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New Apple Super Computer (Army)
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This certainly gives Apple some credibility. I hope the ethernet doesn't hurt performance... There's precious few Mac clusters out there. It would suck if people started blaming Apple when the problem is with the design...
I hope larger orders are sent to apple for supercomputers so that way we can see how a $350,000,000 mac supercomputer goes against the #1 supercomputer.
The indirectly bought them.
That's true. The Army did not directly purchase them. More than likely however, the Army did a source selection and selected this contractor, who had proposed this plan or, worked closely with the Government after contract award to select the systems. Either way, I'm sure the Army had final approval of the direction. Selecting the systems for such a huge computing project would have been a very big decision -- for the future of the project and politically. The Contractor might have brought the Apple option to the table, but the Army bought in.
That's true. The Army did not directly purchase them. More than likely however, the Army did a source selection and selected this contractor, who had proposed this plan or, worked closely with the Government after contract award to select the systems. Either way, I'm sure the Army had final approval of the direction. Selecting the systems for such a huge computing project would have been a very big decision -- for the future of the project and politically. The Contractor might have brought the Apple option to the table, but the Army bought in.
law guy said:
Analog Kid said:
There isn't anything wrong with their design.....
In the press release they stated that their code/problems they are running didnt need a high speed(read low latency interconnect such as infiniband).
Now... how would they have know that.... Im sure they tested and know the particular requirments of their code.
If they would have bought infiniband, myrinet, or quadrics and didnt need it.... then that would be a poor design....
Especially when any of those 3 interconnects can almost double the price of the cluster
Computer systems are tools used to solve problems.......
It sounds to me like the Colsa guys did their homework and built a great system/tool specifically designed to solve their problems...
So if the system doesnt rate as high on the TOP500 as it could have with a high speed/low latency interconnect... Im sure their customer doesnt really care.
nsb3000 said:
Does Apple even produce anything themselves anymore? All the iBooks and PowerMacs are made by Taiwanese or Chinese contractors. Same with the iMacs. I also believe the PowerMac G5s are made under contract. Pretty sure the iPods are a contract job too. Aren't the Xserve delays more likely to be due to IBM?
sushi said:Well put!
Hey, the government/DoD is not anti Mac and pro Microsoft. You could order any computer as long as it ran Windows natively and had Microsoft Office installed!
I really enjoyed it when the Army switched over from NT to Mac servers. It was so fun to see the look on the IT folks faces when I informed them of the change. Total disbelief.
...Of course I gladly enlightened them!
Yup, it is good to see that Apple is finally getting some respect. I agree with other readers, that this is *big* news, because if the Army is saying this is worth while, then others will fallow.
oingoboingo said:
This is exactly why Apple needs to start ordering more of all of the above from the contractors to keep up with demand. It's nice that there's a new supercomputer on the block, but it shouldn't be at the expense of making regular customers wait 6 months for their Xserve to arrive.
Technically, the U.S. Army is not purchasing the X-Serves. They have a contract with an outside vendor, in this case COLA, to supply them with a super computer. COLA made the decision to purchase the X-Serves which they will provide to the Army and set up. For COLA it probably meant a higher profit because of the excellent price to performance ratio. The VA Tech X-Serves are still being delivered and they won't be on line for another month or so. Go Apple.
Some contracts can be so specific as to specify the hardware and software used.mactarkus said:
In the past, there were many DoD folks who were anti-Mac and did everything that they could think about to stifle the procurement and use of Macs.
At one location I was at, they went so far as to eliminate any non-Microsoft software. As the IT for our department, I battled the higher headquarters IT folks to keep using Harvard Graphics, which as that time was loads better for what we needed to do. Fortunately, we had original copies for each individual computer so they couldn't say much when I brought up that fact. Then they said that they would not provide any support for HG. I said fine. We don't need it.
Can you say a combatative environment?!
I am so happy to see Macs get back in the government workplace, albiet slowly.
Sushi
geerlingguy said: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 ...
PowerMacs
Up until a few months ago when the Elk Grove CA manufacturing facility was closed, PowerMac G5s were produced just south of Sacramento. They're now produced in conjunction with a California based independent contractor, within California.
oingoboingo said:
Up until a few months ago when the Elk Grove CA manufacturing facility was closed, PowerMac G5s were produced just south of Sacramento. They're now produced in conjunction with a California based independent contractor, within California.
There are a lot of factors in parallel supercomputer performance, and what's "faster" is somewhat application specific. When I worked with Crays a few years ago, for example, they used relatively slow CPUs for the day - but things like memory and disk access (and message passing between nodes) were tuned so that if you wrote your code properly, you could stream data from node to node, or (on a vector machine) from anywhere in main memory with ultra-low latency.
As for scaling performance as you increase the number of CPUs (more relevantly called "nodes" in this case), it depends on what you're doing. Some problems are what are called "embarassingly parallel", which is to say you can completely divide them up into a huge number of chunks that can run completely independently of each other - those problems really will scale almost linearly as you add processors (with a given number of "control nodes" to feed problems to the rest). With its divide-and-conquer approach, SETI@home actually comes close to this extreme. Other problems require all of the results from previous steps to feed the data for the next step, and are really run serially no matter how many nodes are available.
In real life, most interesting problems fall somewhere in the middle, but when you're designing a massively parallel system you have an idea of which way you're trying to tune it. I'm pretty sure this system's been modeled thoroughly before someone signed the deal.
As for scaling performance as you increase the number of CPUs (more relevantly called "nodes" in this case), it depends on what you're doing. Some problems are what are called "embarassingly parallel", which is to say you can completely divide them up into a huge number of chunks that can run completely independently of each other - those problems really will scale almost linearly as you add processors (with a given number of "control nodes" to feed problems to the rest). With its divide-and-conquer approach, SETI@home actually comes close to this extreme. Other problems require all of the results from previous steps to feed the data for the next step, and are really run serially no matter how many nodes are available.
In real life, most interesting problems fall somewhere in the middle, but when you're designing a massively parallel system you have an idea of which way you're trying to tune it. I'm pretty sure this system's been modeled thoroughly before someone signed the deal.
narco said:
There's A LOT more to supercomputing than screwing with Photoshop. Supercomputers don't even run Photoshop.
Here's an example of what supercomputers do:
You can read more here: http://cray.com/industry/
58% efficiency
The theoretical peak of the Xserve is 16 GFLOPS. (2 CPUs * 2 GHz * 4 Ops/cycle)
VATech had 1100 PowerMac G5s (same peak), for a combined theoretical peak of 17,600 GFLOPs.
VATech measured 10,280 GFLOPs, or about 58% effeciency.
dontmatter said:
The theoretical peak of the Xserve is 16 GFLOPS. (2 CPUs * 2 GHz * 4 Ops/cycle)
VATech had 1100 PowerMac G5s (same peak), for a combined theoretical peak of 17,600 GFLOPs.
VATech measured 10,280 GFLOPs, or about 58% effeciency.
This is great news for Apple, although let's keep some perspective with the comparisons to other supercomputers on the Top 500. Yes, this is a jump over the "Big Mac," but the rest of the competition is not exactly standing still either.
And of course it will be bumped as the top PowerPC machine in a year or so when IBM's Blue Gene goes online at Livermore in California.
And of course it will be bumped as the top PowerPC machine in a year or so when IBM's Blue Gene goes online at Livermore in California.
