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Technology (Apple) Businesses Networking (Apple) Apple Technology Hardware

A Look Inside Virginia Tech's New Super Computer 420

Posted by Cliff from the taking-a-peek dept.
Mr Bob "The original" bougert brings us "...a video of the Virginia Tech super computer centre. How many people think that super computer centres like this, with their reasonably cheap cost should be created in more places? This video of the infamous super computer should be interesting to some and pretty to look for others." It views like an ad for Apple, but Virginia Tech has scored quite an achievement with this milestone, and this should serve as a decent introduction for those unfamiliar with the project.
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A Look Inside Virginia Tech's New Super Computer More

A Look Inside Virginia Tech's New Super Computer

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  • it's a dupe (Score:3, Informative)

    by schematix ( 533634 ) * on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:36PM (#7905904) Homepage
    This is a repost of "Xgrid Clustering Software and Demo" in the Apple section..it's just one of the links listed in the story.

  • It views like an ad for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:38PM (#7905933)

    so we are going to post it anyway ?

    Apple isnt a charity, shall we see what Microsoft are up to ?

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:39PM (#7905946)
    iGrow tired of all these apple stories.
    • When a company is doing THAT many great thaings as Apple is, it certinly deserves all the media coverage its getting.

      • Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ActionPlant ( 721843 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:45PM (#7906032) Homepage
        I absolutely agree. And funny that it should happen after they've finally fully embraced open souce (OSX). Let THAT be a lesson to the MS-Rest of the world.

        Damon,
    • Create an account (free)
      Go to your options homepage
      Exclude Apple or whatever else you're tired of seeing.

      Or, more practically, see the apple logo, Don't read the summary or the article, then enter the thread and whine about it.

    • so don't read them. APPLE.slashdot.org should have clued you in.

  • Ad? Really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rabel ( 531545 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:39PM (#7905949)
    It views like an ad for Apple,

    Gee, did the fact that it was hosted at apple.com clue you in?

  • Sheesh (Score:3, Funny)

    by Marco_polo ( 160898 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:39PM (#7905958) Homepage
    Here I was feeling manly because i just upgraded my mac to 1Gig of Ram.

    I wish I could have this in my basement.. and I would serve old games of quarterstaff on it. :-)

  • build your own (Score:5, Informative)

    by Guano_Jim ( 157555 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:42PM (#7905991)

    build your own with xGrid! [apple.com]

  • Imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zelet ( 515452 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:45PM (#7906033) Journal
    ...what they could do now for the same cost using the new Xserve dual 2 Ghz G5 [apple.com].

    Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
    512K L2 cache/processor
    1GHz system bus/processor
    512B DDR400 ECC SDRAM
    80GB Serial ATA drive
    Dual Gigabit Ethernet

    All for only $3000. They could really built a small, inexpensive cluster with a couple thousand of those.

    • Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bedmison ( 534357 ) <808&music,vt,edu> on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:08PM (#7906298)
      The rumor here on campus is that Apple is going to let them trade the G5 towers for G5 XServes, 1:1. So if you are wondering where the first 1100 XServes are going, look no further than Blacksburg.

      There is some question as to whether they are going install more nodes than the 1100 they have. Given that there are 96 52-U racks currently housing the 1100 towers, they will have plenty of space for more XServes. We did get an email saying the info systems building will be without power over the coming weekend as new power lines are installed...Coincidence? I think not.

    • Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by be-fan ( 61476 )
      Actually, they couldn't do as much. They'd have to throw another 4GB of RAM in there, as well as buy the expensive Mellanox Infiniband interconnect. To get the same total price as the VaTech cluster, they'd have to get each machine at around $2500.

  • Looks like an ad? No, it looks like an ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06NO@SPAMemail.com> on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:47PM (#7906051)
    extremely convincing ad.

    Virginia Tech put together a spectacular number 3 ranked supercomputer for a (comparative) pittance in a (comparative) heartbeat. They did it with Apple's latest/greatest. Is it surprising that Apple wants this story told? I'm just shocked that they aren't filling the airwaves with the story (at the very least on every news program that PHBs watch).

    • Virginia Tech put together a spectacular number 3 ranked supercomputer for a (comparative) pittance in a (comparative) heartbeat. They did it with Apple's latest/greatest. Is it surprising that Apple wants this story told? I'm just shocked that they aren't filling the airwaves with the story (at the very least on every news program that PHBs watch).

      This is especially true given that an equivalent setup could now be put in place in a fraction of the space required by Virginia Tech's setup. The 1U Xserves

    • Let me amplify: Why the hell ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06NO@SPAMemail.com> on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:06PM (#7906271)
      hasn't anyone else built one yet? The proof-of-concept is done, and let's face it, $5.2 million is tissue money for some companies. Don't they want their own 10 teraflop supercomputer?

      • Re:Let me amplify: Why the hell ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:12PM (#7906358) Homepage Journal
        My guess is that a number of folks are planning on building them. Especially now that the 1U G5 Xserve is out. Here is the issue though: VTech wanted to publicize this as a means to attract attention to their programs and Apple wanted to publicize this for obvious reasons. However, if I were a company (or a private or government institution), I may not want to advertise the fact that I am building one of these superclusters. Think about it. This could be a serious stealth weapon (so to speak) for a number of industries that have historically spent huge amounts of money on supercomputing infrastructures.

  • Interesting (Score:5, Funny)

    by WndrBr3d ( 219963 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:52PM (#7906120) Homepage Journal
    it's nice to know that after a hap-hazard movie career, Fisher Stevens [imdb.com] can go on to do an Apple Commercial about the Virgina Tech Super Computer. He can put on a clever discuise, but the minute he said 'Oh no Jonny Five', I knew it was him.

  • The most telling statistic for me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dgrgich ( 179442 ) * <drew@NOsPaM.grgich.org> on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:55PM (#7906150)
    I was amazed at the cost/performance ratio that they were able to achieve with Big Mac. Over at Barefeats.com [barefeats.com], they point out that a Dual 2ghz G5 is roughly 17% faster AND more expensive than a Dual 1.8 G5 - keeping the cost/performance ratio fairly equal. Taking this out to supercomputer levels, the #1 supercomputer is three and a half times faster than Big Mac but cost 60x as much money!!! Amazing.

  • Pricing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TechnoWeeniePas ( 411708 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:56PM (#7906153)
    The video states that the top two cost in the hundreds of millions to build...but never says how long ago. Dont get me wrong the Mac cluster is quite impressive and inexpensive but the price to power ratio has been changing quite rapidly just in the last few months! So if you rebuilt the top two today how would they rank pricewise?

    • Re:Pricing (Score:5, Informative)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:09PM (#7906321) Homepage Journal
      The Earth Simulator is less than two years old, counting from when it was turned on.

      Assuming an optimistic 12 months of doubling for Moore's Law, that's a factor of four. So you've cut the cost by at most a factor of four if you built it today. The VA Tech supercomputer still utterly destroys it on price/performance.
    • According to http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/ [top500.org], number 1 and 2 were built all the way back in 2002. But neither uses off the shelf hardware. Both were custom built.

    • Re:Pricing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lquam ( 250506 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:26PM (#7906520)
      The Earth Simulator (#1) and Asci Q (#2) were both completed in 2002, although I know planning on the Earth Simulator goes back to the mid-90s. No idea on when Asci Q was planned, but it's 8192 1.25GHz Alphas (SC45 servers) which is current technology for the Alpha line. But with TES you're talking about something that's nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive than VT's X. If you could build it today for the same price or perhaps 75-80% and get another 10-20% performance out of it it would still be way more expensive on a $ per GFlop basis.

      More interestingly, #4 on the list in the NCSA's Tungsten with 2500 3Ghz P4s. It's about 15% slower with 300 more desktop procs than X and was also made operational in '03. I suppose if they were to run around plugging 3.2 GHz processors into their 1250 Dell boxes one could perhaps sneek up on X, but you'd likely have to wait for the 4 GHz P4e to actually steam past it.

      Basically, the supercomputers which were completed most recently ARE the ones at the top of the list. X just happens to be insanely cheap compared to the ones above it.

      Len Quam

  • Just a quick tip (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ophidian P. Jones ( 466787 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:56PM (#7906155)
    The project leader, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, will be speaking at a session entitled Building Virginia Tech's G5 Supercluster [oreillynet.com] on Jan 28 at the upcoming O'Reilly Mac OS X conference [oreillynet.com].

    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.

  • PCs to Crays (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fdicostanzo ( 14394 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @04:58PM (#7906173)
    Does anyone know the relative speeds of todays PCs vs. an old super computer from the 80s?

    UMass had one of those Connection Machines with the 65k processes and the blinking lights sitting unused in the basement for awhile and I was always curious to know whether it was any faster than what could be done serially with a 3GHz PC.

    • Re:PCs to Crays (Score:2, Funny)

      by lquam ( 250506 )
      I've heard Cray's make great couches to compliment modernist furniture--think Le Corbusier, Herman Miller, Eileen Gray. Hang a Kandinsky on the wall and you're all set.

      --Len Quam

    • Re:PCs to Crays (Score:3, Informative)

      by davechen ( 247143 )
      According to this page [svisions.com] a 64k processor CM-2 could do 2500 megaflops. Looking at the #4 machine on the Top 500 list, NCSA's P4 Xeon based system, a 3GHz Xeon gets about 3.9 gigaflops. But then it doesn't have cool blink lights of a CM-2. Pretty amazing how far things have progressed. The first supercomputer, the Cray 1, introduced in 1976, did 160 megaflops and had 8 megabytes of memory. Kinda like a Palm Pilot.

    • Re:PCs to Crays (Score:3, Interesting)

      by flaming-opus ( 8186 )
      The connection machines never were real speed deamons in their day. They were built to be used for AI codes (lots of one-bit integer ALU's), but AI groups don't have any money so they re-tooled it to do floating-point math, but they really only sold them with the help of DARPA subsidies.

      http://www.cray.com/company/history.html

      As for the old crays, you probably don't want any of those from the 80's. Even the New cray X1 processor's have a theoretical peak of 12.8 Ghz, a little less than twice the G5. But i
  • And with this server we are able to kick out photoshopped images at an ALARMING rate!
  • Is it just me or did anyone else misread this on first glance as:
    A look inside a virgin...
  • The servers hosting (and the bandwidth) those videos are probably comparable with the supercomputer itself just to handle all of us connecting to it...

  • This video was shown @ Macworld (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fortunato_NC ( 736786 ) <verlinh75 AT msn DOT com> on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:14PM (#7906389) Homepage Journal
    during Steve Job's keynote. If you have a few hours of spare time, and really enjoy Apple Cheerleading and John Mayer, consider watching the whole keynote:

    http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf04/ [apple.com]

    Yes, I'm karma-whoring...and you do it too, damnit!

  • In-Famous (Score:4, Funny)

    by khendron ( 225184 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:16PM (#7906419) Homepage
    Why does Cliff repeatedly use the word "infamous" (a synonym of "notorious") to describe nifty things, like a supercomputer. He did it earlier today with the article [slashdot.org] about the Internet Archive.

    Maybe he's using the Three Amigos definition of the word...
    • From The Three Amigos (paraphrased, I have bad memory)

      *) (reading) ... to battle the infamous El Guapo...
      *) infamous? what does that mean.
      *) Hmm, inflammable means something's extremely flammable, so I guess it means he's extremely famous!!!

  • Should we call this 'The Orchard'?
  • So if I'm an evil dictator, and I can build the worlds third fastest supercomputer for 5.2 million USD what can I do with it? Are all these cheap cycles going to mean I can break codes or do nuclear or biological weapons research faster? I'll be there are people in the US Defense Department, CIA, or NSA that might be concerned.

  • My favourite quote: (Score:5, Funny)

    by ath0mic ( 519762 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @05:28PM (#7906553)
    "At a price of 5.2 million dollars, practically anyone can build one. "

    I think I'll invest in one of these right after I pay off my iPod.
  • In Apple's MacWorld presentation (and this film) they show how the VT supercomputer is #3 and they talk about the details, but barely touch on #2 and #1. I'm curious what operating systems primarily drive those two, but none of the searches on Google I'm doing are turning up the info that I'm seeking. Anyone have any links or resources to share that can clarify it?

    • The operating systems for the Earth Simulator (#1 supercomputer) is described on the following page:

      http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/Software/ope ra ting.html

      Because it is a vector based parallel processing machine it wouldn't be able to run standard OS's...

    • In Apple's MacWorld presentation (and this film) they show how the VT supercomputer is #3 and they talk about the details, but barely touch on #2 and #1. I'm curious what operating systems primarily drive those two, but none of the searches on Google I'm doing are turning up the info that I'm seeking. Anyone have any links or resources to share that can clarify it?

      Tried this [top500.org]?

  • #2 in a week (Score:2, Insightful)

    by api ( 112263 )
    While wathing the video during the keynote, I couldn't imagine why Apple hasn't donated the remaining G5's (Desktop or XServe) to place them in the number two supercomputer slot.

    Costs more than a video but would be even better PR (and tax deductible...)

    MD

  • Self-made (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Psarchasm ( 6377 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @08:33PM (#7908718) Homepage Journal
    Out of the top 5 super computers... there is 1 self-made.
    Out of the top 10... 1 self-made.
    Out of the top 50... 1 self-made.

    This speaks volumes. Apple didn't come in and build this thing for them. They dumped a few trucks with 1,100 computers at their door and VA Tech built it.

    Personally, I'd like to know how many they got that were DOA. Any?

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