Apple vs. Intel supercomputer benches! 2304 x Xeon 2.4 on Linux vs. 2112 x G5 2.0 on Mac OS X. Guess who wins? ;)

[Eug]

Originally posted by: BDSM
Howabout this then:

linky
Over 10k 2 ghz opterons.. And they claim that performance scales almsot perfectly.

Yeah, that's a monster. When is supposed to go live?

BTW, here's an article summarizing the speech by the guy who built the VT system:

Confessions of the World's Largest Switcher

Varadarajan reported that "our latest numbers are 9.555 tera and we still have more tricks left. We are hoping for another 10 percent boost to become the first academic machine to cross 10 tera. The last ratings put us at number three worldwide." During the question-and-answer period at the end, an audience member from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory introduced himself as coming from the institution that had the Supercomputer that the Virginia Tech cluster had just passed. He asked whether the details of the Supercomputer would be published. The reply was that in addition to documentation and papers, the plans are to return the changes to MVAPICH to the open source project so that it would be freely available. There are also plans to open source the caching code and Varadarajan expects that Mellanox's code will be available.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Eug

So the Xeon setup edges out the G5 setup this year for overall score. I wonder why VT couldn't use all 2200 processors they bought though, since that would have put them ahead (7726 Gflops/s) - better bragging rights. Are the extra 88 processors (44 dual G5 Power Macs) simply backups?

probably management.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: Eug

So the Xeon setup edges out the G5 setup this year for overall score. I wonder why VT couldn't use all 2200 processors they bought though, since that would have put them ahead (7726 Gflops/s) - better bragging rights. Are the extra 88 processors (44 dual G5 Power Macs) simply backups?

probably management.

I was thinking that too, but then I saw this article:

"1100 Dual Apple G5 2Ghz CPU based nodes. Each node has 4GB of main memory and 160GB of Serial ATA storage. 176TB total secondary storage. 4 head nodes for compilations/job startup. 1 Management node."

So if we take away those 5 management/head nodes, that still leaves 39 dual-CPU nodes unused.

And now that they're at 9555, they'd need just 445 more to get 10 Teraflops/s. Assuming you'd have add machines by a number which is a power of 2, they could still add 32 nodes, leaving 7 more as backups. Adding 32 nodes would add 290 Gigaflops/s (assuming linear scaling).

290 + 9555 = 9845 Gigaflops/s, simply by adding 32 machines. Tweak just another 2% from that setup, and they've passed 10 Tflops/s.

I think they can do it.

 

[dvinnen]

ccording to this pdf Redstorm won't be out till August of 2004.

http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/ccn/salishan2003/pdf/camp.pdf

 

[EXman]

Man they did get the VT Apples up Quick I didn't even know they had all their CPUs delivered yet as I heard Apple was having a lil delay on filling that large order. I just wish I could afford an Apple so I use it for video editing. keep my intel for the gaming.

 

[Eug]

Wired article

Afterward, Derek Bastille of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, Alaska, said he was blindsided by Varadarajan's achievement.

"It came completely out of nowhere," he said. "I'd never heard of him. If it doesn't have the Cray name on it, no one takes it seriously. It's incredible."

Bastille said his center had just spent $30 million and two and a half years building a pair of IBM-based clusters.

Another member of the audience, an unidentified representative from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said the Big Mac project had seized the attention of the supercomputing world. (The lab's 2,300-node Linux cluster has fallen to No. 4 in the supercomputer rankings.)

"Needless to say, you're being watched," he said to Varadarajan.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: ElFenix

Originally posted by: Eug
So the Xeon setup edges out the G5 setup this year for overall score. I wonder why VT couldn't use all 2200 processors they bought though, since that would have put them ahead (7726 Gflops/s) - better bragging rights. Are the extra 88 processors (44 dual G5 Power Macs) simply backups?

probably management.

Well, now they're using all 2200 processors, and they're up to 10.3 Tflops/s. They finally beat that magical 10 Tflops number.

 

[0roo0roo]

well, so much for mac bashing