Linux Clusters Finally Break the TeraFLOP barrier

cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org has just released its latest list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching 3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier include: LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa ), the University at Buffalo at #22 and Sandia National Lab at #32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP ), and Argonne National Labs at #46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by Megware ) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."

Enough Links?

[rob-fu]

It's going to take me 4 hours to read all of this.

Question?

[beldraen]

How long until computing powerful enough to render the probability thought patterns of a manager? That's what I want to know..

Re:Enough Links?

[Anonymous Coward]

What he said! Holy crap! This is the main thing I don't like about slashdot, I can hardly ever tell what the main point of the post is if I have to figure out what link to click first.

can you imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

a single node from one of these clusters?

(hey what else can I say, it's already a cluster)

in anticipation of the barrage of beowulf cliches

[Slashdotess]

in anticipation of the barrage of beowulf cliches:

Imagine all that power in a single computer with a single processor!
I know, I'm cheezy

Re:Enough Links?

[handsomepete]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of all those links!

It would probably end up linking to the greatest pr0n site of all time...

I knew a Tara

[Anonymous Coward]

She was more perky when I knew her, but I suppose she probably has quite a bit of flop these days.

Re:Question?

[Guppy06]

"How long until computing powerful enough to render the probability thought patterns of a manager? That's what I want to know.."

Good luck. Last I checked, that one falls under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem.

Re:Enough Links?

[jdkincad]

Look on the bright side, it might just spread out the /. effect enough to keep all the linked sites on line.

Re:Links

[isorox]

Is that enough links there? Glad this isn't that impressive to me.

Will we be able to slashdot every one of them though? PErhaps someone should post some mirrors

EARTH-SIMULATOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Read it again. What does it say? EARTH-SIMULATOR

It's gonna take some CPU power to simulate earth, don't you think??

Re:Wow!

[xenode]

If we told you, we'd have to kill you.

Re:EARTH-SIMULATOR

[gl4ss]

int simulate_earth()
{
sleep(years_to_ms(30000));
r eturn 42
}

dunno what they need the computing power for..'
oh yeah, to generate the program to call that.

Re:Have another coffee while it Boots

[jelle]

It's a cluster, so I can imagine the nodes can boot individually, in parallel. Plus I can imagine the system never goes down as a whole, just some nodes may go down when parts break or other maintenance. 1 bootup per lifetime...

Perhaps the boot speed is limited by the ramp-up speed of the local power plant.

Re:How many FLOPS

[taviso]

pfft, FLOPS are for weenies - real men use bogomips [clifton.nl]. ;)

$ grep bogomips /proc/cpuinfo
bogomips : 2962.22

Re:Have another coffee while it Boots

[flight666]

I had a K570 at a previous job that took literally 45 minutes to boot from power-on to login prompt.

Turning off the extended mem-check reduced this to 25 mins.

I once had a SCSI cable go bad, and I had to boot that darn thing up about a dozen times, swapping out cables, to find the bad cable. What a bad night that was! Swap cable, take 25-min break, watch SCSI errors from kernel. lather, rinse, repeat. 3 hours to find one bent pin on a scsi cable. yuck.

Re:Question?

[Masa]

How long until computing powerful enough to render the probability thought patterns of a manager?

That shouldn't be too hard... I bet that my Palm Pilot has enough power to predict exactly, what my boss is going to say in the next meeting tomorrow.

If it's about schedules, he'll say:

Work...

1. harder
2. smarter
3. cheaper
4. faster

In that order.

If it's about project goals, he'll ask me to:

Make...

1. miracles

If it's about specifications, he'll say: "I have no idea. You find out yourself." And for anything else it would be just blank. All blank.

On the other hand... if a manager actually has any real thoughts... Well, that would be as easy as to predict patterns from a pure chaos.

Article /.ed

[Alu3205]

I hope none of those super computers was the webserver or else it's just the top 499 now. :p

Re:Enough Links?

[zdzichu]

/me carefully clicks all the links with middle button, to open them in tabs :)

Re:Enough Links?

[Jugalator]

What he said! Holy crap! This is the main thing I don't like about slashdot, I can hardly ever tell what the main point of the post is if I have to figure out what link to click first.

Just act like the average Slashdot member. Never click any links to read the articles and just post your thoughts regarding the subject. :-)

Everything get so much easier that way!

All Shook Up

[SEWilco]

"Linux Clusters Finally Break the TeraFLOP barrier"

As when other barriers are broken, a bit of a shock wave was created.
Windows machines for miles around were rattled.

Just wondering....

[JustinAlias]

How many TeraFLOPs is actually needed to negate the Slashdot effect?

Does Microsoft compete in this space?

[e_n_d_o]

Are there any Microsoft Windows-based systems that qualify as supercomputers?

(This is a serious question, I have no idea if they do or do not.)

Re:Impressive numbers

[di0s]

The real impressive numbers would be the cost of Win2k Server licences for all those computers...=)
Sorry, couldn't resist.

Imagine....

[DarkHelmet]

All those computers that meet Doom3's system requirements...

... And they're used for trivial things like finding aliens, weather prediction and unified theory.

1. The weatherman is usually wrong.
2. Aliens are abducting us. We need to send radio signals to Fife, Alabama, not out into space.
3. Unified Theory is based on Heisenburg's stuff... You can have relativity and quantum mechanics... but not both at the same time. Damn, that guy was a genius. By the way, the unified theory is:

   e = 42; // always 42.

Of course, I'm sure Doom3 has this somewhere in its source code, so ummm... go crunch 40 TFLOPS on that ;)

</humor>

Re:It seems like the Apple Mac.....

[Kashif Shaikh]

"It's just that Intel/AMD didn't make a song and dance about breaking the GFLOP barrier..."

I don't know 'bout AMD, but Intel has these funny BunnyPeople to promote anything from breaking speed limits to new processors as shown here [intel.com]. So contrary to what you believe, yes Intel does make a song and dance(plus commercial) about [insert_marketing_gibberish_here]!

Re:Question?

[AndroidCat]

It can already be done by taking a Tamagotchi [mimitchi.com] and relabeling the buttons: Feed = Overtime, Attention = Ego Stroke. Cleaning up the poop remains the same.

If it dies, you're fired.