double speed myth again. (Score:2)
Re:Not the double speed myth again. (Score:2)
2) 5 million is the cost of the project.... that is 1100 Macs with (I think) 4 GB of ram and 160 GB HDs, GigE and FW800 on board, Infiniband cards, Customized 19" racks, a customized cooling solution.... The Macs were just a fraction of the overall cost, a sizeable fraction but there were a lot of other significant costs.