New Apple Super Computer (Army)

[MacRumors]

Based on the success of Virginia Tech's PowerMac G5 supercomputer, CNet reports that Colsa has placed an order with Apple for a number of servers:

A U.S. Army contractor has purchased a $5.8 million, 1,566-server supercomputer from Apple Computer, a real-world cousin to an academic system that briefly appeared high on a list of the most powerful machines.

The new cluster is expected to reach 15 teraflops when it is completed this fall and will run Army simulations of the aerodynamics of flight.

[Bernd]

Good news Apple

[geerlingguy]

Woohoo! Another one chalked up for Apple... how long will it be before we all have 50 Xserves in our basements?

[macridah]

25 teraflops ... that's blazing crazy fast. Go Army.

[jettredmont]

Originally Posted by geerlingguy

Woohoo! Another one chalked up for Apple... how long will it be before we all have 50 Xserves in our basements?

About as long as it takes me to scrounge up a hundred grand or so ...

... and a basement ...

[impierced]

Originally Posted by Macrumors

Based on the success of Virginia Tech's PowerMac G5 supercomputer, CNet reports that Colsa has placed an order with Apple for a number of servers:



The new cluster is expected to reach 15 teraflops when it is completed this fall and will run Army simulations of the aerodynamics of flight.

This was rumored a while back from some foreign web site and everyone dismissed it. Anyone remember the link?

[Freg3000]

MacCentral says it will be more than 15 TF.

Originally Posted by MacCentral

The supercomputer, named MACH 5, is expected to deliver peak performance capability of more than 25 TFlops/second. In comparison, the Virginia Tech supercomputer announced last year attained sustained performance of approximately 10 TFlops/second, according to Apple director of product management, server hardware, Alex Grossman.

Either way.....AWESOME.

I know twice as many xServes would scale directly to twice as much power, but just imagine if the 5.8 million dollars they used to buy all of these xServes was 58 million. Imagine Macs comprising the fastest computer in the world......still many times less than the 350 million dollar Earth Simulator!

[Freg3000]

Originally Posted by impierced

This was rumored a while back from some foreign web site and everyone dismissed it. Anyone remember the link?

Well this isn't foreign, it is just AppleInsider :

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

Meanwhile, TechWeb is reporting that Virginia Tech has received "a number of inquiries" from federal agencies to use the university's installation or its supercomputer-kit technology to build their own supercomputer installations, following the universities announced plans to transition the cluster to Apple's new dual Power PC 970 Xserve G5 systems.

Argonne National Lab, the National Security Agency, and NASA, are among those expressing interest in the supercomputer technology. According to the article, negotiations were underway with potential customers who could use the university's installation itself, or obtain rights to build their own supercomputer based on the university's technology.

I do remember another source though.

[musicpyrite]

What?!!?!? WTF?? The government actually doing something right?

Good news for Apple. Good news for the Army. Bad news fo' M$ and DuLL.

[impierced]

Originally Posted by Freg3000

Well this isn't foreign, it is just AppleInsider :



I do remember another source though.

I remember a site (maybe it wasn't foreign) that listed the reasons as to why the XServe G5 (or was it the PowerMac) wasn't shipping. One was because the US Government (I think) was purchasing 1500+ systems and another reason was something that was going to get someone at Apple in hot water. There were like 3 or 4 reasons.

ARGH, stupid memory.

[nuclearwinter]

WTF?!?!?!?!?!?! This is totally sweet! I am flipping out!

[deepkid]

Originally Posted by Macrumors

Based on the success of Virginia Tech's PowerMac G5 supercomputer, CNet reports that Colsa has placed an order with Apple for a number of servers:

The new cluster is expected to reach 15 teraflops when it is completed this fall and will run Army simulations of the aerodynamics of flight.

I wonder if they'll run into any bottlenecks using gigabit ethernet instead of InfiniBand. Would that affect them truly reaching 15 teraflops...

[coolfactor]

Originally Posted by deepkid

I wonder if they'll run into any bottlenecks using gigabit ethernet instead of InfiniBand. Would that affect them truly reaching 15 teraflops...

If you read the article, it mentions that they don't need the network bandwidth that the Big Mac needed. We'll see.

http://news.com.com/Apple+sells+supe...bj=news.1010.5

[Sunrunner]

[quote=coolfactor]If you read the article, it mentions that they don't need the network bandwidth that the Big Mac needed. We'll see.

I wonder why that would be ... isn't network bandwidth one of the primary factors that kill the speed of cllustered computers?

[coolfactor]

Originally Posted by Sunrunner

I wonder why that would be ... isn't network bandwidth one of the primary factors that kill the speed of cllustered computers?

It could be the way the processing is done. There would be a difference between transferring digital media files and transferring mathematical data, though.

[deepkid]

Originally Posted by coolfactor

It could be the way the processing is done. There would be a difference between transferring digital media files and transferring mathematical data, though.

Would seem like flight simulations would need speedy networking also. I guess we'll see once they get it up running. BTW, I did read that statement about networking needs in the article, but it still left me wondering.

[law guy]

Originally Posted by alexf

Yes, well, unfortunately this is an inherently political matter.

However, I will save my comments for a political forum.

Politics or policy of the New American Century aside - it's not the army who's directly purchased these - i.e., the Secretary of the Army has not all of a sudden gone Mac happy. It's a military contractor that won the work set out in an solicitation or has been approved for on-going work, and was in turn able to purchase a system with some amount of their contract award. Think of it like this - you wouldn't call Boeing or Lockheed Martin the Airforce, would you? Same sort of deal.

[ifjake]

cool, apple. but what it seems to me is that apple is becoming a inexpensive provider of computing power, which seems to be just a larger scale of that niche market thing. not all businesses need supercomputers. when apple computers start being used to do mere daily office work, that's where the growth will come from. but the larger the company the more expensive and difficult it is to make that switch. i could see a small startup company that begins with macs and grows with macs as being the most probable situation. i am personally happy with apple's performance. they make an awesome personal home computer and are always finding ways to innovate. i would be happy with just that, but i guess we'll see how things go.

heh, fine no politics.

[AidenShaw]

[quote=Sunrunner]

Originally Posted by coolfactor

If you read the article, it mentions that they don't need the network bandwidth that the Big Mac needed. We'll see.

I wonder why that would be ... isn't network bandwidth one of the primary factors that kill the speed of cllustered computers?

It depends on the application.

The important factor is the ratio of the amount of data needed per "work unit" and the amount of CPU time needed to process the "work unit".

By far one of the most massive supercomputers around is the one doing SETI@home - and it's running on dialup, DSL and cable modems. The key is that it needs many CPU hours of work on a data packet of a few hundred KB.

For MPI jobs like LINPACK, however, you need to work on a few KB of data for a fraction of a second.

A slow or high-latency network will kill MPI performance. It won't matter for video rendering or other tasks with the right profile.

[Wonder Boy]

awesome. an army of 1566.

[mactastic]

As an added bonus, the Army will probably spend a good deal less worrying about software security issues.

It's good to see people who make decisions based on the bottom line choosing Apples again.

(And let's keep this thread out of the political section.)

[macsrus]

[quote=Sunrunner]

Originally Posted by coolfactor

If you read the article, it mentions that they don't need the network bandwidth that the Big Mac needed. We'll see.

I wonder why that would be ... isn't network bandwidth one of the primary factors that kill the speed of cllustered computers?

As a general rule faster interconnects=faster clusters....
But this is very Problem/Code related....

If your particular code does alot of message passing then a low latency interconnect such as Quadrics, Myrinet, or Infiniband is the way to go....

But some Problems are so CPU intensive... that they are literally CPU bound and for these Codes low latency interconnects are not as important...
And you can get by with Ethernet

Since they say they dont need a high speed interconnect, I would expect that their code is like the later

[tortoise]

Originally Posted by Sunrunner

I wonder why that would be ... isn't network bandwidth one of the primary factors that kill the speed of cllustered computers?

It is usually the interconnect latency rather than the bandwidth that kills clustered computers. Cluster interconnects like Myrinet and Infiniband don't have any more bandwidth than various flavors of Ethernet. What you are paying for is an order of magnitude reduction in latency versus Ethernet. That is what makes it worth the price, not the bandwidth.

And the folks that buy huge ccNUMA systems get an additional order of magnitude reduction in latency. Each step up in latency reduction costs a significant premium.

[shamino]

Originally Posted by tortoise

Cluster interconnects like Myrinet and Infiniband don't have any more bandwidth than various flavors of Ethernet. What you are paying for is an order of magnitude reduction in latency versus Ethernet.

The latency issue is definitely what drives up the price. So is jitter (that is, per-packet variation in the delay characteristics - important for some applications, like video.)

But there is still a big bandwidth difference. According to the Infiniband FAQ, Infiniband's link speeds are 2.5, 10 and 30Gbps. (I also remember reading that 100G Infiniband is under development for the future.)

Ethernet, on the other hand, doesn't go that fast. The only commonly used speeds are 10M, 100M and 1G. There's a spec for 10G, but there are very few vendors shipping any devices at that speed.

With this news and the news previously about the USarmy icons for the login this is looking good for apple.

And I remember people saying that Apple is going to go out of business in another 20 years.