Mini-ITX Clustering 348
NormalVisual writes "Add this cluster to the list of fun stuff you can do with those tiny little Mini-ITX motherboards. I especially like the bit about the peak 200W power dissipation. Look Ma, no fans!! You may now begin with the obligatory Beowulf comments...."
Inexpensive for testing purposes, (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, you can get some stats on how the clustering works, what's the best algorithm for dispersing problems, and these boards are cheap, but that's about the only advantage I can see...
Simon
Re:Floating point performance (Score:5, Insightful)
And VIA markets their own line of CPUs for use in that scenario.
However, I wouldn't mind seeing Pentium-M or mobile Athlons placed on mini-ITX boards.
Just because you can... (Score:3, Insightful)
Massively Parallel (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd just like to point out that 12 nodes is not "massively parallel."
Re:Just because you can... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't use FP for money (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps many people would insist on using FP dollars and cents, but those people are fools, and it is very easy to part them with their money. Just make sure all the rounding errors work out in your favor, which isn't hard if you have access to their accounts.
Yeah I know that for small numbers FP has no rounding errors, but that doesn't last long.
Re:Floating point performance (Score:3, Insightful)
* To crack encryption?
* To compile big projects?
* To compress huge files?
How about scientific computing? That's really the big thing that keeps cluster computing alive. Cracking encryption is the only thing on that list that makes sense. The other stuff shows your lack of knowledge of other disciplines by the fact that you think these are computationally expensive tasks.
One use I thought of right away... (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be quite useful for a university with an undergraduate course in high performance computing to have their own little NoRMA cluster to play with without the space, heat, and power consumption of a supercomputer.
Let the researchers use the real supercomputer, but the undergraduates can still play with message passing parallel algorythms to their hearts content.
I wonder too (Score:3, Insightful)
Video encoding? (Now, where'd I put that parallel-processing version of AVISynth?)
Rent it out to a university?
Program it to solve chess and leave it going till it does?
Get a decent frame rate in any FPS, once and for all? (Note to self: develop parallel-processing graphics card.)
Re:Floating point performance (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmm, high availability and/or load balancing come to mind.
As others have said, the Nehemiah core based boards are really slick little widgets.
Re:Floating point performance (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's [mini-itx.com] your link, by the way.
Re:Floating point performance (Score:4, Insightful)
FPUs of the future? Re:Floating point performance (Score:3, Insightful)
Informative:
If you're looking for a small form factor for high-end processors, you will likely find future products using the picoBTX form factor. The motherboard layout provides better cooling for hot processors that mini-ITX can't address. Here's a summary of the BTX form factors from Anandtech [anandtech.com].
Interesting:
Has anyone figured out how to use the floating point power in their graphics cards for non-video applicaitons? Those things are becoming powerful that they use their own heat sinks. Just like we had floating point chips for the 486SX series, perhaps it will be more cost-effective and power-effective in the future to separate commodity, low-cost, and low-power I/O processing from floating point processing.
If graphics card developers start thinking of their cards as being more like floating point coprocessors and less like device controllers, they can help drive future floating point computing and leave traditional central processors to manage memory and I/O.
Redundant:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of video cards!
-ez
Disclaimer: I use a 500MHz Celeron on my desk and a 300MHz laptop at home. I'm not a luddite - I just don't utilize a 3D "rich" graphical environment to surf the web, create documents, and manage computers.
Re:Floating point performance (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently you've never done any numerical computing, especially of the scientific variety. In an astrophysics simulation, for instance, the density of a field may span over 20 orders of magnitude, hardly reasonable to do with fixed point arithmetic.
Not to mention that many iterative algorithms can oscillate wildly in the presence of numerical error.
It is true that there are many other uses for a cluster besides numerical computing, however the idea that any floating point algorithm can be converted to fixed point could not be more wrong.
Disclaimer: My research at Cornell University is high performance clustered numerical computing.
Cheers,
Justin
Re:Massively Parallel (Score:3, Insightful)
12Nodes is as small as clusters can be, so "a small cluster" would be a better description than "a massivly parallel cluster".
(But it really looks cool, and 12v dc via lab psu is cool,too.)
Flops/$$$ = free (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Imagine.. (Score:3, Insightful)