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Virginia Tech Supercompuer - Now at #3?
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Re: hey everyone what about the "Little Mac"
VT - it's a bite of the Big Mac. However, there is an error in the entry - it states 256 processors but a max of "only" 1024 Gflops. 256 970s has a theoretical max of twice that, and it still hasn't been corrected.
VT - it's a bite of the Big Mac. However, there is an error in the entry - it states 256 processors but a max of "only" 1024 Gflops. 256 970s has a theoretical max of twice that, and it still hasn't been corrected.
I believe it was posted somewhere that va tech did indeed order it online - no special discounts beyond the educational price discount, no custom configuration beyond adding ram. The one thing they did get was an assurance they would get their systems in time to meet the top 500 deadline - looks like a brilliant move by apple.
Check out the financing!
Hey, at $132K/mo, why not?
(actually there are probably some businesses who would be interested in such terms and could afford it)
Hey, at $132K/mo, why not?
(actually there are probably some businesses who would be interested in such terms and could afford it)
Re: Check out the financing!
if you had some spare millions in your back pocket, it wouldn't be a bad idea to build G5 supercomputer clusters for a living. The G5 cluster is coming at 20% (or less) the cost of other comparable supercomputers. You could easily charge people double. Or do something like $1 million per GFlop.
if you had some spare millions in your back pocket, it wouldn't be a bad idea to build G5 supercomputer clusters for a living. The G5 cluster is coming at 20% (or less) the cost of other comparable supercomputers. You could easily charge people double. Or do something like $1 million per GFlop.
Well, yeah, except there's one tiny thing. Those systems aren't on the Top500 list. Not in November. Not in June. Not since around 1997-1998. The list that starts on page 53 of the preliminary results document (performance.pdf) contains over 1,000 entries. With roughly 40 machines listed per page, anything beyond about page 64-65 (roughly 35-40 GFlops) isn't going to make the cut.
Five years ago, a dual-processor G5 would've been in the lower part of the Top500 list. To make it on the list today, you're going to need to cluster at least, say, ten or so. Of course, things will be going even faster come next June, but hypothetically speaking, one could get 100+ Gigaflops on LINPACK from 20-25 dual G5's, so if anyone has a budget of, say, $100K or so and wants to have a "Little Mac" near the bottom of the next list, go for it!
Incidentally, that same document contains (between pages 6 and 46) a lengthy table of LINPACK results from various machines. The original Macintosh apparently was capable of something like 0.38 megaflops, making a dual G5 more powerful than 10,000 original Macs. (The only thing slower than an original Mac on the list was a Palm III PDA.
Re: Cost?
Not true. The 5.2 million includes the machines and networking, but not the cooling and building infrastructure. The latter two adds $2 million to the price tag for a grand total of $7.2 million. More when you consider most of the housing infrastructure was already built and this was the upgrade cost.
Dell either couldn't meet the ship date or couldn't meet the cost. Not surprising since Dell has little to no experience in HPC and makes crappy servers. (Yes, I've used a lot of Dell servers. They higher performance you go, the weaker the offering relative to HP, Sun, IBM.)
The simple fact is, Virginia Tech tendered all bids from Dell (Itanium), IBM (Athlon and PowerPC), as well as HP (Itanium) with extra time allotted for Dell to meet Apple's price point and ship dates. The Apple machines bid in at less than a half of the cost of the other bids that could meet the Fall Top500 date (i.e. ship by August).
Proof? Infiniband came in at $1.5 million for the cards, routers and cabling (according to the person who runs the VA Tech cluster) which means that the G5 systems cost was around $3.7 million. Every other vendor who could meet the target quoted a price of $8-10 million (again, this is according to VA Tech).
Like I said many times before, this will not hold forever because IBM can design custom systems around the PPC970 starting Q1 2004 which will be cheaper/CPU than G5 towers. I imagine Intel will lower the prices for the Itanium2 in order to compete (or come out with an Itanium3 or speed bump the Itanium2 from its 1.5Ghz). AMD can't compete here because you'd need twice as many Opterons to get a Rpeak in Linpak. That's not to say the Opteron isn't a good chip for other uses (TPC), just not very cost efficient in HPC.
It was a great coup for Apple that involved a planet alignment (Infiniband, the university alliance to create it, and the window before the Fall Top500) that coincided with the release of the G5. By my estimation they didn't even have to lower their systems price at all Wow!
Not true. The 5.2 million includes the machines and networking, but not the cooling and building infrastructure. The latter two adds $2 million to the price tag for a grand total of $7.2 million. More when you consider most of the housing infrastructure was already built and this was the upgrade cost.
Dell either couldn't meet the ship date or couldn't meet the cost. Not surprising since Dell has little to no experience in HPC and makes crappy servers. (Yes, I've used a lot of Dell servers. They higher performance you go, the weaker the offering relative to HP, Sun, IBM.)
The simple fact is, Virginia Tech tendered all bids from Dell (Itanium), IBM (Athlon and PowerPC), as well as HP (Itanium) with extra time allotted for Dell to meet Apple's price point and ship dates. The Apple machines bid in at less than a half of the cost of the other bids that could meet the Fall Top500 date (i.e. ship by August).
Proof? Infiniband came in at $1.5 million for the cards, routers and cabling (according to the person who runs the VA Tech cluster) which means that the G5 systems cost was around $3.7 million. Every other vendor who could meet the target quoted a price of $8-10 million (again, this is according to VA Tech).
Like I said many times before, this will not hold forever because IBM can design custom systems around the PPC970 starting Q1 2004 which will be cheaper/CPU than G5 towers. I imagine Intel will lower the prices for the Itanium2 in order to compete (or come out with an Itanium3 or speed bump the Itanium2 from its 1.5Ghz). AMD can't compete here because you'd need twice as many Opterons to get a Rpeak in Linpak. That's not to say the Opteron isn't a good chip for other uses (TPC), just not very cost efficient in HPC.
It was a great coup for Apple that involved a planet alignment (Infiniband, the university alliance to create it, and the window before the Fall Top500) that coincided with the release of the G5. By my estimation they didn't even have to lower their systems price at all Wow!
Originally posted by danbirchall
Incidentally, that same document contains (between pages 6 and 46) a lengthy table of LINPACK results from various machines. The original Macintosh apparently was capable of something like 0.38 megaflops, making a dual G5 more powerful than 10,000 original Macs. (The only thing slower than an original Mac on the list was a Palm III PDA.
That's funny, because I worked at NASA when the original Mac came out and it actually benchmarked faster than our minicomputer at the time - a VAX 11/750. And there were things we could do on that Mac that we couldn't do on the VAX, yet the Mac cost about the same as the VT-100 terminals we used on the VAX and had a VT-100 emulator.
We bought a ton of those macs once the MacPlus came out and we could add a hard disk. The original Macintosh - it was called simply Macintosh at the time
128k of RAM
400k floppy disk
1 bit black and white display (512x384 resolution if I remember)
mouse
keyboard
dual serial ports
mouse and keyboard port
external floppy port
and that's pretty much it - no hard disk, no ram expansion
cost - $2499
Today you can get the 1.8 GHz G5 machine for $2399.
Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
Technically it was called Macintosh 128k. It was followed by the Macintosh 512k and 512KE
I think the Macintosh 128k name only happened after the Macintosh 512k was released and they realized they couldn't call them all exactly the same thing.
I can check on that. There is an original on the shelf at my old work.. it's the original because it still has the signatures in it (the first run of the mold). That first mold broke so only some of the 128K Macs have signatures in them.
If I recall, just off the top of my head, it does in fact say Macintosh 128K on it.
I never said the G5 would make the list... just that, by my first incorrect *guess* at where a dual proc G5 would score, this would be the competition.
Just for reference, a quad processor Sun Sunfire with 900MHz processors [from the list I posted earlier] certainly isn't from 1997-1998. More like beginning of this year.
The very latest Sunfire V480 with quad 1.05 GHz processors and 8GB of ram (base config) retails for just under $35,000 yet (based on the fact that I forgot a 2 in my earlier calculations) it shouldn't be able to beat the dual G5 on this benchmark.
It's not fair to compare prices with the 6800 (which is still in production with 1.05 and 1.2 GHz UltSparc IIIi cpus) since the 6800 scales up to 24 processors, and as a result starts at $165,000 for a 4 processor model.
Originally posted by danbirchall
Five years ago, a dual-processor G5 would've been in the lower part of the Top500 list. To make it on the list today, you're going to need to cluster at least, say, ten or so. Of course, things will be going even faster come next June, but hypothetically speaking, one could get 100+ Gigaflops on LINPACK from 20-25 dual G5's, so if anyone has a budget of, say, $100K or so and wants to have a "Little Mac" near the bottom of the next list, go for it!
I would recommend buying 33 dual G5s, for several reasons: First, according to the numbers from VTech (820 GFlops with 64 G5s), you should get 422 GFlops. That would put you at number 241 in the previous Top 500 of June 2003, just ahead of two dozen 192 processor 875 MHz HP Superdomes, so it will take a while before you drop out of the Top 500. Second, you beat all those universities that buy 32 G5s, and there will be _lots_ of those.
33 G5s with school rebate, no superdrive, no modem, cost $82,269. 33 times 4GB of memory at www.crucial.com cost $23,757, and you have 66 256MB chips worth around $3,000 left over. You will need some fast interconnect, that will cost you some money. 33 dual G5s shouldn't produce too much heat, so lets say $150,000 would get you nicely in the middle of the current Top 500 lists and you might stay there for a year or two.