Apple Wins VT in Cost. vs. Performance 105
danigiri writes "Detailed notes about a presentation at Virginia Tech are posted by by an attending student. copied most of the slides of the facts presentation and wrote down their comments. He wrote some insightful notes and info snippets, like the fact that Apple gave the cheapest deal of machines with chassis, beating Dell, IBM, HP. They are definitely going to use some in-house fault-tolerance software to prevent the odd memory-bit error on such a bunch of non-error-tolerant RAM and any other hard or soft glitches. The G5 cluster will be accepting first apps around-November."
mfago adds, "Apple beat Dell, IBM and others based on Cost vs. Performance alone, and it will run Mac OS X because 'there is not enough support for Linux.'"
Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Who could have guessed?
software to solve memory problems? (Score:1, Interesting)
IMHO the lack of ECC RAM is the only flaw in an otherwise perfect machine (well that, and the massive HEAT).
Infiniband insured latency? (Score:5, Interesting)
From most of my reading with Infiniband, it was designed from the ground up as a NAS style solution, than for large multi-node cluster computing. I'm curious as to if they have any issues with cluster latency.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/1211sandia.ht
The primary timings and white papers I've seen published for Infiniband have been for small clustered filesystem access. Although it's burst rate is much higher than Myranet, it's hard to find any raw retails for their multiple node latency normalization.
I hope it scales, since Intel's solution appears to be less cost prohibitive than some of the other solutions offered on the market, and would really open up the market even for smaller clusters (16-36 node) for business use.
For those in the know (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if by "lack of support in linux," that they're refering to the fact that the fans are controlled by the operating system in the powermac? Or the fact that there are relatively few support companies for ppc linux?
Any insiders care to comment?
neat. (Score:4, Interesting)
An interesting tidbit (Score:5, Interesting)
graphics in science (Score:3, Interesting)
The system doesn't have to be chaotic, just complex:
Watching protein folding simulations.
Watching full 3-D seismic waves propagate through the Earth.
Watching, in general, any kind of 3-D model or simulation of a complex process evolving over time.
A couple links:
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography Visualization Center:
http://siovizcenter.ucsd.edu/library/objects/
Th
http://www.arsc.edu/news/mdflex.html
water cooled laptops as blades (Score:4, Interesting)
A few years ago I asked apple if they would be willing to sell me 200 laptops without the screens, disks, video cards, and keyboards. They were interested helping me build my cluster but, the the engineers said it would actually cost them more to have a special manufacturing run than woul dbe saved by deleting the hardware.
my plan was stack these things on water cooled chill plates. Basically this would be like a blade.
In my circumstances, adding a well ventilated computer room to the building I was in would have been probibitively expensive. but water cooling and a high density configuration made this very appealing. And if I could have gotten the costs down and reliability up by deleting the screens, keyboard, video, and disks I'd have an affordable system with low sys-admin costs.
I still think its a good idea. Cooling/power costs (including building retrofits) and sys admin costs can dominate the differential purchase price of vairous cluster configurations. In my building the space alone was >120/sq foot, so even the footprint mattered.
Nice rack! (Score:2, Interesting)
(Especially seeing as a G5 XServe will probably be at least several months away -- at least until most of the desktop orders can be filled.)
-Alex
Why was bidding secret? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clueless Sysadmins... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why was bidding secret? (Score:3, Interesting)
"dealt with vendors individually because bidding wars do not drive the prices down in this case."
I don't think they've even dealt with Apple until Apple's G5 announcement but they did deal with other vendors. I'm interested why VU dealt with all of them individually and why do prices not come down when you deal with them in this way. This is why I was alluding to collusion.
Re:Clueless Sysadmins... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that "consumer" graphics cards run in floating point and have comparitively complex shader engines, it's quite possible to start working on rendering movies etc. with the substantial quantity of hardware acceleration possible on these things. You don't have to hit 60fps, and you can have as many passes as you like.
Mind you, with 1100 nodes if you can render a frame in 45 seconds
Dave
Re:Gentoo Linux Runs On The G5 ... from Mac/ (Score:3, Interesting)
Why hell, i get blazing speeds with gentoo on my Athlon, i'd sure hope that you'd get them on the g5 as well
Re:ECC FUD (Score:1, Interesting)
Errr, what is the point of putting 4+ GB into your cluster nodes if you're not going to use it? This isn't a SETI@home cluster. Seems to me that "long running converging apps" tend to have large datasets associated with them. The higher the data density per node the less network bandwidth needed except for "embarassingly parallel" computations with essentially no comm overhead anyway.
I'll concur on desktops, but they typically don't have apps with large datasets that run for large periods of times. The Applications/data come and go and the screwed bits get wiped.
P.S. the cooling systems can fail also. It is also a question of redundancy. You'll find ECC in "big iron" systems also with significant cooling resources assigned to them. In a fail-over transition time the ECC would be leveraged until that node could be completely transitioned out.
Apple Outshines Dell on Ethics (Score:4, Interesting)
As an American company, Dell is a huge disgrace. Please read the "Environmental Report Card [svtc.org]" produced by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition [svtc.org]. Dell received a failing grade and is little better than Taiwanese companies, which are notorious for destroying the environment and the health of workers. Dell even resorted to prison labor [svtc.org] to implement its pathetic recycling program.
Re:ECC FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Think before you post. The failure rate is constant in each memory chip (actually it goes up a bit with higher capacity due to higher density). Unless you setup the memory to be redundant (which the G5 can't do either...) you will experience MORE errors since a good OS tries to use the empty memory for things like file buffers.
How many of you are reading this from a desktop without ECC RAM that has an obnoxiously huge uptime? ECC is a non-issue in a well-cooled cluster of desktop cased machines.
Sigh... this is a 2200-cpu *cluster*. Here's a primer on statistics. Assume the probabiliy of a memory error is 0.01% for some time interval (say a week or month). The likelyhood for a perfect run is then 99.99% on your single CPU, which is just fine. Running on 2200 CPUs, the probability of not having any errors is 0.9999^2200=0.8, or 20% probability of getting memory-related errors somewhere in the cluster.
The actual numbers aren't important - it might very well be 0.01% probablility for an error per year, but the point is that when you run things in parallel the chance of getting a memory error *somewhere* is suddenly far from negligible.
ECC is a cheap and effective solution that almost eliminates the problem. Incidentally, one of the challenges for IBM with "Blue Gene" is that with their super-high memory density even normal single-bit ECC might not be enough.
But, what do I know - I've only got a PhD from Stanford and not VT....
Re:Clueless Sysadmins... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clueless Sysadmins... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)