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20 Comments
- Sukino, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Everybody knows we won't need supercomputers after PS3 enters the market.
... I couldn't help it. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12The supercomputer would be cheaper to buy, though.
- deanlowe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Yeah, but the PS3 can play all those 10 Blu-Ray movies.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Dibs.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Maybe now someone will be able to play Crysis with all the graphical options turned up...
- ninepoundjammer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Almost mystical in scalability," that's a good one. Wonder who said that. I'm sure I could hook a few hundred 100MHz Pentiums together with any modern interconnect and demonstrate "mystical scalability".
Don't get me wrong though, cool machine in its day. - sophiaperennis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Let's send this thing to Sweden... hint hint.
- cbdgr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Il take it off their hands
- doldr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't think it's that easy... here's a few things to consider:
* it's not a few hundred Pentiums, it's ~9K procs.
* the interconnect used (custom 3d-mesh) is very optimized for those nodes
* scaling is not just hardware, among other things the systems runs a sandia micro kernel OS to minimize interruptions to the running applications.
...bottom line, "almost mystical scalability" might actually be justified here :-) - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"* it's not a few hundred Pentiums, it's ~9K procs.
Well, it's 9298 Pentium 2 Overdrives, so in Pentium 4s.. that's about 200 processors ;) [or in Opterons about 100].
* the interconnect used (custom 3d-mesh) is very optimized for those nodes
The interconnect used is very optimized for those node's /applications/. Different application, different node configuration. SETI@Home? No need for a 3D Mesh, Beowulf the bastards and be done. Rendering Toy Story? Well, maybe not, go with some heirarchical layout. Doing Fluid Dynamic computations along the curves of your new Ford Mustang to determine the optimum pitch angle for a spoiler? Definitely not, stick with the mesh. Besides, using modern interconnect technology, you could literally redefine the cluster's layout in software (somewhat, it depends on how high bandwidth your application actually is; if you're application's already struggling with Infiniband.. you're likely not going to have room to restructure in software).
* scaling is not just hardware, among other things the systems runs a sandia micro kernel OS to minimize interruptions to the running applications."
Or slap Linux on the machines and get those mythical 1000FPS Quake games you always wanted (though probably more than 2/3rds the frames will be dropped due to the bandwidth requirements of sending around game frames). Again, it really, really depends on the application of the supercomputer. - matthewsr2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I get the impression that they have something else alot better waiting to go into the space that it's occupying. like has been said, if they replace all those old machines with new 4 proc opterons, assuming they had quad setups before, if they use the dual core 880's to boot, that's 9298*2=18596 cores. cores*2.4GHz= 44630.4 Ghz of raw power, or about 45 teraflops. i think heat would be about the same too, so no need to upgrade the cooling!
granted, they'll probably go with a much cheaper proc [1700 a piece for the 880's isn't too cost effective. . .] and scale it back some, but then again this is the US federal government we're talking about! I'm sure they need some new uber machine to render virtual tests of their new nukes and could get ton's of funding from the current regime to do so! [not that i have a problem with that. . . much better than real world testing. . .] - chongy5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm sure they would love it sophia.........
- charmedguy18, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'll take it.
- rubin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I worked in the next-building-over when intel was assembling and testing this thing. Man it was something to walk through. Its sad to see it go to scrap :(
- mdoverkill, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And in 2008 Cray is going to hit Petaflops with that monster they are going to install at Oak Ridge for a cool 200 Million dollars
http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=873357&highlight=
I'm curious as to what is going to be done with the machine now that it's been decommissioned. Sell it off to the academic world? A private collector perhaps? (people have been known to buy old cray machines just because they looked really cool)
http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jamescurry/index.htm - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Sorry guys, it's already got my name on it.. lots of newbs to frag on that machine.
- ThreeDogg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What a lousy story. It didn't even elaborate as to why the computer was being decommissioned. If it's been at the top of the list for so long, yadda, yadda, yadda, then why kill it? Who cares if it's getting on the "old" side. Do you scrap a perfectly good classic Mustang just because it's old? Sound to me like a case of keeping up with the Jones'.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2"Dibs."
Okay, do you have room for 4,510 nodes of 333MHz Pentium 2's?
Hell, for the price of that entire machine, you could probably set up a teraflop machine in your basement (string together 128 Opterons [using O4's that's 32 Compute nodes]), a petabyte file server, and lease a few T1s and rent out your baby supercomputer to universities and companies when you're not using the cycles to rerender Toy Story in record time. - stonedgeek, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Yeah, but this thing has been running for years. The PS3, well, do they even have one of those working at full capacity yet?
- Splitt3rxx, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1pfft, the PS3 is 3x more powerful than that old hunk of junk.
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