What is Digg?69 Comments
- fifrenzy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18obviously their site is not hosted off these computers...
- fifrenzy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15"Houston, we have a problem"
- SixSider, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Columbia System Facts
Based on SGI® NUMAflex™ architecture
20 SGI® Altix™ 3700 superclusters, each with 512 processors
Global shared memory across 512 processors
10,240 Intel Itanium® 2 processors
Current processor speed: 1.5 gigahertz
Current cache: 6 megabytes
1 terabyte of memory per 512 processors, with 20 terabytes total memory
Operating Environment
Linux® based operating system
PBS Pro™ job scheduler
Intel® Fortran/C/C++ compiler
SGI® ProPack™ 3.2 software
Interconnect
SGI® NUMAlink™
InfiniBand network
10 gigabit Ethernet
1 gigabit Ethernet
Storage
Online: 440 terabytes of Fibre Channel RAID storage
Archive storage capacity: 10 petabytes - zkirill, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Did we just take out NASA's servers??? Go Digg... 0_o
- dongiaconia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9NASA = Need Additional Server Admins
- nailPuppy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7440 terabytes...so nice.
- florin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7The nice thing is that Columbia (or any other Linux-based SGI supercomputer) is running Linux - and a not too different version from a "normal" distribution.
- SixSider, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6And it is only #4 in the world...
Link to #1:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/rsc.bluegene_2004.html - RubeusEsclair, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Can I get one in an ATX case?
- Kitsune818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Heh, I love articles about supercomputers, and then the obligatory posts by people saying "I want one!"
What for? I doubt very few people reading this page could actually do anything useful with the thing (myself included.. although I'm sure tons of people here think they could since they've taken C/C++ 101 and maybe a Fortran/Cobol/Pascal class).. and even then, I'm not sure you could do much with it that would be considered "fun". Not to mention powering the thing. Back when you average home PC was a Mac Classic/Plus or an XT/AT, I used to get to do pretty much whatever I wanted with a bunch of DEC and NEC mainframes.. the power difference was tremendous.. but there really wasn't anything that made the big systems more fun, other than maybe email. I'd imagine with one of the new supercomputers, assuming you could get X working, you might be able to grab one or two processors and do the same things you do with your desktop, but the rest of it would just be idling away. You'd have to run distributed.net or seti/folding/primes@home on some special software just to have something for it to do.
It would be like a 700HP commuter car in an area with a 30MPH speed limit. - TheRepublic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3i wonder what their Light bill with FPL is like.
- Kitsune818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't mean this as a joke.. but given the usual inaccuracy in Digg article descriptions, did anyone else expect to see a charred AP-101 or, even more typical, a slightly beat-up System/360?
- martynda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yes... because that's all that shuttle safety depends on is computing power. Forget the millions of other parts and the thousands of people who work on these things. No possibility of human error or hardware failure... at all.
- florin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'd like to see how Columbia performs when combined with these new modules:
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2006/march/rasc.html - Kitsune818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm definately a sucker for the blinking light phenomena, the modem room at the ISP where I used to work was one of the cooler things I've seen in my life. :)
What I'd really like to see is a more easily scalable personal computer platform. Something the size of your standard ATX tower/mini-tower, but make each "drive bay" a module running the full length, with an interconnect ready for every module. Bare minimum would be one processor module (component power of your choice) and a storage module (also internals of your choice). Need more processing power? Slide another processor module in there and click it into place.. The OS detects this and adapts accordingly (Perhaps you'd need to recompile some things.. but seemless would be nice). Need more storage? Slide another storage module in there. Since you'd be able to fit multiple drives into one module, you could have a RAID in one module. Run out of room? Get another case, an interconnect cable to the first case, and start filling it up. swap out old modules as they become obsolete.. Hell, the power supply could be swapable the same way.
Sort of a personal mini-rack. One part of this I haven't figured out is exactly how to work graphics.. but assuming you could create the hypothetical super-bus above, you may be able to just add graphics modules as needed.. 2, 3, 4.. Another problem is how well this would scale once that bus was saturated..it would need to be self-adapting in ways I don't think we can yet acheive once it started to get really big..
I think I spend too much time around blade servers :) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So when do I get to play with it?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Yummy. Where can I buy a system like this as my 2nd PC. For web browsing and emailing stuff, nothing too stressful :)
- SixSider, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Yeah, but can it run OSX? (I kid.)
- rockyrobins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1But can it play Solitare?
- tylerni7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1But can it run linu-- oh... right
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5I wonder if HL2 would run with no stutter on that machine?
- Splitt3rxx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Intel isn't crap, seriously, don't be such a fanboy. i have an AMD 3500+ in my PC because it is a great budget CPU for gaming, itamium 2 is a good platform for something like this.
- dangson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Wow, those look nice when they're covered up (the last two pictures).
Looks like something out of Star Wars. - breakneckridge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I wonder how many teraflops it does.
- pmac, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors"
Ahhh, so that's who bought them. - a1532b, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I would sure like to play F.E.A.R. on that thing!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2leave it to the government to spend money on intel processors. WTF! Stop spending my money on crap!
- milkfilk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Since when does SGI run Linux? That's really good news, I always shuddered at IRIX (what SGI used to run).
Kitsune, the blinking light factor is way high on a box like this. You better believe I'd find something great to do with it... sell half of it, buy crazy bandwidth, mirror imdb, set up an IRC hub, sell Ventrillo hosting. Finally have two boxes to play with MySQL replication/hot redundancy?
But Kitsune has a really good point about C/C++ skills. I imagine programming for 10,000 CPUs (wow) is not easy. It requires bottom-up design from the very beginning to make use of all of it.
Of course, the holy grail is to get something like Oracle Grid or the promises of Sun's N1 computing grid to actually work on demand. Your desktop would be on a computing grid and if you had to do something 'difficult' (let's say encode a video, render something 3d, something else cpu bound), you'd (in theory) hop on the grid and the results would be done by the massive farm and not your piddly desktop.
The reality of this grid craze is quite different as it stand today: it's super expensive to have some grid sitting around doing nothing; your grid probably isn't Intel so you'd have to cross-compile your apps (super hard); N1 and Oracle Grid are job based (afaik) and it's a throw back to the mainframe days ... it's very labor intensive.
We have a ways to go still. - florin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Check your facts again. This is actually pretty brand-spanking-new technology.
- Tansons, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Imagine if it can run games.
Quake 4 at 1000 FPS, drool - TexMachina, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Nice to see SGI is hanging on somewhere.
- fireport, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1nice.. but can it play quake . ;)
- jrocklin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@fifrenzy
At least get the quote right: "Houston, we've had a problem"
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-13-1.html - Tansons, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Why the hell did they use Intel Itanium 2 processors ???????
If the use the AMD Optron processors instead, it would use less energy, be more powerfull, and cost less too.
AMD > Intel - nacks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0columbia is actually broken up into a bunch of smaller single system images (most of them 512 processors but there is one large 2048 processor system). So, you don't log into "columbia" but rather any one of several large systems that make up the loose cluster. Most of the work on these systems is run as a batch job through PBS (Portable Batch Scheduler). The system can be used as a large cluster through a high speed interconnect (infini-band). This was how the system was put on the top 500 list (they ran the LINPACK benchmark on all of the separate images via the interconnect).
- t94xr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0screw that, just "jack in" matrix like and have a free for all :P
- thatsiebguy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1How fast it play FEAR?
- SystemError, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4I have shot parts of a film at the nasa super computer facility, very cool place.
- nacks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The name was meant to be a tribute to the crew of the Columbia. I don't see anything wrong with that unless the project turned out to be a failure (which as far as I know it hasn't).
- kevmonster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Greetings Professor Falkin, Would You Like To Play A Game? ...."
- t94xr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And yet im sitting here waiting to discover what the hell you just said?!
- Nicarlo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0damn... i got to get me one of those
- OliverStone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 Scientists are using Columbia to discover and design more carbon nanotube-polymer materials
- GoFlyaKite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1OK! Hand over the Super Computer and Nobody Gets Hurt!
OK! Hand over the Super Computer and Nobody Gets Hurt! - nacks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0sorry, this reply was meant for the comment below this one (Tansons).
- nacks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Blame that on SGI. For some reason they decided to get in bed with Intel and bet their future that the Itanium2 wouldn't turn out to be a dog. It has cause some problems since there are a lot of code out there that is still 32 bit and a lot of scientific applications that are never going to be ported to Itanium2 (like IDL and Mathlab). There might be an out for SGI at some point to dump Intel for AMD, but with SGI's current financial problems (layoffs just several weeks ago and a new CEO) they are running out of time.
- nacks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Actually, they do have a pretty big admin staff to administer the 20 systems. It also doesn't hurt that NAS is located at the Ames Research Center which is right across the road from SGI headquarters/engineering.
- pilot3033, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2~70 diggs and it goes down....wow.
- alanmarchman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1It's sad that you can go into the military as a computer programmer and learn Fortran, and the only place that probably still uses it it NASA. They have all that computing power, yet we still lose shuttles.
- goflyers, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I want to leave a more offensive comment, but I'll just hope that everyone can see why the name Columbia is a bad name for a computer made by NASA.
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