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Virginia Tech Supercomputer Cluster Info Session

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Apr 12, 2001
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On September 4th, 2003, Virginia Tech held an informational session for their upcoming Supercomputer Cluster. The new Cluster has received a lot of attention as it is expected to be one of the top computer clusters in the world, and utilize 1100 of Apple's new Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5s.

The informational session provided confirmation of some of the available information as well as some interesting details of the planning stage. As previously reported, the total cost of the Supercomputer Cluster comes to $5.2 million -- which includes systems, memory storage and "communication fabrics".

Even at $5.2 million, the overall cost of the system is said to be "one of the cheapest systems of its kind". In determining which architecture to use, many vendors were considered beyond Apple -- including Dell, Sun, IBM and HP. The final decision was made on a pure Cost vs Performance basis -- with Apple's solution providing the best overall price.

The PowerMac G5 systems will be running Mac OS X, and will also utilize a custom "fault tolerance" software system called Deja Vù. This fault tolerance system will allow the cluster to withstand "just about every failure".

The cluster is expected to begin operations on October 1, 2003, with performance tweaking through Mid November. At that time, it will be open for initial applications, with a fully operational cluster expected by January 2004.

The entire transcript of notes is provided here. Virginia Tech student, Myuuchan, took these detailed notes from the session. These notes were submitted to MacRumors by Cless.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2003/09/05/va-tech-cluster-info-session-apple-the-cheapest-option/
PSC

The only acronym for PSC I know, and one that fits with supercomputing, is the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, in Pittsburgh, PA. It's one of the original NSF supercomputer centers, operated from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the reasons the internet's predecessor was created. I believe PSC upgraded through the years from a Cray X-MP to a Y-MP to a T3D, and who knows what they have now.

It's kind of funny and makes a certain amount of sense they'd be involved. CMU must have been one of the biggest customers for NeXT computers back in the day, and has always maintained decent Mac clusters as well as their UNIX and Windows offerings for their students.
 
Expansion?

Just a quick question...

When Apple releases dual 3Ghz G5s next August, can they simply be added to the cluster to increase the processing power, or do all the machines need to be the same?
 
Too bad they can't run Virtual PC on that thing.

I wonder if they run the Mac OS on those things or some weird supercomputer OS I never heard of.
 
Dell didn't win the bid ?

At least we won't have to hear any crap spewing from that blow hole under the nose of Michael Dell about this one.
 
IIRC from the cnet article its a beta version of the OS, which seems unlikely, so I expect its panther.
 
Originally posted by mvc
IIRC from the cnet article its a beta version of the OS, which seems unlikely, so I expect its panther.
Click to expand...

Panther is a Beta version of the OS. :)

arn
 
Yup, but the part I found unlikely was that they would run with a beta at all. ;)

Not explaining myself properly - been a long day
 
Re: PSC

Originally posted by Booga
The only acronym for PSC I know, and one that fits with supercomputing, is the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, in Pittsburgh, PA. It's one of the original NSF supercomputer centers, operated from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the reasons the internet's predecessor was created. I believe PSC upgraded through the years from a Cray X-MP to a Y-MP to a T3D, and who knows what they have now.

It's kind of funny and makes a certain amount of sense they'd be involved. CMU must have been one of the biggest customers for NeXT computers back in the day, and has always maintained decent Mac clusters as well as their UNIX and Windows offerings for their students.
Click to expand...


Yes, that's exactly what it was. I'd forgotten entirely.
Sorry about the confusion!
 
Can someone tell me how exactly 1,100 Dual G5s being shipped to them was suppose to slow down the shipping for Dual G5s for everyone else? There were supposively over 100,000 G5s ordered, and supposively most of those were duals...
 
Re: Expansion?

Originally posted by woodsey
Just a quick question...

When Apple releases dual 3Ghz G5s next August, can they simply be added to the cluster to increase the processing power, or do all the machines need to be the same?
Click to expand...

At the present moment, they're trying to establish functionality with homogeneous machines. However, it was mentioned that they may consider adding machines of different architechture later on in the process - a step up in processing speed might occur at that time, though they made no mention of that specific detail.
 
Re: Re: Expansion?

Myuuchan,

Thank you very much for taking and providing these notes... as you can see, people are closely interested in this topic. :)

arn
 
"The final decision was made on a pure Cost vs Performance basis"


Seems like a little backtracking (and spin)... IIRC, the big deciding factor was if it was able to be delivered on a set schedule that VT needed. Apple promised to make sure that it would be on time; others couldn't commit. Well of couse school admins have to justify their decision making especially at a public school during budget cuts.

As for Dell and supercomputing: #25 on the list, 2 Tflops, 600 Xeon 2.4Ghz @ SUNY.
 
Hmm, I've got an icon called Déjà Vu in my System Prefs. It's part of Toast 6. With the amount of lawsuits going around these days, I sense another one coming along :(
 
Re: Re: Expansion?

Originally posted by Myuuchan
At the present moment, they're trying to establish functionality with homogeneous machines. However, it was mentioned that they may consider adding machines of different architechture later on in the process - a step up in processing speed might occur at that time, though they made no mention of that specific detail.
Click to expand...

Actually keeping all of the machines the same on a cluster helps out with programming. Since all machines are equally fast, you don't have to bother too much with the timing of data transfer to the server. When you have a cluster of different machines, programming becomes more problematic, and Virginia tech want to run atleast a basic benchmark to see the effective speed of the cluster.
 
Quads

It is too bad the quad processor machines (or xserves) were available for them to order. (Or for that matter 8s).

Regarding using the same processor in each machine, with this type of archictecture it shouldn't matter a whole lot if they are the same speed or not. This is a MIMD machine not a SIMD machine so the odds of it mattering are low.
 
Not running OSX

They are not running OSX (any version). I've worked with the Admin who is running/working on the project. They have done a special build of Darwin (the open-source kernel under Aqua that runs OSX). They are hoping this does the trick. However, if it doesn't, they are already planning on falling back on Linux to run the cluster.
 
Re: Not running OSX

Originally posted by nilspace
They are not running OSX (any version). I've worked with the Admin who is running/working on the project. They have done a special build of Darwin (the open-source kernel under Aqua that runs OSX). They are hoping this does the trick. However, if it doesn't, they are already planning on falling back on Linux to run the cluster.
Click to expand...


Now that's interesting. Because they mentioned at least twice that they'd be running under OSX. How odd.
 
Originally posted by ZildjianKX
Can someone tell me how exactly 1,100 Dual G5s being shipped to them was suppose to slow down the shipping for Dual G5s for everyone else? There were supposively over 100,000 G5s ordered, and supposively most of those were duals...
Click to expand...
More than half, from what I have heard. At best, this is just a nice excuse. It is good PR for Apple, but it is a lame way of trying to appease all those customers that ordered these machines when they were announced back in June. You would think Apple wants to keep the Mac faithful that buy the newest stuff happy...
 
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