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Virginia Tech Supercompuer - Now at #3?
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I'll take two please...no wait I found a couple extra million under the cushions, make that three!
hey everyone what about the "Little Mac"
there is another G5 Mac on the list. Look on page 55 of the 80 page pdf...
It is a 256 processor G5 Mac running at .82 TFlops.
It has the same infrastructure as the "Big Mac"
Who has it?
there is another G5 Mac on the list. Look on page 55 of the 80 page pdf...
It is a 256 processor G5 Mac running at .82 TFlops.
It has the same infrastructure as the "Big Mac"
Who has it?
#1 - cost $350 million - 5120 custom NEC CPUs- 35,860 GFlops
#2 - cost $200 million - 8160 DEC Alpha CPUs - 13,880 GFlops
#3 - cost $5 million - the power macs (2112 CPUs) - 9,555 GFlops
#4 - cost $25 million - Intel Itanium - 8,633 GFlops
#5 - cost $100 million - 4096 Alpha CPUs - 7,727 GFlops
#6 - cost $100 million - 4096 Alpha CPUs - 7,679 GFlops
systems ranked #3, 4, 5, and 6 are all new. The G5 cluster is by far the cheapest and by far the fastest of the new supercomputer clusters. There are a couple of supercomputers in the works that will be much faster than the current #1 - they are both IBM PowerPC based systems.
#2 - cost $200 million - 8160 DEC Alpha CPUs - 13,880 GFlops
#3 - cost $5 million - the power macs (2112 CPUs) - 9,555 GFlops
#4 - cost $25 million - Intel Itanium - 8,633 GFlops
#5 - cost $100 million - 4096 Alpha CPUs - 7,727 GFlops
#6 - cost $100 million - 4096 Alpha CPUs - 7,679 GFlops
systems ranked #3, 4, 5, and 6 are all new. The G5 cluster is by far the cheapest and by far the fastest of the new supercomputer clusters. There are a couple of supercomputers in the works that will be much faster than the current #1 - they are both IBM PowerPC based systems.
I read down the list of systems and noticed that some of the ones near the bottom had only one or two processors. Has anyone tried running the LINPACk on a single G5 2x2.0. I'm just curious if I might have a top 500 Supercomputer sitting on my desk. Talk about a conversation piece. 
By a pure $ to GFlops conversion, $350 million worth of Power Macs would buy 668,850 GFlops. That would be over 18 times as fast as #1.
Originally posted by Fender2112
I read down the list of systems and noticed that some of the ones near the bottom had only one or two processors. Has anyone tried running the LINPACk on a single G5 2x2.0. I'm just curious if I might have a top 500 Supercomputer sitting on my desk. Talk about a conversation piece.
That's an idea! I hope someone manages to do this.
If we disregard the boost from Infiniband, a dual 2GHz should be somewhere around 9GFlops. It'll probably turn out a little less, but somewhere in there.
well, a PPC 970 has two double precision floating point units. Altivec doesn't 'do' double precision FP math so they won't help.
Absolute, max, pie in the sky, performance for a dual G5 running double precision FP math would be 2x2x2GHz... = 8GFlops
That would be if it were able to retire two fp instructions every cycle for each processor.
real performance might be around 6MFlops with good code.
guess that would put a Mac in this company...
machine proc. spd. # proc. rMax GFlops
Sun Fire 6800 (900MHz/8MB L2) 4 6.016 28956 1200 7.2
HP Exemplar S-Class SPP-UX 5.2 12 6.005 13320 800 8.6
Cray J920 (10 ns) *** 20 5.917 19456 675 4.0
DEC 8400 5/350 (12 proc 350 MHz) 12 5.904 9548 3010 8.4
SGI POWER CHALLENGE (195 MHz, 2MB cache) 20 5.872 15000 3000 7.8
Sun Ultra HPC 6000 250 MHz (1MB L2 Cache) 14 5.856 15700 960 7.0
DEC Alphaserver 8400 5/440(440MHz, 4MB cache) 10 5.845 9548 1124 8.8
SGI POWER CHALLENGE (195 MHz, 1 MB cache) 22 5.812 15000 2900 8.6
Sun HPC 6500(400MHz 8MB L2 Cache) 8 5.810 39936 1344 6.4
Originally posted by Sun Baked
There's hope for countries wanting to jumpstart their nuclear weapons program with a few large orders of PowerMac G5s, for not a whole lot of money.
The power to make the infidels pay
They just didn't walk into the Apple Store, nor did they just go online and add 1,000 Power Macs to their order. They contacted Apple higher-ups.
you might be thinking of the price of a new Dell cluster that is coming on line. A lot of people got excited to hear the Macs were a lot cheaper, but the Dell cost included construction of a building to house them.
I'm not saying that these figures don't include a lot of infrastracture, but Itanium2s shure aren't cheap. That's about what I'd expect for the machines, cooling, interconnect and racks.
Ummm, note that the analysis above implies that the Virginia Tech cluster has a peak of 8.8TFlops. The Linpack FAQ states that the benchmark must be performed in 64-bit FP arithmetic. It would appear they are only using 32-bit FP in the Altivec. (Note that the Infiniband switch cannot make the FPUs run faster.)
Cost?
I am pretty sure that the 5.2 million includes the whole ball of wax. Housing, networking, cooling. The set up was the cost of a few dozen pizzas, so that really doesn't add up to much. I think this is by far the cheapest solution so far. It will be interesting to see if there are any computers that will show up that are not already on the list (besides Big Mac).
I am pretty sure that the 5.2 million includes the whole ball of wax. Housing, networking, cooling. The set up was the cost of a few dozen pizzas, so that really doesn't add up to much. I think this is by far the cheapest solution so far. It will be interesting to see if there are any computers that will show up that are not already on the list (besides Big Mac).
Actually, each dual G5 has two processors. Each processor has two FPUs. Each FPU can do a combined multiply + add per cycle, that is two operations in one instruction. Multiply this by the clock frequency, and you get a theoretical limit of
2proc x 2fpu * 2ops * 2GHz = 16GFlops
And Big Mac has already achieved 80% efficiency when running on only 128 processors, so that would be 12.8 billion double precision floating point operations per dual processor G5 that have already been achieved.
Using Altivec, the numbers would be 2 processor x 1 Altivec FPU x 4 operands in parallel x 2 operation x 2 GHz = 32 billion single precision floating point operations per second theoretical limit.
Re: Cost?
The housing in terms of the building itself wasn't included and the ongoing operating and support costs weren't included. All are quite considerable. The typical rule of thumb is initial capital outlay is around about 15% of the total cost for its life though.
Originally posted by Sun Baked
There's hope for countries wanting to jumpstart their nuclear weapons program with a few large orders of PowerMac G5s, for not a whole lot of money.
Well then, Apple should re-introduce the commercial they had for the original G4, that classified it as a weapon by the US government, and had tanks, etc.
aethier