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Hardware

New 8-Node PPC Cluster From Terra Soft 49

Posted by timothy from the heck-on-wheels dept.
Ben Mesander writes: "Check out the cool looking iDitarod' parallel PPC Linux machine the folks at Terra Soft Solutions just shipped." This yellow rack actually packs a lot of power into a relatively small, mobile enclosure You don't even have to build a beowulf cluster out of this, but it's for deeper pockets than I've got -- as they suggest, though, it sounds like an easy way for a company or school to get a sweet little turnkey PPC cluster.
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New 8-Node PPC Cluster From TerraSoft More

New 8-Node PPC Cluster From TerraSoft

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  • Re: Foreign trolls (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone wanting to troll the Slashdot, even for a short time, requires a work visa. Work visas are for specific positions in the Slashdot and require prearranged employment. The member of the troll council who requires your services must file a petition with the Slashdot Trolling Service, known as STS. If STS approves the petition, it issues a notice of approval.

    H-1B classification applies to a specialty occupation which requires the theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge requiring completion of a specific course of higher education. This classification requires a labor attestation issued by the Secretary of Labor. (65,000) This classification also applies to Government-to-Government research and development or coproduction projects administered by the Department of Defense. (100)

    H-3 classification applies to troll trainees other. This classification also applies to practical training in the education of handicapped trolls. (50)

    L classification applies to an intracompany transferee who within the three preceding years has been trolling abroad continuously for one year and who will be employed by a branch, parent, affiliate or subsidiary of that same troll council in the Slashdot in a managerial, executive, or specialized knowledge capacity

  • 8 PPC's?? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    thats crazy, you'd need 80 heat sinks for that thing.. and i think 100 tons is the max anyway, uhm ok sorry bad joke
  • Had a few things to nitpick about. The RS6K in question actually has four
    (4) Power3-II processors, not PowerPC. The Power3 and PowerPC
    both share a subset of instructions, and the Power3 can emulate PowerPC
    instructions. (at least under AIX)

    Also, if you are a large purchaser of RS6K equipment, you usually get a
    hefty discount around 40% which dramatically lowers the price to $33,600.
  • um, screw you guys, I posted this first. :-P
  • Following a link from a previous Slashdot story about somebody rack-mounting an iMac, I came to this site [marathoncomputer.com]. Looks a whole lot like that terrasoft unit, to me.

    At $400 for the case and another $900 for an iMac to go in it, that puts you $500 under the per-unit price of the terrasoft cluster. This is assuming, of course, that you can actually get one of these cases now and that it's worth your time and effort to put the thing together and get it running yourself.

    Which it may be to me. ;)
  • It seems that these "iRacks" support only up to 333MHz iMacs, while the terrasoft cluster is advertised as being available in 333MHz-500MHz varieties.

    Oops.
  • While I can't quite justify spending $15k on that system (although I think it's very neat) I'm wondering where they got the rack they mount the computers in. I'm looking to reduce the clutter of computer equipment I have and I'm looking into racking most of it. I've found a source of very inexpensive rack cases for ATX motherboards (Interlogic Industries [interlogicindustries.com], the RKT series economy 4U chassis) but I can't find an inexpensive rack to mount it in... Smart Home [smarthome.com] looks like it has an option, but I really do dig that yellow rack and its simplicity... anyone have any ideas?

  • Heh. BattleTech references anyone?

    And if you can get 7 gauss rifles in a mech, you can get 8 PPC's one too. rec.games.mecha. [rec.games.mecha]

    Anyhoo. This looks like a killer all-in-one setup for someone looking to do an all-in-one internet services provider. Or a guy who wants to just make all his buds GREEN with envy. Once LinuxPPC gets going, stuff like this should start making the x86 setups look sick.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!


  • I'm right there with you...The rack is prefect for what I want (and its yellow--which is big bonus).

    --- richard.
  • That's www.onion.com, I believe.

  • Cool, a multiprocessor on wheels. Now all it needs is a few servo motors, a grasping arm, and a video camera.

    Oh, and a high-intensity particle beam. And *missles*!

    Use an industrial CO2 laser instead of the particle beam. You can buy them off the shelf, and they don't have the atmospheric dispersion problem :).
  • Sounds like a new weapon in Mech Warrior....
  • Cool, a multiprocessor on wheels. Now all it needs is a few servo motors, a grasping arm, and a video camera.

    oh no. i can already imagine. robots routinely crash into all sorts of things when debugging vision code or action control loops, but i wouldn't want to be responsible for debugging this one. it's painful to even think of such cool equipment colliding with an obstacle crash-dummy style at 2m/s. :)

    especially since that obstacle often happens to be person debugging it... (no, i'm not bitter! :)
  • Yep, that's pretty much what it amounts to.
  • I was wondering about that myself.

    My guess is, they're either using cannibalized Apple hardware (!) or Motorola boards. (Cannibalized RS/6ks would be WAY too expensive)

    If I'm wrong, though, it would kick serious @$$ if they decided to offer a workstation configuration...
  • Marathon started off as a company catering to the music industry in Nashville. Much of the indie music coming out of Nashville is recorded and edited on Macs.
    a Mac based studio [stonesongs.com]
  • The only people who make PPC computers right now are Apple and IBM. Apple doesn't produce rackmounts, and these don't look to be IBM boxen. Since IBM released the specs for PPC hardware a while ago, could this be a new competitor for them?
  • Have you seen API networks new CS20? http://www.api-networks.com/products/cs20.shtml

    . Dual 833Mhz/667Mhz processors or a single 833.
    . They handle 2GB of RAM.
    . built in dual ethernet
    . two 64 bit PCI slots each on their own bus
    . onboard ultra160 scsi and UDMA 66 IDE
    . Many "network aware" features
    . able to boot linux from flash rom
    . Did I mention Alpha's are 64 bit?

    --
    www.alphalinux.org
  • After I figured out what the price was for.... You should be able to get 1 CS20 per 8 imac 1u's. I didn't realize that was a cluster cost. There's not much informatation on their site saying any different. If dual Alpha's cost that much I would have one instead of my 3 year old 600MHz LX. Allthough a new UP1100 uni-proc board/chip can be had for about $2000. Now for comparable Alpha clusters available "now" you can see for example http://www.microway.com/products/clusters/alpha.ht ml. They have one that hits the Imac price range dead on.

    --
    www.alphalinux.org
  • Like this?
    http://www.theonion.com/onion3123/hawkingexo.htm l

  • Good to see they're marketing it as a "crank'n MP3 rip station"

    Seems like a good way to gain powerful friends.

  • Mp3 ripping speed is determined by the CD-ROM drive and interface more so than the processor speed and network bandwidth. Hell, I had a 32x cd-rom that ripped at 20x on my pII-266.

  • The POWER series and the PowerPC are no longer relatives; they're actually the same thing, from when the POWER2 was released (IIRC). The main difference between the PPC and the original POWER was a few instructions, and a few that worked differently; the PPC 601 was a bridge between the two architectures, and when IBM made big-iron from PPCs (e.g. 604-based servers), AIX had to have traps to handle the slightly different environments. Other than that, though, the PPC and the POWER2 and onwards share the same ISA.
  • Hey, that works too, but most newbie trolls will be using Windows 98, and won't have access to an editor where a simple s/ /\ /g will do. The alternative, copying and pasting for every single space, or (gasp!) typing each escape sequence, is so lame in itself that it makes the attempt moot.

    The "empty link" method allows users with low-powered text editors to get in a bunch of lowercase letters all at once without appearing quite so lame.

    Thanks for writing, fucko!


    All generalizations are false.

  • No, silly! I'm reffering to regexp search-and-replace capable text editors such as GNU Emacs and vi clones which 99% of Windows users don't have installed. While they are available for Windows, GNU/Linux users are guaranteed to have at least the latter.


    All generalizations are false.

  • I want one with eight G4 processors to boost my dnetc keyrate. I can't possibly work out why anyone would want a multiprocessor type parallel computer for anythhing else.

    The Ego Has Landed.
  • As an Alaskan, I'm offended and stigmatized by the use of our dog sled race's name coupled with Geek Capitalization. Horrible...

    MyopicProwls

  • Or just imagine one...
  • yes, but what do you DO with this? Why would you run a cluster on some sort of proprietary/off brand powerPC boxes where if something stupid goes bad, you will have to pay an arm and a leg for it. however, the yellow rack looks cool (try putting it in a network operations center... they just might let you since it looks that cool)
  • LinuxPPC is great and all, but wouldn't OS X work on these, especially if they are just repackaged iMacs? All the functionality of Linux, plus the developer support of a commercial OS!
  • hmmm, It'd ONLY $14,900! Hmmm, that comes out to $1862.50 per node.

    Not too bad I suppose. I like the fact that you can split the nodes up for different services. This could potentially be a nice little all-in-one setup for someone who needs http, mail, quake, mp3 ripping, etc.


    On top of that it's yellow! How can one resist?

  • "The problem is limits on the iMac logic board these systems use, and limits on how much memory PowerPC Linux can properly address. iMac's have limited RAM slots, that have a limited capcity per SIMM, that totals up to 512 MB maxium."

    I'm not sure where you get your information from, but according to this [apple.com], you can put 1GB of RAM in an iMac.

  • I didn't think that PowerPC was 64-bit, at least not until G5; though Power (a relative) is.

    Indeed! The main difference, essentially, is that while the PPC and Power might differ in actual architecture as far as triangulating bitrate channeled processors goes, they are both able to numerize vector state linked pseudo-activated code processors and analyze bootstrap algorithmic void resultants, something that other processors struggle with.

    Regardless, I don' t think the RAM limitation of each node has anything to with that. The current G4 towers, for example, can go up to 1.5GB of RAM, and the high-end iMacs can go up to 1.0GB

    Ok, you've missed the point slightly here...the amount of RAM has little to do with the ability to preset raw input geared programs. However, on the RAM side it is important to be able to effectively numerize random access memory compatible integer resultants.

    Hope this helps

  • The specs for CHRP have been available for liscense for years. Interest died down when Apple killed the clone liscensing, but there's no such problem for linux. Expect to see more as linuxppc matures.
  • Yeah, it'd be cool to rip mp3's that fast over a cluster. But who has got $15,000 to spare on Mp3 ripping?

    I would just buy all the CD's in a whole music store, kinda more sensible, right? :)


    --------------------
  • If this article happens to be of interest to /. readers, shouldn't their server withstand the Slashdot effect?

    It'll be a joke if their servers die to the slashdot effect, since it's most likely powered by their own PPC cluster (on wheels!)

    ..Unless it's a bandwidth problem.


    --------------------

  • Diskless nodes are much better from the point of view of maintenance and upgrading software on the system. Do it once, on one node (the "master" node with the disk), and all nodes are updated.

    Caveat: Using the network for temporary storage hurts performance and doesn't scale if you have a lot of temporary data.

    High Performance Computing Hardware

    If your parallel process has a lot of communication, you would be using Myrinet [myrinet.com], and/or getting a CSPI cluster running Linux [fastcluster.com], because ethernet is too slow. (You would avoid Mercury and RACEway [mc.com] because they are avoiding Linux.)

    Appropriate Parallel Applications:

    In short, this system would be good for embarassingly parallel tasks like a brute force search through key space for breaking encryption, or encoding mp3s. In such tasks, each processor only has to communicate at the beginning and ending of the task, and no processor has to communicate with any other processor during the task.

    Inappropriate Parallel Applications

    This system would not be so good for STAP [navy.mil] in RADAR or SONAR.

    Kenneth J. Hendrickson

  • It looks to me like these are nothing but iMacs re-packeged into Marathon Computer's iRack [marathoncomputer.com].

    Check out the picture on the terrasoft page, and then look at the marathon page. They look almost identical!!

    That would explain the RAM limitations, and the lack of SCSI.

    Kind of dissapointing that they are just repackaging Apple hardware!!
  • If you've could have got that as a 4-node cluster, and omitting the switch (I already have some 3coms), I'd maybe actually scrape enough money to buy one 8-)

    ... or maybe I should actually buy some christmas gifts this year...

  • but API's is much faster :-).
    http://www.api-networks.com/products/cs20.shtml

    Would you like a dual 833MHz ev68 Alpha with each having a 4MB DDR cache? I would.
    The best part is these PPC cluster slices cost about the same as a CS20 (like a UP2000) but the CS20 (otherwise known as 'shark')is a dual processor system!!!!

    Also the CS20's boot linux from the flash rom and have neat little network enhancments that makes deploying them easy as turning them on.

    How's that for bang per buck?

    Peter
    --
    www.alphalinux.org
  • Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

    Sorry, couldn't resist that. :)
  • I'm gonna rush out and get TWO of 'em and yer' all invited over for a massive lan party!! Quake, Duke, Doom, and Descent for everybody!!!

  • How small these sort of things are getting.. Soon enough a mad man with deep enough pockets will be able to buy a terabyte of HD space with a small Beowolf cluster and some highspeed networking and run intense pr0n operations out of his bedroom on a 5U rack.
    When they come down in price, then I'll be happy. quick and easy hardware for power users is always nice.

  • G4 Towers go up to 1.5GB RAM (Score:3)

    by TheInternet ( 35082 ) on Friday November 24, 2000 @10:49PM (#602593) Homepage Journal
    and I don't see why it needs to be limited to 512MB/CPU, the PPC is, after all, a 64bit architecture - the "low end" RS-6000s can take up to 1GB/CPU, more on the big iron

    I didn't think that PowerPC was 64-bit, at least not until G5; though Power (a relative) is. But I'm not CPU expert. Don't take my word for it. Regardless, I don' t think the RAM limitation of each node has anything to with that. The current G4 towers, for example, can go up to 1.5GB of RAM [apple.com], and the high-end iMacs [apple.com] can go up to 1.0GB

    - Scott

    ------
    Scott Stevenson

  • Interesting... (Score:3)

    by LHOOQtius_ov_Borg ( 73817 ) on Friday November 24, 2000 @08:27PM (#602594)
    I am going to look into buying one, and see what these folks say in response to my inquiry...

    However, the limitation of 256MB/512MB RAM/node is a bit off-putting (one part of the site says the cap is 256, the other, 512)... The system starts at $14,900 they say... It will be interesting to see where it goes from there. A Quad Xeon with 1GB from SWT [swt.com] costs $20400 (less if you buy in quantity), and the PPC-based IBM RS-6000 4CPU/4GB [ibm.com] is $56,000... so theoretically this rack could be pretty competitively priced for a Linux server...

    For my company, the RAM limitation could be a limiting factor (and I don't see why it needs to be limited to 512MB/CPU, the PPC is, after all, a 64bit architecture - the "low end" RS-6000s can take up to 1GB/CPU, more on the big iron)... hopefully versions will come out that at least get 1GB/CPU...

    Also, since there is no apparent option for SCSI disks, this may not be your ideal file or image server... but there are obviously some good uses for - though I'd like to know more on pricing of the G4 version and RAM upgrades...

    By the way, 8 video ports is pretty amusing... They don't mention the resolution, I wonder if you could make an 8 person QuakeStation out of it ;->

  • Re:Did they make the boxes themselves? (Score:3)

    by Phaser777 ( 130135 ) on Friday November 24, 2000 @09:53PM (#602595) Journal
    I think you're right. Looks like iMac CD-ROM doors on the rackmounted cases. Would also explain the lack of SCSI and gigabit ethernet options.

  • All this thing needs is... (Score:4)

    by jbuhler ( 489 ) on Friday November 24, 2000 @08:04PM (#602596) Homepage
    Cool, a multiprocessor on wheels. Now all it needs is a few servo motors, a grasping arm, and a video camera.

    Oh, and a high-intensity particle beam. And *missles*!

  • Re:Interesting... (Score:4)

    by AArthur ( 6230 ) on Saturday November 25, 2000 @06:04AM (#602597) Homepage
    The problem is limits on the iMac logic board these systems use, and limits on how much memory PowerPC Linux can properly address. iMac's have limited RAM slots, that have a limited capcity per SIMM, that totals up to 512 MB maxium. PowerPC Linux is very experimental at addressing large amounts of memory (over 768 MB), it requires a special kernel compile in option, and Linux 2.4.

    SCSI disks are not an option, as the iMac's logic board doesn't have SCSI. They may have firewire (if they are made from iMac DV's logic boards).

    They also have the strenghs and limitations of the iMac board. For one they have video outputs from all of the machines. Concivably, as they are 8 discrete systems, you could have it hooked up to 8 different USB keyboards, mice and VGA montiors, and use it to power a full office. Then again, that would be more expensive, and pain then you would want. The limitations are in the RAM, and the 32-bit G3 proccessor, because these are what the iMac has.

  • Re:Not 64-bit (Score:4)

    by LHOOQtius_ov_Borg ( 73817 ) on Friday November 24, 2000 @11:15PM (#602598)
    Aha, indeed those PPCs are NOT 64-bit... I had not been paying close-enough attention to the chip models... However, even with 32-bit addressing, you can still hit 1GB/CPU (indeed, you can hit 4GB (- overhead) in each individual address space)...

    Clearly 4+ CPUs on a single, fast backplane are faster and justified in being more expensive than a cluster... that is why it is interesting to see *how much* less the cluster remains... The "base price" for 8CPUs is about equal to that of a 4CPU Xeon system... that's still interesting...

    We've currently got a diskless workstation cluster of 15 Celeron-based systems that cost us $600/ea (in 1unit rackmount cases), and could put something similar together using P3's w/256MB/CPU for around $17k (before any discounts) - but the PPCs should be faster, in theory... though it will require testing and tuning to see they do for our app...

    Anyway, must sleep now...

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