Analog
Lifer
Low-Cost Supercomputer Made With 1,100 Macs
October 22, 2003
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 - A home-brew supercomputer,
assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one
month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about
to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.
Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by
faculty, technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute, is shaking up the esoteric world of high
performance computing, where the fastest machines have
traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and
taken several years to build.
The Virginia Tech supercomputer, put together from 1,100
Apple Macintosh computers, has been successfully tested in
recent days, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of
Tennessee computer scientist who maintains a listing of the
world's 500 fastest machines.
The official results for the ranking will not be reported
until next month at a supercomputer industry event. But the
Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M.
microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion
operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other
ultra-fast computers.
The fastest computers on the current Top 500 list are the
Japanese Earth Simulator; a Los Alamos National Laboratory
machine dedicated to weapons design; and another weapons
oriented cluster of Intel Pentium 4 microprocessors at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
Officials at the school said that they were still
finalizing their results and that the final speed number
might be significantly higher.
"We are demonstrating that you can build a very high
performance machine for a fifth to a tenth of the cost of
what supercomputers now cost," said Hassan Aref, the dean
of the School of Engineering at Virginia Tech in
Blacksburg, Va. The computer was put together in a virtual
flash. Scientists from the school met with Apple executives
two days after the company introduced its new 64-bit
desktop computer in June.
Apple agreed to put the school at the head of the line for
the new machines. Starting when they returned to school in
September, student volunteers, who received free pizzas for
their labor, helped with the assembly of the system,
essentially an array of large refrigerators to keep the
computers from overheating. Virginia Tech's president
offered free football tickets to the technicians who were
spending long hours on the project.
"When you have a small budget," said Srinidhi Varadarajan,
a leader of the project, "you have to take risks."
The ranking is a coup for Apple, which for several years
has lagged behind, in terms of raw computing speed, the PC
world controlled by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices
microprocessors. It is also an indication that the
supercomputer industry, which has been in eclipse since the
end of the cold war, is again playing a more vital role.
"On the surface this is a pretty impressive machine," Mr.
Dongarra said. "It shows that the processors are getting to
the point where this kind of performance will be quite
common."
The performance of the new computer highlights the
challenge to highly expensive custom-designed machines -
like the Earth Simulator of Japan, which is assembled from
5,120 custom processors that have special circuitry for
performing long strings of mathematical operations - from
computers put together by linking more common off-the-shelf
components in fairly simple ways.
The Japanese computer was measured at 35.8 trillion
operations a second last year but American computer experts
estimate that it cost as much as $250 million. By contrast,
the fastest cluster machine, the Lawrence Livermore system
consisting of 2304 Intel Xeon processors, is capable of
7.63 trillion operations a second, at a price estimated at
$10 million to $15 million. The Virginia Tech computer
makes the cost-to-performance equation even starker.
October 22, 2003
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 - A home-brew supercomputer,
assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one
month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about
to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.
Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by
faculty, technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic
Institute, is shaking up the esoteric world of high
performance computing, where the fastest machines have
traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and
taken several years to build.
The Virginia Tech supercomputer, put together from 1,100
Apple Macintosh computers, has been successfully tested in
recent days, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of
Tennessee computer scientist who maintains a listing of the
world's 500 fastest machines.
The official results for the ranking will not be reported
until next month at a supercomputer industry event. But the
Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M.
microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion
operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other
ultra-fast computers.
The fastest computers on the current Top 500 list are the
Japanese Earth Simulator; a Los Alamos National Laboratory
machine dedicated to weapons design; and another weapons
oriented cluster of Intel Pentium 4 microprocessors at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
Officials at the school said that they were still
finalizing their results and that the final speed number
might be significantly higher.
"We are demonstrating that you can build a very high
performance machine for a fifth to a tenth of the cost of
what supercomputers now cost," said Hassan Aref, the dean
of the School of Engineering at Virginia Tech in
Blacksburg, Va. The computer was put together in a virtual
flash. Scientists from the school met with Apple executives
two days after the company introduced its new 64-bit
desktop computer in June.
Apple agreed to put the school at the head of the line for
the new machines. Starting when they returned to school in
September, student volunteers, who received free pizzas for
their labor, helped with the assembly of the system,
essentially an array of large refrigerators to keep the
computers from overheating. Virginia Tech's president
offered free football tickets to the technicians who were
spending long hours on the project.
"When you have a small budget," said Srinidhi Varadarajan,
a leader of the project, "you have to take risks."
The ranking is a coup for Apple, which for several years
has lagged behind, in terms of raw computing speed, the PC
world controlled by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices
microprocessors. It is also an indication that the
supercomputer industry, which has been in eclipse since the
end of the cold war, is again playing a more vital role.
"On the surface this is a pretty impressive machine," Mr.
Dongarra said. "It shows that the processors are getting to
the point where this kind of performance will be quite
common."
The performance of the new computer highlights the
challenge to highly expensive custom-designed machines -
like the Earth Simulator of Japan, which is assembled from
5,120 custom processors that have special circuitry for
performing long strings of mathematical operations - from
computers put together by linking more common off-the-shelf
components in fairly simple ways.
The Japanese computer was measured at 35.8 trillion
operations a second last year but American computer experts
estimate that it cost as much as $250 million. By contrast,
the fastest cluster machine, the Lawrence Livermore system
consisting of 2304 Intel Xeon processors, is capable of
7.63 trillion operations a second, at a price estimated at
$10 million to $15 million. The Virginia Tech computer
makes the cost-to-performance equation even starker.
