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NASA Installs Linux Supercomputer 189

Posted by Cliff from the penguins-exploring-the-ocean dept.
unassimilatible writes: "Federal Computer Week reports that NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system. The new supercomputer -- an SGI AltixT 3000 single-system image supercomputer -- has been installed at the space agency's Ames Research Center in California."
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NASA Installs Linux Supercomputer More

NASA Installs Linux Supercomputer

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  • Imagine a beo...oh never mind.

    • Almost but not quite... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @05:37AM (#7518333) Homepage
      Don't hit the post button if your joke requires a life support system such as:

      "oh, never mind"
      Printed backspace symbols^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcharacters
      ...pause (Think about it longer, you'll find a new way to make an old joke funny!)
      A comment relating to the moderation system or karma
      Rehashing all your old Slashdot memes are belong to Natalie Portman's hot grits in Soviet Russia goatse.cx posts YOU!
      Using any form of Slashdot cliche as an attempt at humor
      Ending your post with @^T#G@#YHB^#@$NO CARRIER

  • Uh-oh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hanzie ( 16075 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:18AM (#7518145)
    The article explicitly says they're using NUMA archeticture.

    Obviously, it's running SCO's intellectual property. SGI doesn't really own NUMA, they only wrote it. Deep down, it's really a derivative of vi.

  • Altix (Score:5, Informative)

    by Preach the Good Word ( 723957 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:20AM (#7518150)
    SGI's Altix handles up to 64 processors on a Linux kernel using the patches they release as opensource. As SGI hacks away at their bigmem and numa patches, they'll be able to handle more and more processors. The plan is to eventually graft enough IRIX technology to support just as many processors on Altix as they do with MIPS processors in Origin with IRIX.

    Even if you aren't a fan of Itanium2, Linux, or NUMA, these patches are bringing some nifty high-end tech to the free software arena.

    • Re:Altix (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rf0 ( 159958 )
      The thing is this Altix is 256 CPU machine in a single system image. They are looking to take this to 512 in a single image. That is some serious scaling

      Rus

    • Re:Altix (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20, 2003 @05:10AM (#7518271)
      The only IRIX technology they're grafting is the SCSI layer. With the 2.6 kernel, there really isn't that much they need to do. They're testing their 512 processor systems on linux 2.6 as we speak, btw.
      • They claim to do quite a bit more on their oss page [sgi.com]
      • Are you sure there is not that much to do?

        I don't think there is a problem with the scaling.. or they are fixing it anyway.

        The problem would be the NUMA Does the 2.6 kernal support NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access)?

        For NUMA to work efficiently you need to get the data and the processors close together. Most (if not all) previous the time Linux is used it does not matter if you shuttle the processes from processor to processor. In dual etc processor systems the memory acess time is the same. At the mom

        • Re:Altix (Score:5, Informative)

          by GooberToo ( 74388 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @09:39AM (#7519045)
          Tons and tons of work has gone into 2.6 to make it fully NUMA aware and scalable. Last I heard, there were still some minor memory allocation node biases left in the scheduler, however, those are actively being worked on. Furthermore, they were considered corner cases and not general NUMA processing problem domains.

          IIRC, one or more the developers has a 128 (or larger, I forget) CPU NUMA system that 2.6 periodically gets tested against. Many smaller NUMA systems are commonly used by several others. It seems that many, but not all of the NUMA optimizations, also help SMP systems as well. As such, the developers have not been shy about embracing it. When the O(1) scheduler was writen, it was a very short period of time before they started adding HT and NUMA optimizations to it.
      • I don't suppose there's any chance that the Linux XFS team is planning to bring us guaranteed rate I/O? I'm sure that would require some modifications to other parts of the kernel...
        • That's an interesting idea. Just the same, does that fall under the realtime XFS extensions? Does SGI currently offer guaranteed I/O rates natively? How do you assign I/O? On a per process basis? Part of an API that each process must use to request a minimal I/O level? How does the layer know how much I/O it can guarantee? Seems like the HA and associated driver, VM, and VFS caches would all make for a huge difference in what it could guarantee. How would an implementation cope with all of these var

    • Re:Altix (Score:3, Informative)

      by EyeSavant ( 725627 )
      The technology is fantastic. It will be even more fantastic when it works :-(. At the moment you have to be nuts to buy one of these, as they are complete bleeding edge technology. In Amsterdam they "upgraded" from a 1000 processor mips machine to a 416 processor Altix/Itanium2 machine. On paper an itanium processors should be 5 times faster than the old mpis processors. At the moment we are lucky to see 2 or 3 speedup. And that is AFTER you have tuned the damn things for itaniums.

      It seems to be quite

      • On paper an itanium processors should be 5 times faster than the old mpis processors. At the moment we are lucky to see 2 or 3 speedup. And that is AFTER you have tuned the damn things for itaniums.
        It seems to be quite normal for code to run slower on the new machine than the old... So you have a tough porting job to do...

        Is this speedup per processor or overall on your application? In any case, any time you move to a new system, you may have to do some tuning of your software for the new machine. For

        • Re:Altix (Score:2, Interesting)

          by EyeSavant ( 725627 )
          Is this speedup per processor or overall on your application? In any case, any time you move to a new system, you may have to do some tuning of your software for the new machine. For example, the Sun E10K+ has memory latencies very similar across the system. You can write code that works fine there, but when you move to a NUMA machine it may run very poorly because of memory access patterns and memory locality to the processor. You'll need to tune your software to make it run better.

          The speedup I quoted i

      • yea.. my co-worker who does our Origin/Altix admin stuff is always bitching about chasing Intel compiler bugs.. even on the 8.0 compilers.
    • yep.. it's great.. we have a 48proc altix at work, and we have another one on order. (1.3ghz I2)

      Rumor has it.. SGI has 128proc's in beta in their labs. That would match the capacity of the origin 3800's that our Alitx replaced. (we had 2 96proc 3800's)
    • Yeah, it's sort of funny to see posts to linux-kernel from SGI people complaining about things that break on 512-way machines.

  • All research welcome (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by fr0m ( 692421 )
    It is fairly obvious that changes in our environment has increased rapidly during the past years.
    Last winter has been one of the coldest in a few hundred years in Sweden. I was there (south part) during christmas and the warmest temperature we had was -24. The same goes for the summer here in Europe. So damn hot. Here in Paris we've had thousands of deaths due to the heat.

    Something strange is happening. All research about our "new" environment is welcome. Ocean or otherwise. What are your thoughts?

    • But the meteorogists say that the superwarm summers and supercold winters fit in "normal variation". Whom to believe in when your gut reaction combined with the flood of information about the greenhouse effect and global warming make you feel like "this is it, climate change in action" and the scientists say otherwise?

    • Re:All research welcome (Score:1, Informative)

      by Zloopy ( 595401 )
      I think it's mostly BS. The environmentalist wackos use every occurance of what should be called "weather" as a proof of (man made) global warming.

      Last winter was indeed very cold, and The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvardsverket) ran lots of ads in newspapers and on billboards about global warming, and how warm the weather is and that you must cut down on driving or else all snow will melt.

      When it was the coldest winter in at least a generation, people laughed at the ads, but environment
      • I think it's mostly BS.

        While this may be true, since we only have one earth/climate to live in why not err on the side of caution? Research, developement, and implimentation of less/non-polluting energy sources is a huge market waiting to be developed. Yes, for now clean energy costs more, but those costs are going to creating gennerally good jobs. Its not just a loss.

        Also, think about the "worst-case scenarios":

        If global warming is BS and we move our economies to cleaner energy, then at worst we spend
    • Something strange is happening.

      Say it with me:

      Weather is not climate.

      Weather is not climate.

      Weather is not climate.

      It is impossible to correlate one specific weather event with a change in climate. While it may be related, it could just be a statistical anomoly.

      Last winter has been one of the coldest in a few hundred years in Sweden.

      What was the cause of that winter? Was it part of a trend, or was it a random fluke? If it was part of a trend, could the current weather be related to a si

  • NASA was going to roll this out earlier... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AvantLegion ( 595806 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:26AM (#7518165) Journal
    ... but their copy of Mandrake 9.2 broke their supercomputer's LG CD-ROM drive.

  • Patches ? (Score:2, Funny)

    by noselasd ( 594905 )
    Whewre can I get the patches from SGI to make 2.4 run on such insane hardware ?

  • In other news..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by micaiah ( 593598 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:35AM (#7518183)
    SCO sues Nasa for using Linux.

    Darl McBride stated yesturday, "Since Nasa is using Linux we now own the entire universe and are claiming our rightful ownership."

    • Strange, I thought I have more rights on
      Linux than SCO. At least, I have the right
      to distribute the Linux operating system to
      others. SCO has violated the GPL; thus, they
      don't even have distribution rights.


      (Oh, assuming that is they recognize the
      validity of the GPL, for if not, that will
      be one additional reason they cannot legally
      distribute Linux; although, almost everyone
      else on Earth is free to distribute!)

    • Darl McBride stated yesturday, "Since Nasa is using Linux we now own the entire universe and are claiming our rightful ownership."

      That's just silly [slashdot.org]

    • SCO sues Nasa for using Linux. Darl McBride ...

      In yet other news, Darl McBride is now so afraid how NASA is going to respond, that he have hired a couple of bodyguards.

  • they also have. (Score:5, Funny)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:42AM (#7518200) Homepage
    A 512 CPU and 1024 CPU IRIX system. The 512 one is referred to as the small one :)

    Rus

  • Not quite "Supercomputing" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quigonn ( 80360 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:43AM (#7518203) Homepage
    The SGI Altix 3000 is not quite a supercomputer. Our local university got the very first model for production use of the Altix 3000's successor, the Altix 3700, in last April or so, and it made it in the TOP 500 supercomputer list in last June, but it fell out of the current list. And the 3700 is even faster than the 3700, so what's so special about it?
    • What's special about it is that it supports more processors - namely 5120 - on a single image under Linux than any other supercomputer before.
    • And the 3700 is even faster than the 3700, so what's so special about it?

      If it's faster than itself, then with some handy infinite recursion you can prove it's infinatly fast!

      Sounds pretty special to me.
    • "And the 3700 is even faster than the 3700, so what's so special about it?"

      It's obviously faster than itself, that sounds pretty special to me!
      • "And the 3700 is even faster than the 3700, so what's so special about it?"

        It's obviously faster than itself, that sounds pretty special to me!

        Those pesky overclockers again! What will they do next.. overclock there toaster??

    • Re:Not quite "Supercomputing" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Error27 ( 100234 ) <error27.gmail@com> on Thursday November 20, 2003 @05:42AM (#7518342) Homepage Journal
      The thing that is special about the NASA computer is that it is a single image system and not really some cluster type thing. Mostly people say that Linux 2.4 scales well up to 8 processors, but this system has 256 processors.

      SGI is working on scaling the kernel to even more processors. For example, Erik Jacobson from SGI recently noticed that 'cat /proc/interrupts' doesn't work if you have 512 CPUs in your system. Frankly when I saw that I thought it was a joke, but I guess it must be real if they already have paying customers.

      • Linus is going to ask the responsible for the /proc/interrupts code how on hell didn't he tested that at home:
        " Why didn't you test /proc/interrupts with 512 CPU in ?"

        DUH!!
      • Ya, I followed that thread too. I thought it was fairly interesting myself. Seems the kernel runs out of kernel memory to handle the kernel-like printf statement. The fix is to convert it to an iterative approach whereby, many smaller chucks of memory simple get reused. Appears the infrastructure was already in place from another part of the kernel. So, seems it will be a fairly quick fix for them.

        I knew it wasn't a joke (or certainly hoped not) and immediately thought, WOW! Serious scalability!

      • Single System Image is Nice (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @10:01AM (#7519169) Homepage Journal

        The thing that is special about the NASA computer is that it is a single image system

        I did parallel code development on Sun SMP boxes. Starting up jobs, seeing what was going on, killing zombies, debugging was all easier on one system than through different boxes you'd have to ssh over to see.

        Even though I was using MPI and getting ready for a distributed memory architecture for the really big runs, the development was easier on the SMP box that showed a single system image.

        I haven't used things like OpenMOSIX [sourceforge.net], and Don Becker, early pioneer of Linux ethernet drivers (not many other folks can claim a complete decade of experience with Linux networking), founded a company called Scyld [scyld.com] that sells Linux clusters with single system image.

        Sometimes it's convenient to see the whole box as if it were one, even though efficient programming dictates that you become aware of the different costs of data access (network, main memory, cache, disk). Practically speaking, developing and running parallel jobs is a higher user productivity proposition on a single system image.

  • how does this compare? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kjba ( 679108 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:46AM (#7518209)
    "NASA plans to study the ocean's future with the help of the world's first supercomputer of its kind to run on the Linux operating system."

    Nice to know that it is the fastest Linux supercomputer, but how does this compare to the other top-ranked supercomputers in the world?

    • Like Lightning [lanl.gov], a Linux-based Opteron cluster ranked at #6 in the newly released 2003 list?

      By "of its kind" the article meant that is used for oceanography. By "fastest" they mean that it excelled in ECCO.
    • That is not that hard.. There is an 416 processor SGI Altix at Sara in amsterdam, that is currently 41 in the top 500. (www.top500.org) The problem with these machines is that they run benchmarks really well, but if you try doing anything real with them you do not get anything like the proper performance... That is more a problem of the Itanium2 than anything else though. And the Intel compiler for itaniums is buggy as hell. This is bleeding edge technology :-(.
    • Nice to know that it is the fastest Linux supercomputer

      It's not. They lied. This is the fastest Linux supercomputer:

      http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/
      Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
      Integrity rx2600 Itanium2 1.5 GHz, Quadrics Interconnect
      1,936 processors
      8633 rmax / 11616 rpeak

  • Study the oceans FUTURE? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Jeez, if NASA has a method of studying the FUTURE of anything, you'd think somebody would have the vision to study the future of the stock market or even the sports books in Vegas.

    • Info about the future of stock markets or sports books in Vegas may be more immediately monetizable than info about the future of the oceans.

      But...

      The future of the oceans is a lot more financially valuable than either of them. Trends in the Oceans could have major economic impacts that send stockmarkets spiraling to their deaths.

  • this does not even make the top500 so by ... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    this does not even make the top500 so by definition it is NOT A SUPERCOMPUTER.

    top500.org does show that for 3.2 million of macs and under 2 million of infiniband and hardware racks you can get to the THIRD position in top500,org using macintohses and the mac os x.

    • Re:this does not even make the top500 so by ... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Eh, are you kidding? Most standard Altix are listed on TOP500, and this is not a standard Altix so it should be on among the top 100. And you cannot compare a simple cluster (the Big Mac) with a real supercomputer (the Altix) with a single shared memory system.

  • Bad Influence (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20, 2003 @04:56AM (#7518233)
    Isn't using a supercomputer that has hundreds of very hot processors to simulate climatic change going to directly cause a change in the climet be ejecting large quantities of hot air?
    • Isn't using a supercomputer that has hundreds of very hot processors to simulate climatic change going to directly cause a change in the climet be ejecting large quantities of hot air?

      That would be a manifestation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, thereby making this the first commercial supercomputer to exhibit Quantum effects. I can read the headline now: "Linux runs Quantum supercomputers!"

  • 3000 Processors @ $699 ea ~ $2.1 million
    3000 Processirs @ $1399 ~ $4.2 million

    So that's where SCO was planning on getting its money for Linux. It all makes sense now

  • Nice to see SGI still making sales (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @05:14AM (#7518284) Journal
    ... I have something of a soft-spot for SGI, and it's nice to see them still making high-profile sales - it'll do their government profile no end of good :-)

    512 processors running a single image is pretty cool :-))

    Simon

    • Oh, I agree, and I'd go further - a single image over 512 procs is more than cool, it's very good engineering.

      As with many things, the compute problems that get thrown at "supercomputers" or big clusters or whatever, will vary enormously. Some will require lots of CPU but have little need for a large network connection. Others will work much better with this sort of highly-connected system - low-latency, high bandwidth, single system image. There are some parts of problem space that best fit machines like

    • I agree - I too have a soft-spot for SGI, and am glad to see that they are still getting customers in a market that fewer and fewer people really understand a need for. Linux & SGI aside, large systems like this are just plain cool!

  • How is this "News" for nerds? (Score:3, Informative)

    by ODD97 ( 645414 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @06:34AM (#7518455) Homepage
    If I'm not mistaken, NASA *invented* the bewulf cluster. And it ran Linux then, too.
    Clicky [nasa.gov]

  • This new supercomputer has paid off already... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20, 2003 @06:47AM (#7518485)
    ... as it has completed it's simulation of the ocean in order to predict it's future:

    cold and wet.

  • According to SGI Japan, Ministory of Education and Science
    has orderd 4 Altix 3700 computer to make up 4 node
    super computer, November 18th.

    Each node, which altix3700 is equipped with 64 cpu. Total
    main memory has reached 1.9TB.

    It's also said that hardwares will be installed and in
    operation in the early half of 2004.
  • So anyone got a copy of /proc/cpuinfo from this mother?

    (Oh and do you do something special to 'top' so it doesn't give you 512 lines of CPU state?)
    • They don't need to change top, NASA has all those nifty video walls that We the people like paying for so much. The admin will just open a >512x80 xterm...
    • I haven't used an Altix, but from the docs it seems sgi's patches provide a lot of the tools and goodies from IRIX. On a montster Origin, "top" gives 4 nicely formatted status lines above the process details. For specific details on each processor and other aspects of the machine, there's "osview". There's also a handy script called "hinv" that prints out a hardware inventory of the machine. "hinv -m" even prints out the part numbers and laser-burnt serial numbers for the various boards in a system.
      I believ
  • ...a cluster of these!!! ;)
  • NASA engineers worked with SGI to expand the Altix systems' capabilities. It has achieved a high speed of 2.45 trillion operations per second.

    Unfortunately, NASA will (mis)manage this cluster to running at 0.245 trillion ops per second.
  • I am at work just at email reading and reloading Slashdot, the radio at high volume, Watching an Iron Maiden '92 live video, while i'm on the phone with yet another client that is mad 'cause we deactivated http upload for php, Now, *That* is _real_ Multitasking!!!!
  • I wonder how this will impact Sun. Sun has been making a big deal about Linux not scaling and that Solaris is. Yet solaris does not run on a SSI system of this size.
    Linux keeps winning all the rounds.
  • Because SCO is probally going to sue you ;)
  • ... sues NASA and all SCO executives miraculously disapear off the face of the earth and are last seen hurdling towards the sun in a firey death ball..... (LOL)

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