After achieving international honors and accolades for building System X, the fastest supercomputer at any academic institution in the world (November, 2003 TOP500 List), Virginia Tech announced today that its rebuilt System X is now operating at 12.25 teraflops.
“Virginia Tech will learn of its new ranking when the list is unveiled in November of this year at SuperComputing 2004 in Pittsburgh,” said Srinidhi Varadarajan, the lead designer of the system in the press release. “We expect to do well.”
“This new number is an increase of almost two teraflops over the original System X,” said Hassan Aref, dean of Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering in the press release. “We are extremely pleased with the performance, using the new Apple machines.”
Virginia Tech revealed plans to migrate its cluster of Power Mac G5 desktop computers to Apple’s new Xserve G5 in January. The Xserve G5, the most powerful Xserve yet, delivers more than 18 gigaflops of peak double-precision processing power per system and features the same revolutionary PowerPC G5, 64-bit processor used in Virginia Tech’s original cluster of 1,100 Power Mac G5s.
When Virginia Tech used the G5s, it was establishing that a radically different communications technology could be used to create a large-scale scientific computing platform. After proving the technology worked, Virginia Tech moved to the Xserve G5 cluster due to its server optimized architecture, computing power per unit density, and ground-breaking performance and innovative management tools.
The original System X operated at 10.28 teraflops for the official records, but its peak theoretical performance was rated at 17.7 teraflops.
When Virginia Tech renegotiated with Apple to upgrade System X, the computer company arranged for 1,100 very special Xserve G5 servers to power their System X Supercluster. These systems were custom built by Apple for Virginia Tech utilizing dual 2.3GHz G5 processors. This configuration was developed specifically for Virginia Tech, and Apple currently has no plans to offer 2.3GHz processors in the Xserve G5 product line.
Varadajan and Cal Ribbens, both of Virginia Tech’s academic computer science department in the College of Engineering, confirmed the new benchmark numbers after numerous operations since August. Kevin Shinpaugh and Jason Lockhart, associate directors of the Terascale Computing Facility, assisted on this project, as well as other members of the engineering college and the information technology office.
The supercomputer is part of the university’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS). ICTAS fosters multi-disciplinary, large research projects. The grand challenge problems in science and engineering that can only be solved by a powerful supercomputer meet these criteria.
“We believed that we could build a very high performance machine for a fifth to a tenth of the cost of what supercomputers now cost, and we did,” Aref, a former chief scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, said in the press release. “And we wanted to have our own supercomputer to use for ICTAS, where we will be conducting multidisciplinary work on such topics as nanoelectronics, aerodynamics, and the molecular modeling of proteins. With this machine, our researchers will be able to build computer modeling in days, not years.”
The additional cost to rebuild System X was about $600,000, and included 50 additional nodes. The original cost of System X was $5.2 million.
In addition to the companies that participated in the first design of System X
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!) 😎
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.