Army Contractor To Build A 1566 Xserve Cluster 465
olePigeon (Wik) writes "MacCentral has an interesting article on a new computer cluster. From the article: 'Apple Computer Inc. will announce on Monday the sale of 1566 dual processor 1U rack-mount 64-bit Xserve G5 servers to COLSA Corp., which will be used to build what is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The US$5.8 million cluster will be used to model the complex aero-thermodynamics of hypersonic flight for the U.S. Army.'" alset_tech was one of the many readers to point to
CNET's version of the story.
Why the Army? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why the Army? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a feeling that as more time goes on, more and more Apple-based clusters will use OS X. Apple continues to optimize the OS. They also continue to add remote administration features (both GUI and command line) while at the same time keeping the BSD-ness of OS X as pure as possible. (OS X is based on NeXTstep and OPENSTEP, so it does have some oddities when compared to "pure" 4.4BSD or Free/Open/Net BSD).
There are also some Apple software cluster technologies (such as Xgrid) but I'm not sure if they're hardcore enough for something of this magnitude. Apple has mainly been aiming their cluster software and marketing towards the small-scale (10 to 100 notes) research groups.
Is this the same thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Translation:
Re:Why the Army? (Score:5, Interesting)
US Army Space & Missile Command is around the corner after all.
form factor... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know there aren't available for mac, but I seem to remember Opterons and Xeon blades were the hot topic some month ago, with dual opteron blades and all...
any reason not to use them blades to build a cluster, each blade bay connected to all other, creating a (sic) beowulf or mosix cluster of some sort ?
Re:Defense $$$ (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why the Army? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why the Army? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Army is not allowed to operate armed, fixed-wing aircraft. And if you can figure out how to get a helicopter to go hypersonic, then the Airwolf designers want to hire you.
the age of skynet may be nigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Defense $$$ (Score:4, Interesting)
I was active duty USMC from 1992 through 1998 (aptly dubbed "Clinton's Corps"). It's good to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whether you have a Republican globalist in the White House or a Democrat globalist ruling the roost, the people who need it most still get the short end of the stick when it comes to military spending. In the end, the D.C. suits in charge are all globalists with the common goal of the oligarchy in mind.
We had practically no green money (USMC money) for things like training and education, but blue money (US Navy money for the aviation side of the house) seemed to come out of the friggin woodwork. I couldn't get a new three ring binder without filling out two forms (in triplicate!) and a two week wait for the purchase to be approved, but one avionics jockey with a few too many beers in him from the night before drops a $45K helicopter battery on the tarmac and POOF!! a new battery practically materializes out of nowhere with no paperwork and no questions asked.
The Marines are well known for doing the best job with the worst equipment and no preparation. Keep up the good work, and watch your ass in Iraq.
Semper Fi!
Re:I don't follow the numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
Now _this_ makes sense. I can easily believe that a different app could have very different performance characteristics, which could explain a 2x performance difference. That won't affect the Top 500 list too much, though, since it's based on standard benchmarks.
In any case, it's nice to see another Mac supercomputer. It's kinda cool watching the open source world win (since an Xserve is basically an open source machine as far as supercomputing nodes go -- nobody cares about the GUI on a compute node) that's competitive based on raw performance. Go PPC!
Re:I don't follow the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:form factor... (Score:5, Interesting)
As to the comment about no 'mac' blades, it is true, but if you are a big fan of power architecture, IBM has announced JS-20, a power based blade, which has the 970 (same as G5), but only at 1.6 GHz (ironically enough, IBM doesn't seem to sell anything at the clock speeds Apple gets to sell at, and they are all IBM's chips...).
The cost of blade solutions with myrinet or infiniband solutions is significant. Otherwise, most chassis' I see communicate externally through an oversubscribed ethernet switch. Ethernet is inherently sub-optimal, but oversubscribed ethernet is particularly troublesome for some of the fine-grained parallel applications (embarrasingly parrallel applications, of course, don't care, and rendering is one such application).
Add to this a lack of expansion capability (i.e. IBM blades can take one daughterboard, so there is not any possibility of, say, having a fibre channel *and* myrinet adapter in a blade server.
The only thing I'm aware of with respect to high-performance interconnect solution for blade servers available today is to get IBM blades with Myrinet daughter boards and an optical passthrough module. Ultimately, it can really reduce cabling for things like ethernet, kvm, etc etc, but those myrinet cables are still going to be a tad unwieldy (80+ wires to the cabinet, even if they are fiber cables).
I actually want to see a solution that would aggregate, say, 1X infiniband to each blade into 4 4X connectors, no oversubscription and much sturdier and fewer cables.
Re:1556 ???? (Score:2, Interesting)
1566 is probably evenly divisible by however many racks they have alloted for the cluster.
Re:1556 ???? (Score:5, Interesting)
1556 = 1024 + 512 + 20 hot spares.
Re:Defense $$$ (Score:2, Interesting)
The stuff i work with is on the same level, even an order of magnitude larger. The budget is out of this world. And about the money... every part, servicable or not, is worth 70%+ of what was paid for it and is turned back in.
I work on apache longbows, i almost dropped a battery last time in the field. There was a nasty component faliure that was hard to trace and was causing the battery controller to charge all the time, not trickle. It was still hot enough to boil an egg after 4 hours sitting on the ground.
Re:$5.8 M is peanuts, maybe even peanut dust (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike the poor people, who, when given a tax break, hide the extra money in mattresses because they don't know what to do with it.
Okay, enough sarcasm.
The difference between a poor family, or even a lower middle-class family, and a rich family is that when the rich family saves $200 on taxes, they buy another big screen TV. When poor or middle-class family saves money on taxes, they buy *groceries*. Bush cut taxes, maybe, but the bottom 50% or so isn't any better off.
Should the top 40% pay 95% of the taxes? The top 30%? The top 20%?
Yes -- you make the money, you pay the taxes on it. Should the top 40% pay 90% of their income above, say, $100,000 in taxes, like they did in the 30's and 40's? Doubtful. Should they pay more than they do now? Definitely.
The top 50% *may* pay 95% of the taxes (doubtful) in terms of the government's total tax intake. The top 50% are not paying anywhere *near* 95%, or even 50%, of their *income*. Remember, the tax system is a bracketed system, so if the tax rate for the lowest bracket gets reduced a couple percent, *everyone*, from Jane Welfare to Bill Gates, pays less in taxes on the income in that bracket. I realize that wealth naturally accretes in the hands of the few -- I'm a realist about economics -- but I don't think we need to help that process along any. Since money naturally trickes *up*, and economic health is determined by the movement of money, why the hell are we giving the tax breaks to the people who would get the money anyway? Keynesian economics requires none of the hand-waving you need to make Reaganomics seem sensible. Giving tax breaks to the rich to "stimulate the economy" is like pouring water into the ocean and waiting for it to flow to the mountains.
How much money do you need to live, anyway? $30,000 a year? $50,000 a year? $100,000 a year? There's a certain point at which you can purchase pretty much every basic thing you could ever need (food, clothes, and shelter) -- above that, it's gravy. You sure as hell better be giving some of it back to help people who aren't able to pull the big bucks in through their jobs. Maybe the rich use less in government services -- that's mostly because they can afford to get theirs elsewhere. The more the poor are able to afford their own medical care and groceries, the less they have to rely on the government for that.
Try living within spitting distance of the poverty line, and *then* tell me that the rich deserve their tax breaks. How many plasma screen TVs and yachts do you need, anyway?
I'm probably a moron, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
At what point does linking together a bunch of off-the-shelf fully-self-contained PCs become a supercomputer? If doing so is the case, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to link together whitebox machines, much as datacenters (the type that rent servers) tend to use whitebox servers rather than rackmount boxes?
I just feel like the term "supercomputer" is being sullied by so-called supercomputers that are nothing more than a simple cluster. Of course, I'm probably a moron, as I said earlier.
The coolest part (Score:2, Interesting)
How do they come up with 1566? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Torn between... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure that's not the only solution. What I suspect when I see you type that is that you like the violence.
Re:I don't follow the numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
More accurate math (Score:4, Interesting)
Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.
I've got an older M392A2 spin stabilized sabot round in my office. Heavier than it looks :^)
Apple the new Sun? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying they are direct competitors, but they are competitors in at least some respects. And it seems that Apple is profiting from sales of its products whereas Sun's biggest revenue inflow recently has been its $1b settlement with Microsoft, not from its product lines.