Unboxing a Cray XC30 'Magnus' Petaflops Supercomputer

Bismillah (993337) writes The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia has started unboxing and installing its new upgraded 'Magnus' supercomputer, which could become the largest such system in the southern hemisphere, with up to one petaFLOPS performance.

A picture is worth a thousand words?

[eric31415927]

Where's the story?

Re:

[bigwheel]

Here' some info. Not a lot, but better than a picture of a couple wooden boxes. http://www.ivec.org/pawsey-sup... [ivec.org]

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[Pascoea]

A picture is worth a thousand words?

And 12 pictures spread across 12 pages that force a complete reload between every one of them is worth three words. "Fuck you guys" comes to mind.

Dammin that "article" was painful.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderate -1, an inconvenient truth.

Re:Will it run DOSBox and Doom?

[jandersen]

Not necessarily - the '...FLOPS' refers to FLOating Point Operations Per Second, and the hardware necessary to deal with this might conceivably not have the kind of processing capacity necessary for running DOS or Doom. It's like asking whether an aircraft carrier can sing you child to sleep; lots of power is not always relevant.

Re:Will it run DOSBox and Doom?

[fuzznutz]

Not necessarily - the '...FLOPS' refers to FLOating Point Operations Per Second, and the hardware necessary to deal with this might conceivably not have the kind of processing capacity necessary for running DOS or Doom. It's like asking whether an aircraft carrier can sing you child to sleep; lots of power is not always relevant.

Good post, but bad analogy since "computers" are expected to run programs. I'd say it's more like asking whether an aircraft carrier can tow a skier. Maybe, but it won't do it well.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Good post, but bad analogy since "computers" are expected to run programs. I'd say it's more like asking whether an aircraft carrier can tow a skier. Maybe, but it won't do it well.

Well, if you use the catapult...

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[istartedi]

Requisition item 453/67-A2NX, drag buoy and speedboat package. Secure an ordinary ski rope to the drag buoy, and detail personnel to effect rescue with speedboat if you lose your grip. Don't you guys know anything?

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[jandersen]

I wasn't saying that an aircraft carrier couldn't sing a lullaby - it probably has a tannoy, and it might even sing quite softly; but it can only do so by not using most of its enormous power.

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

I got 500+ FPS when I ran Quake on a dual-core AMD processor and a Radeon 3870 video card. Haven't tested it since I got a quad-core AMD processor and a Radeon 6970 video card.

How come it says Xbox on one cabinet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on now, tell me you didn't take a second look at the pics when you saw that comment subject! How many actually went back and looked to see if one of the cabinets really did say "Xbox"?

Bitcoin!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many bitcoins you can mine with it.

Ode to past: "Imagine a Beowolf..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Old timers...how many here could remember a time when "imagine a Beowolf cluster of these machines" would have been a "normal" post on /.

Ode to past:

[Anonymous Coward]

And in Soviet Russia the Beowolf cluster imagines you...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And in Soviet Russia the Beowolf cluster imagines you...

That depends. Does it run Linux?

Re:

[onepoint]

yes it does
http://www.cray.com/Products/C... [cray.com]
has it's own version I believe

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[Artifakt]

You run Linux on dead badgers, not wolves.

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[fahrbot-bot]

You run Linux on dead badgers, not wolves.

NetBSD actually runs on both.

Re:

[cstacy]

It's "Beowulf", not "Beowolf", you silly guys.

Bad Wolf

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[oldmac31310]

Why not B.O. wolf?

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[Thanshin]

A.... Beowolf... ...

I've decided you mean a Philanthus Triangulum.

The alternative is too sad.

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[jitterman]

It might be able to generate a 3D image of Natalie Portman with a bowl of hot grits. You never know! I for one bow down to our Cray petaFLOPS overlords.

Old School

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I like to see, a computer taking a whole room like in the old days!

It's too bad that punk 'iVec' had to tag it with graffiti!

Re:

[sillybilly]

Just in case, I'll repeat the movie "Screamers" from 1996, that goes along this military intelligent robots automation design topic. And it's not a joke, it may seem like surreal and funny, but it's very serious stuff. The miracles of science and technology can create some really jawdropping stuff, but nothing as jaw dropping as the stuff created in that movie, so far.

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[sillybilly]

Anybody in charge of handling nukes, or launching them knows the extreme danger they are tinkering with. I don't think the AI researchers minds are permeated by the same mindset, and if anything, handling a nuke or a nuke launch system is comparatively a piece of cake, a whole lot less dangerous than handling one of these supercomputer machines. They should mandate by law for every person that works with it to watch that movie "Screamers," just so that they are aware, and whoever works with it needs total p

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[sillybilly]

I think we still got at least another 50-200 years to go before we match the computing power of a cheap human cranium, which has got to be way more than a terraflop. Next wonder of biotechnology: reworking a human brain - or more like a monkey brain that has no ethical issues - to efficiently compute floating point results that can be directly displayed on an LCD, instead of analyze visual signals.

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[sillybilly]

Then there'll be these secret places where people or monkeys with a lot of terraflops are bred in a dish, without having any fathers and mothers, are born and get eyes and ears excised so they don't develop normal sensory processing and world awareness (or they can even be genetic engineered and propagated like that, not to have eyes and ears, or even skin touch and taste and smell senses), so their whole brain capacity is available for some non-sensory, non-world-around-you-awareness-and-modeling computing

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[sillybilly]

I for one, love my little HP Mini 210 Laptop with a 5 W Intel Atom chipset and 9 hr battery life, and way more than sufficient computing power as far as I'm concerned, and all the recent creations on the web, such as semi-infinite-loop javascript webpages trying to tell me to upgrade, they can go stick their javascript where the Sun don't shine, because I think I have way too much computing power as it is, not too little, more than sufficient for my needs, only it's used incorrectly by shitty software, and

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[sillybilly]

I don't need more computing power, or cheaper computing. What I have is enough, what I need is software that's more efficient. Heck even MS Office 97sp2 is more efficient than all the office version starting from Office 2002 they throw at me today, has better features, it's faster and less bloated and smaller in size. My real issues, when I look at my costs are: housing and transportation. Healthcare I try not to mess with, and it's a fight against constant deliberate infection. So to drop the housing cost,

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

You forgot poorly-lit, hand-held, un-rehearsed, and with the phrase "So I'm just gonna go ahead and..." repeated several hundred times.

Art

[Charliemopps]

I do like the art. I'm not generally a fan of indigenous art. I grew up with a lot of native american kids and was forced to do tons of it for the pow-wows, school art projects and such. So I've an aversion to it now. It's kind of like growing up Scottish and hating bagpipes now because of it...

Anyways, what they did for those computers was well done and has a modern flavor. Good job!

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[jellomizer]

The Cray supercomputers use to look really impressive. Blinking Lights, Red Liquid coolant dripping down a glass/plexiglass enclosure. Even the Cray 1 with its round design, with benches made it look really cool.
Now it is just a bunch of Printed Plastic covers, on a set of square boxes.

For the cost, you might as well make it look really impressive.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> For the cost, you might as well make it look really impressive.

It is precisely because of the cost that they don't make it look really impressive. It used to be that supercomputing was a high margin business and they could afford all the froo-froo. Beowulf killed that. Even when your machine isn't in competition with a cluster, the market is no longer as accepting of froo-froo.

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[Charliemopps]

You mean gaudy? Because that's what you're describing to me.

DF

[Thanshin]

It's so overpoweringly mighty it can run Dwarf Fortress on a 256x256 embark area at 2 FPS.

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[Mashiki]

You think that's impressive, it can actually hit 13FPS in Crysis.

I remember when...

[skovnymfe]

I remember when computers used to fill an entire football field! Now look at this, the powerhouse of the world, the biggest monstrosity on the scale, coming up at what, 8 racks?

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[AJodock]

Just the biggest in the southern hemisphere. The biggest super computers in the northern half of the world still take up about football field sizes. (http://www.hpcwire.com/2013/06/02/full_details_uncovered_on_chinese_top_supercomputer/)

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[skovnymfe]

Ah I must've overlooked that detail in my rage.

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[andy.ruddock]

Read the text, and follow the links, from picture #5.

Only half the story

[gmhowell]

An 'unboxing' is only half of the modern way of reporting on new hardware. The more interesting question in this case is "will it blend?"

Ooooooh... Custom Paint Job!

[dohzer]

Half the money is in the custom paint job.

Re:

[Dins]

Now it just needs a cool set of rimz. Maybe some ground effect lighting. Possibly some pneumatics.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ooh, and coasters for beer!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Someone at Cray loves them some corn nuts.

Looks like a brilliantly decorated VAX...

[Archtech]

...but what on earth has happened to the Unibus???

Cool but fastest in Australia??

[kf6auf]

Pictures are cool and all, but there's supercomputer currently at the Australian National University that has been benchmarked at 0.978 PetaFLOPS so saying that this one could be the fastest in the southern hemisphere with up to 1 PetaFLOPS seems a bit like counting your emus before they've hatched.