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What's the peak theoretical performance for the new system?

I wish we could have a consistent naming nomenclature for that VA Tech supercomputer. Is it "System X" or is it "Big Mac"?

This is great news.

Now I wonder how USAToday and c|Net are going to spin it to make this look like a miniscule accomplishment and imply that VaTech's system is a toy.

It's not a standard Xserve G5, it was custom made by Apple. It's not using OSX it's using unix. It's really an IBM cluster because it uses IBM chips. Apple has had little to do with it.

Let the bulls*it begin. It is a win for Apple but the Wintellians will cry foul.

Al.. Huh? The G5 IS an IBM chip, even in Macs.

Well, that system is great if you are a graphic artist or you've got lots of music but what if you want to run Excel?

Sorry to be off-topic, but this needs to be said;

R.I.P. John Peel. A true radio legend.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3955289.stm

It is a xServe with dual 2.3 GHz G5 with Apple architecture, running Darwing. The CPU is a development of AIM (Apple, IBM and Motorola)...

NOt much of a jump from 32-bit to 64-bit. Are all Flops created equal ?

hey AL! OSX IS UNIX (BSD), duh!!!

There has been far too much made of the 2.3GHz XServe G5's used at Va Tech versus the standard 2.0GHz versions. While the extra 15% clock speed is nice, it isn't as if the "general public" is offered a substandard product or that the 2.0GHz Xserve is not a high performer. To me the articles give that flavor when they stress "custom-made," as if the effort would not have worked nearly as well with standard Apple hardware. They seem to overlook the fact that the Xserve version of System X only provides about 20% more throughput than the original version that used "off-the-shelf" 2.0 GHz PowerMacs.

oh and AL... the orginal Big Mac was running OS X server. i would assume the same would be for System X.

Why do they rate the super computers by flops and not home computers. it would be nice to see the low intel numbers beside the high G5.

In total agreement with Smithy. John Peel was the only reason for listening to Radio 1 duirng my late teens.

RIP

Sarcasm is a dead art.

What part of 'Wintellians will cry foul' didn't you understand?

yeah, i know it's sarcasm. i did catch the wintellian quip (another reference to 1984? caught that one too).

it was impressive to wrap a multi-level sarcastic retort that i know 95% missed.

cheers!

$1200 per server, not bad

Not a bad result, but nothing spectacular.

Hmmm ... quite good scaling (99%) with the extra hundred processors and extra Ghz ..

Old config:
Apple G5 dual 2.0 GHz IBM Power PC 970s, Infiniband 4X primary fabric,
Cisco Gigabit Ethernet secondary fabric
2200 processors
Rmax=10280
Nmax=520000
N1/2=152000
Rpeak=17600 (i.e. 2200*2.0GHz*4 ops)
Rmax/Rpeak=58.4%

New config (presumably):
Apple G5 dual 2.3 GHz IBM Power PC 970s,
Infiniband 4X primary fabric,
Cisco Gigabit Ethernet secondary fabric
2300 processors
Rmax=12250
Nmax=? (probably similar to former numbers)
N1/2=? (probably similar to former numbers)
Rpeak=21160 (i.e. 2300*2.3GHz*4 ops)
Rmax/Rpeak=57.9%

Pretty cool! I daresay better numbers are possible if the high speed interconnections can be improved.

How System X/BigMac/Whatever performs on other benchmarks/codes would be interesting. In my experience some supercomputers have better general performance (in a robust sense than others) e.g. compare a Fujitsu VPP300 vector machine versus a shared memory machine such as a SGI Power Challenge. The latter machine while much slower at Linpack was easier to optimize for codes that were not so trivially vector oriented.

Well, since there are many kinds of scientific problems worth solving, the more competition and variety in supercomputerland the better! Bring it on! 8-)

Trippah:
"Not a bad result, but nothing spectacular."

Hmmm ... a lone unjustified statement with no quantifiable meaning or reference point.

Maybe Trippah would like some all singing all dancing fireworks spectacular spectacular ala Moulin Rouge ... or would that overwhelm Trippah's sensory capabilities ... discernment is the first to go! 8-)

Sorry ... I know I shouldn't ... but the blind-IBM-PC-compatible/MS crowd make such nice sitting ducks!
Good name for a Microsoft Supercomputer ... Sitting Duck!

Anyway, Trippah, what part of the good scaling and good performance and good price/performance do you not like? Absence of a NOS like Windows? (NOS = Non-operating system ... especially when Windows mal-ware gets out of hand!)

Um let me get this right. V. Tech built the 2snd fastes Supercomputer, #1 super cluster for $5.2 Million that ran at 10.28 Teraflops, or 1.9 teraflops per million.

The increase is above the original average cost per Teraflop. for an additional $600K they increased the speed by 1.97 Teraflops, or 57% more speed than an original $600K supplied. This meand that the current 12.25, cost a total of 2.2 teraflops per million dollars.

Sorry, but thats a huge increase when you consider the realized gain for such a minimal expense.

- Thorpedo: a lone unjustified statement with no quantifiable meaning or reference point.

My Appologies for I do not talk poo like you.
Heres a kleenex, wipe your brown mouth.

"Concluding a 15-week effort with NASA and Intel to build and successfully install the world's most powerful supercomputer Columbia. Columbia achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops)"

WHAT A MOTHER OF A MACHINE!

Which OS you ask? You do the research.

10.28 Teraflops, I say again, not a bad effort, but its hardly spectacular. How long did it take to set this up from the ground up?

Thorpedo not a bad effort from you either.

Oh my appologies again, 17.7 teraflops (in theory).
LOL

And what % has "Apple" actually done anything useful? Lets see, itss not even powered by OS X, and forget about Apples all mighty geekipod. Uhhh who makes PowerPC processors again? Oh Apple wasn't 100% responsible for SystemX development?

"I have an Apple, it works straight out of the box! Thats good because I have no idea what goes inside my computer, and this way I am spoon fed by Steve Jobs himself!" - Many Apple Users

Seriously.

Trippah: Obviously you haven't developed any of the cultural niceties one would expect from somebody who can handle a keyboard.

The achievement of Virginia Tech will little funding and little time was quite worthy, and it is probably a little unfair to compare it with a goverment lab and a serious collaboration with a long-time supercomputer manufacturer, SGI. (Columbia seems to be a poor choice of name or does this system run rather hot? Memory leaks?)

System X (presumably) is still the fastest (Linpack) supercomputer at an academic institution and took only a few months to come up and the upgrade took even less time. Price/performance is probaby still #1 and it is very likely it uses far less power than the more expensive and faster alternatives. Needless to say, Apple is not currently a supercomputer manufacturer, so from several perspectives it is still a spectacular result, compared with real supercomputers as well as existing Intel/AMD clusters.

Of course Linpack is only one benchmark and a lightweight one at that! (For those who know!)

So how much supercomputer time have you being using? Written and ported any supercomputer applications lately? Know anything real about supercomputing?

Trippah:

Oh by the way, I attended an SGI seminar early this year when they unveiled the SGI® Altix® series and how it could be scaled up and it was clear that they were going to be competing with IBM in the supercomputing market.

This in no way negates the spectacular nature of Virginia Tech and Apple's achievements. Of course hardware is going to improve and the more competition the better.

But note how many Intel® Itanium® 2 processors it took, 8192 (16 of the 20 systems) for 42.7 Tflops
which works out at 5.2 Gflops per processor.

The 2300 2.3GHz Power PC 970 processors in System X running achieved 12.25 Tflops which works out at 5.3 Gflops per processor.

Yes! The same sort of ballpark. Of course scaling is unlikely be linear to 8192 processors but we aren't talking about a dedicated supercomputer company either. The Xserve G5's (at 2.0GHz) are off the shelf dual processor components compared to a 512 processor system which is tightly coupled. So it should do better.

What happens when IBM uses it's latest POWER chips in a similar manner (Blue Gene is only an experimental PowerPC system and is going to be scaled up much more next year!) and scale to similar sizes?

Apple is obviously not in the full blown supercomputer market (no need) but there are many more buyers for machines that deliver several Teraflops of power and don't need much power or cooling to run. How hot do 512 Itaniums run, huh?

Trippah:

"Oh my appologies again, 17.7 teraflops (in theory)."
And your point? Can you understand 5.3 Gflops per processor?

And what % has "Apple" actually done anything useful? Lets see, itss not even powered by OS X,

It is indeed. GUI is turned off. OS X is more than GUI! Duhh!

and forget about Apples all mighty geekipod. Uhhh who makes PowerPC processors again? Oh Apple wasn't 100% responsible for SystemX development?

Find what percentage of supercomputer makers make every component of their system. Very low. Almost negligible. Apple was responsible for design of the systems: PowerPC G5 and Xserve G5's.

"I have an Apple, it works straight out of the box! Thats good because I have no idea what goes inside my computer, and this way I am spoon fed by Steve Jobs himself!" - Many Apple Users

This categorises a higher percentage of normal users of non-Apple machines. And it is generally not necessary to understand the details of a complex machine given an appropriate interface.
Everything should be viewed at the right level of magnification: or do you want to indulge me in doing some electronic structure and quantum dynamics calculations if you really want to know what is happening inside your machine. When you peel back the layers of an onion what do you end up with?

Seriously."

Gee ... hard to take any of your superficial comment seriously!

Trippah: "Which OS you ask? You do the research."

Linux which is indistinguishable performancewise from Unix or BSD or OS X ... usability on the other hand varies. I view them all as part of the same tree and it is easy ( no, actually trivial) to migrate between them.

Oh by the way, Virginia Tech could have rebuilt a much bigger system but chose not to at this point. Given the space they have they could add to System X, or more likely choose other systems e.g. SGI, IBM so as to have better leverage when repurchasing and also allow for diversity amongst supercomputers since there is diversity in problems to be solved. Obvious!

To borrow from the Slashdot Forum:

"20X512 = 10240 Itanium 2 processors.

The System X cluster contained 1150 machines containing 2 CPUs each which equals 2300 CPUs in total. You were saying? Not to mention you are comparing an expensive Server CPU with a desktop/workstation CPU.

Why don't we wait for IBM to build a Power 4+ or Power 5 super cluster?"

Game, set and match to...Thorpedo!

You guys are knob goblin geeks. Do your mommies know you are speaking this way to one another?

Thorpedo: "Obviously you haven't developed any of the cultural niceties one would expect from somebody who can handle a keyboard."

Its "necessities". Try option-escape while your in middle of typing a word in cocoa applications =D Its a great function, I applaud Apple for this one.

Thorpedo. spending 1 hour on a single forum thread? Perhaps its time to walk the talk!

GUI is turned off. OS X is more than GUI! Duhh!

REALLY? Are you sure its not UNIX?

Thorpedo: "Obviously you haven't developed any of the cultural niceties one would expect from somebody who can handle a keyboard."

Trippah: Its "necessities". Try option-escape while your in middle of typing a word in cocoa applications =D Its a great function, I applaud Apple for this one.

Actually, it's niceties ...
 "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

Thorpedo. spending 1 hour on a single forum thread? Perhaps its time to walk the talk!

Fair enough ... thanks for the joust! I guess I was bored with coding ... so a 15 minute break was called for! (MDN sends updates by Email!)

Thanks for the option-escape thingy, I overlooked that nicety (or is it necessity?) ... still more to learn! (or re-remember!) 8-)

Thorpedo: GUI is turned off. OS X is more than GUI! Duhh!

Trippah: REALLY? Are you sure its not UNIX?


Sigh! Well all Unix is Unix to me ... AIX, IRIX, OS X, BSD, Linux ... but my experience is relative since I've used some really bizarre and arcane OS's ... running on IBM, CDC, Univac, Prime as well as the nicer ones running on Digital products ... PDP-10, PDP-11, DEC-10, Vaxen ...

Anyway for some form of confirmation see
http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

Oh by the way, I recently attended a briefing by Dr Kevin Shinpaugh, who is the Director of Researchand Cluster Computing at Virginia Tech, while came Down Under a few months ago and he verified the same! OK?

Well with the concept proven we now had to make sure we had a system capable of conducting scientific computation. We needed to upgrade the system to something with error correcting code (ECC) RAM. The Power Macs did not support it and the XServes were coming. So in January we tore the system down and started prepping for the XServes. And now they're here and we have our final system. The best is yet to come.


What a Big waste of money and time...Spend countless days putting G5's towers in just to turn around, pull them out, and order G5 xServes...

NoMacForYou: What a Big waste of money and time...Spend countless days putting G5's towers in just to turn around, pull them out, and order G5 xServes...

Only a waste in the sense that Virginia Tech had funding hoops to jump through (this is apparent from various articles written last year) and was confirmed to me by Dr Kevin Shinpaugh, who is the Director of Researchand Cluster Computing at Virginia Tech.

I forget the exact details but Virginia Tech had to have a running proof-of-concept before they could access some serious supercomputing funding. This configuration of Apple G5's/Infinband/etc had never been done before on this scale. People were highly sceptical beforehand. However, taking the risk worked, they also got high visibility which also attracts more funding and also talent.

So in that sense it was not a waste at all. To be an active research scientist these days takes a lot of hard work, not just in the lab or office, but also to attract funding. Good projects often stay unfunded for various, sometimes political, sometimes random. factors that I won't go into ...

And if you think "countless days" (only a few months) is a great length of time in research you haven't had the joy of spending years on a project trying to understand new concepts and hopefully come up with an inspiration.

Understand now? A lot of research/development looks like waste in hindsight but making things work is not just a linear process.