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- inactive, on 11/18/2008, -1/+18Oh my...would I love to have that as a personal PC.
- Spuy767, on 11/19/2008, -1/+14Article or summary is wrong, the Mac Pros have 2 Quad core processors.
- peznex, on 11/19/2008, -0/+13The new Nvidia Tesla can do this with about 5 computers for about $50,000. How much do all those 325 Mac Pros cost???
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_s1070.html
All while using MUCH less energy. (800W x 5) vs (~500W x 325) - Spuy767, on 11/19/2008, -0/+7The Mac based super computer was one fo the first scalar units like this in the world to acheive this level of performance. The original version of the "big Mac" as it is affectionally known at VA Tech consisted of 1100 Power Macs and was in the top ten of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
- rapidripz, on 11/19/2008, -2/+9Thats pretty fast, i'd love to use MSCalculator on it.
- hbyrne, on 11/19/2008, -2/+8Pretty impressive.
- Butter66, on 11/19/2008, -1/+6I just have 326 extension cords running my 22.8 TFlop supercomputer (the extra plug is for my printer)
- zeptobyte, on 11/19/2008, -1/+6No, because it's a Mac.
- Paranoidmarvin, on 11/19/2008, -0/+5No, it's a Mac
- martinherrera, on 11/19/2008, -0/+5a personal personal computer?
- oboshoe, on 11/19/2008, -0/+5The secret of its ultra energy efficiency? - Dolphin meat.
God I love green technology - Darthyoshiboy, on 11/19/2008, -1/+5Not so interesting as it was in 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(computing) - brianpeiris, on 11/19/2008, -0/+4A Microwulf cluster can get you 25Gflops for about $1000 (~$40/Gflop)
http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/ - MacParrot, on 11/19/2008, -0/+3So very wrong! Dolphin meat doesn't reach full effiency until it's greased with baby Panda blood!
- Wornstrom, on 11/19/2008, -0/+3until you got the power bill... :P
- zeptobyte, on 11/19/2008, -0/+3I hope you're not referring to THIS supercomputer when you say the fastest in the world... 22.8TFLOPS isn't even close to the fastest.
- KIERANMULLEN, on 11/19/2008, -0/+2To bad their article isn't.
5 ads 4 short paragraphs. - Spuy767, on 11/19/2008, -0/+2Holy crap at the spelling errors. Note to self: Don't try to talk to a vendor on the telephone and type at the same time.
- doctechnical, on 11/19/2008, -0/+2RTFA - this is an experimental design that will be used to *develop* more power efficient computers.
- leerayIG88, on 11/19/2008, -0/+2Whatever happened to the potato/light bulb thing? It needs to replace the hand held flash light.
- sarchosis, on 11/19/2008, -2/+4Yes, because Macs can run Windows
- leerayIG88, on 11/19/2008, -0/+2Wow...I bet Apple made a fortune off of these guys.....
- AndrewMoyer, on 11/19/2008, -0/+2I was just about to post the same statement.
Maybe they're saying that because the Intel Core 2 Quad is actually just two Duos shoved in one package...
Who knows... - moghua, on 11/19/2008, -1/+3Power efficiency for a super computer comes down ENTIRELY to how much CPU speed/watt you can pack into a fixed amount of space. If your supercomputer is idle enough that it needs to go into a sleep mode, then you shouldn't have bought that supercomputer, or you should be spending more time finding people to lease time on your system. Using a rack full of Apple desktop machines may get you some press and ooh and ahh's from the Apple-hype-saturated press, but it is a massive waste of resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. One has to wonder what level of financial support Apple gives to this research group that they can afford the time to spend on doing what is essentially pointless research.
- inactive, on 11/19/2008, -1/+2http://ps3.qj.net/PS3-Cell-powered-Roadrunner-rate ...
The Top 500 Supercomputers list is published twice a year. It was back in June 2008 that the Roadrunner first got its grand laurels in the list. It's to be noted that since its first crown, the Roadrunner has been upgraded. It's now billed as not only the most powerful supercomputer, but also one of the most energy efficient systems in the entire list - Julie188, on 11/19/2008, -3/+4Cool, I'm not sure I've seen a Mac-based supercomputer ... Windows and Linux seem to be the fav for that.
- Spuy767, on 11/20/2008, -0/+1Good point, not something that I had thought about.
- autologica, on 11/20/2008, -0/+1Please note that the advancement here is -energy efficiency- , NOT teraflops. 22.8 Tflops is honestly not that much from a supercomputing standpoint.
The fastest supercomputers today sit on the order of petaflops, rather than teraflops. The fastest known supercomputers operate at ~ 1- 1.1 petaflops. The fastest university based supercomputer is TACS at UT - the Texas Ranger system, which peaks currently at 326 Tflops. The second fastest is at RPI, the CCNI, a BG/L which peaks at 100 Tflops. Just a friendly FYI :-)
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Advanced_Comput ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCNI
For more info. - tallguy240, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1two words: Cable management!! It might run at 22.8 TFlops, but if that is it in the background I would be hesitant to put my code on something that looked that thrown together.
- leerayIG88, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1how does one make multiple computers run as one? Is there special software? Do the machines need to be the same specs?
- MacParrot, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1Leave one open for your external hard drive on FireW...DAMN IT!
- bobartig, on 11/20/2008, -0/+1@moghua: No, really, your ignorance is just astounding. So, you're at high utilization. You're done now, right? That's it. Can't get any better. You've already figured that out, and there are NO other considerations whatsoever. *****, why didn't you call up Virginia Tech, one of the leading super computer research centers in the nation, and just let them know? Could have saved them millions of dollars in research money.
Or could it be that you STILL DON'T GET what their research is about. *Sigh*
"How do we make HPC more efficient? How about if we can sustain 100% CPU load while reducing power consumption elsewhere? Lets research thermals and energy consumption to optimize this."
"SHUT UP YOUR SERVERZ ARE ASLEEPZ LOL!!!111 MOAR IBM BLAEDZ PLEEZ!!! - Genma, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1jobs - "hey we got a bunch of macs sitting around, they ain't selling wtf are we gonna do with these"
vtech - "if we put em all next to each other, we can make one SUPER computer"
jobs - "sweet, hook em up and I'll get your spin from pr"
vtech - "this is gonna be awsome, eat it beowulf" - dark_ryan, on 11/28/2008, -0/+1I wonder if the Mac Pro supports operation with no graphics card. Unless they are harnessing the additional power that the GPU provides, it's a wasted item (that draws quite a bit of power).
Actually, I wish all computers supported this. I wish I could remove the STB TNT Velocity 128 in my PII server; but unfortunately, the system will not boot. - mtbterain, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1ha...i'm pretty sure macs use more then 500w...unless they have no graphics adapters, then i may be wrong
- RapidDave, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1WOW! I think they should of just got a couple of Mac Pros with 32 gbs of ram in them
- bobartig, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1Yes, but the Tesla is only good for computations that can be done on GPU, that is, floating point operations, whereas these computers can run 1200 copies of Office at once... or something.
- KIERANMULLEN, on 11/19/2008, -0/+15 Ads on this page blocked by the adblock firefox extension but only 4 paragraphs? Something is wrong here.
Some more detail would have been nice. - reqage, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1Never knew that existed. Pretty damn cool technology.
- Patrikimo, on 11/20/2008, -0/+1Most large clusters are never used 100% all the time for a large number of reasons. Partially because most applications only use a subset of the cluster at any one time, but they do run multiple applications in parallel to try and max out usage. I can name several reasons off the top of my head why even an application that is attempting to use all nodes does not need 100% of the CPU usage: 1) IO bound (throttle CPU), 2) CPU bound (sleep disk controllers and disks), 3) the problem doesn't lend itself to being fine grained parallel and some nodes finished a particular phase first and are waiting for the others to catch up. And there are others but those are the basic few. I know some of these guys have also done research on using power profiles to choose when to slow down and how to throttle so that maximum power is conserved and minimum CPU cycles are lost on the throttling. There's a lot more going on there than Apple machines.
- RapidDave, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1Yes it can. Don't forget that Macs can run windows
- tomz17, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1it has nothing to do with floating point or not floating point.
The graphics cards are only really good at running SMD code without branches (in other words, a very particular class of problems). A traditional CPU is still needed to run most code!!! - bobartig, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1They're probably using Macs because the sophisticated thermal calibration system is so superior to other computers, with various thermal sensors and discrete cooling regions, instead of having to build a lot of that hardware themselves and retrofitting it into other cases. I don't think they're talking about sleeping computers, and I don't think you really have any idea as to what their research involves.
"But, what makes System G so green? “We set out to design the fastest supercomputer with advanced power management capabilities such as power-aware CPUs, disks, and memory. Our partnership with Apple ensured the most advanced network of power and thermal sensors ever assembled in this type of machine,” commented Cameron, an expert on green computing. According to Cameron, System G has thousands of power and thermal sensors. As the world’s largest power-aware cluster, System G will allow CHECS researchers to design and develop algorithms and systems software that achieve high-performance with modest power requirements, and to test such systems at unprecedented scale." - inactive, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1lame for mentioning mac when the chips are made by intel.. anything to get publicity.. no?
- moghua, on 11/19/2008, -0/+1I don't think you understand my criticism. If your supercomputer is not ~100% utilized then you are wasting a lot more money than just the cost of energy used to keep it running. Throwing temperature sensors and fan controls all over the place to control power utilization is one way to increase the efficiency of UNUSED CAPACITY, but not buying that capacity in the first place is a FAR BETTER approach. As such, if these folks want to improve the efficiency of supercomputers, they should be spending money on implementing better scheduling algorithms and business methods for estimating capacity. But please go on and tell me how much better the "thermal calibration" is in a desktop Apple machine. Compared to a purpose built QS22 blade, the performance per watt of energy used is still going to be far lower.
- bipolarruledout, on 11/19/2008, -3/+3Because they like to waste your money on macs?
- zooey1234, on 11/19/2008, -1/+1Hey, I know those guys. He's my dentist and his dental hygienist.
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