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Virginia Tech Supercomputer?

Originally posted by MrMacman
Hell no.

If anyone doesn't want one, screw you and good job.

I think anyone who ever wanted a computer should want one of the fastest computers.

Gimme a break, there are no mass cancelations.

No way in hell.


Yup, turn in a WU every .2 Seconds.

:eek: :eek:

/\- Plug for MacRumors Folding Team -/\
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Careful mate the fates will get you for that. Actually, it was a joke. Wouldn't it be ironic if exactly 1100 orders were cancelled due to the month delay? I would hope it would be less, much less. Oh well, carry on then and good day to you.;)
 
Pixar ordered hundreds of G5s themselves,so if Virginia tech ordered 1100,and say Pixar ordered 2000 or something theres our hold up for delivery,not to mention other big orders we dont even know about.



What was it over 100,000 G5 - 2ghz machines,I wonder what percentage go to big organisations and universitys etc.




Heres a giggle for you guys.A university close to where I live has always been a Mac unversity.Recently a percentage of the students bitched and moaned because they couldnt be bothered learning another OS,so the Uni ditched hundreds of machines and bought PCs,but then a couple of viruses hit and they have been fixing the mess ever since.One of the law lecturers who is a friend of mine is a Mac fan and has been walking around campus with a grin as she made them leave her a Mac {still a handful of Macs there} and is getting everything done as per usual,whilst everyone else screams and rants as things get fixed :D
 
Originally posted by cc bcc
Wouldn't it be better for them to buy 1100 xServes G5? :)
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Nope. This way the students can use them as standalone workstations and all unused CPU cycles can be hogged by Pooch and similar programs for cued processing tasks. Not unlike folding.

X-serves are "dedicated" servers.

I was thinking that if VT ordered a mere 1100 (out of the 100k+) and impacted delivery dates to some detectable extent, what would happen if Pixar broke down and bought some G5's to abandon those crappy Xeon CPU's? People on this site would whine loudly and persistently.

And I would be amused no end.

Not to mention if the VT cluster works out, people (institutions) might actually duplicate that and buy G5's 1000 at a time. Imagine the shock and awe!

Merely Rocketman

avatar2.jpg
 
dang that's fast

I go to VA Tech and would rather see them cut the teaching program and buy a super computer any day of the week. :) Anyways we already have a building called the math emporium that houses around 490 flat screen iMacs for math students. To see the warehouse/room is jsut amazing before they upgraded to those they had about 490 G4s Here is a quicktime vr of the g4s http://www.emporium.vt.edu/emporium/VisitorsWebsite/VisitorsMain.html
I'm looking forward to finding out where this cluster is being put and taking pictures/video for you all :D I hope Tech finds some aliens cures breast cancers or folds some dna with this thing.
From my calculations this should reach around 15.4 Teraflops
14 Gigaflops per duel g5 times 1100. Take some away for the clustering and this is still going to be aroudn the 3rd fastest machine in the world. 1st being built using 10000 processors, so it's a bit unfair.
 
vah tek

they need the cluster to hack the BCS computer and keep them in the running for a bowl bid...
 
it has to be worth it though, if they let you just go into the room where they all are once
**************************************************

I plan on being there the set it up!
 
why would you buy 1100 first revision g5s? I understand they want the machines ASAP... but still to spend at least $2mil on a bunch of machines that are brand spanking new with no small scale usage and certainly no large scale, and also were, for the first time, mass produced... just doesn't seem like a great way to do things. Then again, maybe this cluster isn't that important.
 
YellowDog?

After reading up on YellowDog linux and their Blank Lab cluster management software, VT might have this planned out pretty well afterall.

But then again I have heard talk of clustering for OSX on large scales. Apple did produce a clustered XServe right?

It will be interesting to see what OS VT chooses in the end. Anyone out there have first hand knowlegde of the clustered backplane to be used? I would love to see the whitepaper on this this.
 
Originally posted by vouder17
Well i went to applestore and did a order of 1100 Powermac dual 2ghz G5's, just for the fun of it to see the price..........

It came to
$9 651 400.00
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Of course - the superdrives and Graphic cards and HD's are completely useless in those, You also won't need modems and the like.
You can probably save a thousand bucks just leaving unneccessary stuff away.

btw. Why use Powermacs in a cluster anyway? this kind of thing belongs in a server rack. It's extremely unefficiant to use desktops as a super computer.

But then - hopefully we'll be seeing xservers G5 soon.
 
Re: YellowDog?

Originally posted by CybrCyfr
After reading up on YellowDog linux and their Blank Lab cluster management software, VT might have this planned out pretty well afterall.

But then again I have heard talk of clustering for OSX on large scales. Apple did produce a clustered XServe right?
Click to expand...
I guess you can still buy them. cluster nodes - at the same price as single processor xseres - but with two g4's
 
Originally posted by asim
a project this size is usually a part of a huge government or foundation grant that is planned out long ahead of time. they may have also been working with apple behind the scenes and have made their commitment PRIOR to the g5 announcement. just as it wouldn't come about in a day or so, you can't get a group to invest millions (1100 x ~5000 = 5.5million) in a new technology even in the two months since it has been announced.

this must have been in the works before june.

afc
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If what you say has any merit to it and I do not doubt it one minute then it is incredibly poor planning on Apple's side because the 1100 units were a given way before the announcement and they should have prepared better.
If this cluster news is now being used for an excuse then that is especially p...poor performance on the side of apple.
Who cares if they use 1100 units ? What about the 1100 consumers waiting ? The small businesses, the artsy crowd who need this for their next customer account ? No, if this is really true, then Apple have either their priorities wrong or their planning is extremely amateurish.
 
VT cluster email

From the /. thread: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/08/30/1838222.shtml?tid=107&tid=137&tid=187

In my email the other day, I received this letter:
Hello all,

This email is to serve as invitation and notice of impending Terascale Facility assembly assistance. For those receiving this info for the first time know that Virginia Tech is building a top 10 supercomputer from scratch and we need your assistance. We do have one stipulation to volunteerism and that is you must not be a wage employee of the university. Grad students on GTA/GRA are fine as well as others outside the university that may wish to volunteer.

We are expecting to receive machines next week!!! Yikes! In preparation for the assembly process, we need to get volunteers together at the AISB (Andrews Information Systems Building), 1700 Pratt Dr., this weekend. We are planning to have a process orientation session start at 10:00 AM on Saturday, August 30, and last no longer than an hour. We can give you a few more details about the project if you show up and have not been before.

There are many things that need to be covered and many new volunteers needed. We have posted an electronic sign-up sheet for proposed shifts at (link deleted) We will need folks to sign-up as either a primary volunteer or on-call/backup person that we can call and bring in if we are short people. We know this is a very busy time for everyone and we want to get this done and over with quickly so it will not affect other work that needs to be done across campus. Once we have a definite date for the deliveries we will send out notification to those folks that said they were available on that day. We will have 48 hours notice of shipment, 72 hours notice of delivery. The machines will arrive on a staggered, every other day, schedule. Three shipments are expected for the total number of machines.

Orientation today was postponed, however, so I won't have more details until Wednesday =/ I'm looking forward to helping out, though.
 
Another VT cluster email

From the /. thread: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/08/30/1838222.shtml?tid=107&tid=137&tid=187

For those unbelievers, here's a little proof [vt.edu] and maybe a bit more [vt.edu]

Here's an official word [vt.edu] (search for Teraflop).

Also, here's the original e-mail that went out (a month ago) They never mentioned Apple though:

> Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 17:36:46 -0400
> From: Jason Lockhart <multimedia@vt.edu>
> Subject: Terascale Assembly Assistance
>
> Hello all,
>
> As you may know the College of Engineering in conjunction with the
> university Information Systems and Computing organization are
> building
> a 10 TeraOp, 1100 node supercomputing cluster. We are in need of
> volunteers to assist in three areas of assembly; cabling, RAM and PCI
> card install, and machine racking. We would like to get as many
> volunteers as possible.
>
> Some logistical things, there is not adequate parking for every
> volunteer to drive and park at the Computing Center. We
> would ask that
> volunteers either carpool (4 or more to a vehicle) or take the BT.
> Initial cabling will be done with the power cables beginning this
> coming Friday, August 1st. We have yet to set a start time,
> but I want
> to get an idea of who is available to assist on that day as well as
> availability for the weekend and early next week. I will forward the
> time to arrive as soon as I nail it down...should be tomorrow. The
> power cabling represents one third of the overall cabling that will
> need to be done.
>
> I need to get a list of those who will be assisting to the facilities
> people at the ISB as soon as possible. This list will be
> used to allow
> volunteers access to the building and the machine room. If
> you're not
> on the list you will not be allowed in! We want to have at
> least 30 to
> 40 people working at any one time on the project. If you know others
> that will be interested in assisting, please have them email me so I
> can get them on the roster.
>
> Thank you for your willingness to participate, and please respond and
> have others respond with "Terascale" in the subject so I can
> filter the
> volunteers properly.
>
> Thanks.
(E-mail signature removed)
 
First person account of VT cluster

From the /. thread: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/08/30/1838222.shtml?tid=107&tid=137&tid=187

For the ones who are questioning this existence, the order is shipping, the racks (a ton of them) are there in the main Computing Center server room. First they required all servers to be moved innto racks. Then they started moving servers around, including removing the Petaplex [vt.edu]. The power has been upgraded in the server room (the UPS backup generator actually). This caused a morning of basically all the important servers on campus having to go down for one day in the summer - I hated waking up to go switch off machines for that one. The AC has been upgraded to accomidate the huge amount of heat to be put out. It was't until I heard about the cluster that all the chages in the Machine Room made sense. Now they're recruiting help to do the grunt work of putting all the machines in the racks.

The stated objective was to be on the next 500 list. Dell and HP were considered, but they couldn't fill the order in time (possibly as they have made announcements of other large clusters recently) and Apple promised delivery after someone leaked the story of the cluster meetign with Dell and HP to Apple and Apple jumped at the chance.

Basically, the story is not a rumor from the point of view of the geeks on campus who have been effected by the preperations. I'll probably post the /. link to the campus geek list (If someone hasn't beaten me to it).

I'm disapointed about this being only on the Apple section of /. since a cluster this size is noteworthy of the frontpage. (Rumor - and this is rumor sice I haven't goe to direct sources on this - is that it will not be running OS X, and probably BlackLab or YellowDog [terrasoftsolutions.com] or SuSE.)
 
Originally posted by FelixDerKater
Mmmm. Budget cuts... Raise my tuition and cut more classes, but buy one of the fastest computing clusters in the world... Finances make no sense around here.
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The University will most likely be doing more than run word or quake on these machines. They will be doing serious research. Govt. agencies will be paying professors to have projects to do all sorts of research. The Uni will make plenty of money from this investment. I doubt that any student tuition money went to this project.
 
YDL and the G5

looks like YDL is perfectly at home with the G5

Terrasoft Store - G5's!

Or at least will be...

* We are working hard to provide Yellow Dog Linux support for the Apple G5s. In the mean time, we are pleased to offer Apple G5s with a partition for both Yellow Dog Linux and OS X. Your G5 will ship with the current set of CDs, 'Getting Started' book, and sticker. While your computer will immediately provide OS X, we will deliver the updated install CDs and 60-days Install Support --free
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Dan is exactly right. This has been going on for some time now.
I've seen the room where the cluster is going to go. They have already cleared out the space and have all the racks assembled. I've been told the G5's will have 4g ram per each system, and they are going to use a distro of linux. They are expecting all the sysytems in a week or two.
 
This is so cool! Finally I can piss off my PC friend's about Apple being on the Top 5 of the Most Powerfull, Fastest, Badest Kick-Ass computers in the World! This is very good for Apple, will give them credit for the PPC they now use. Apple PR can now brag a lot and investors will feel confident. Way to go Apple!
 
Re: Re: Re: G5 Fans

Originally posted by shadowfax
no, it's software controlled. that's why the G5s are running on 10.2.7 (partly). just like the light sensors on the 17 inch powerbook.

you comment about setting them to run all the time is funny too. how do you do that in linux, if you can't control them?
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Apple has specifically stated that if software is not controlling the fans, they run all the time. This is a common fail safe mechanism in any system.
 
big deal - Xeons already in Top 5, 122 of Top 500 are x86

Originally posted by Tiauguinho
This is so cool! Finally I can piss off my PC friend's about Apple being on the Top 5 of the Most Powerfull, Fastest, Badest Kick-Ass computers in the World!
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Perhaps you didn't look at the link - #3 is currently a Xeon cluster, and there's another Xeon cluster and an Itanium cluster in the top 10.

http://www.top500.org/list/2003/06/?page


On the summary page - 100 of the top 500 are Intel Pentium systems, and 22 more are Itanium and AMD.

I'm sure that you'll be pissed if your PC friends toss those figures back at you! ;)

And remember, the rankings are by measured sustained LINPACK double-precion performance, not by marketing GFLOPs. The G5 should do well (lots of memory bandwidth, dual float units) even though AltiVec cannot be used.

But until the machine is built and the numbers are run - "top 5" is a finger in the wind guess. :rolleyes:
 
Totally & Completely Sweet

ANY increase in the shipping computers from Apple helps Apple... increases profit (EVEN if these 1100 are a wash... the scale of production will yield some added economy).

Perhaps it will actually speed the release of the next G5's or speed the price reduction of the G5's shipping right now!

either is GREAT (did I mention I'm happy it wasn't a story about VT getting a cluster of DULLs?

:p
 
Originally posted by dguisinger
Because OS X has never been designed for large scale clustering, nor would they want to handle all those CPU cycles of running a GUI on every box (talk about a waste of billions of cycles a second). If you want to get in the top 5 with speed records, you have to go with a headless OS with no graphical subsystem.
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This is flawed - there are no CPU cycles being used by an idle GUI.
 
also, 1100 machines isn't going to cause much of a delay on over 100k orders - it might bump everyone back a few hours.
 
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