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Linux Software

Linux Showing Up In Supercomputers 33

Posted by CmdrTaco from the faster-cheaper-better dept.
tomas sent us a press release on yahoo talking about Linux and Supercomputers. Talks about Beowulf and clusters as well as Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center's 128 P2/450 cluster. I'd like one of those, but I don't have $400k, or a building to put it in. (who am I kidding! I couldn't pay the electricity bill to run 128 P2s!)
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Linux Showing Up In Supercomputers

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  • if they hadn't spent WAY too much!

    "Albuquerque bought its $400,000 system..."

    "Albuquerque's Roadrunner has 128 Intel Pentium II processors"

    $400,000 / 128 = $3125 each.

    That's each mind you! Three thousand each for computers with no monitors or anything really except a nic and some memory.

    $3125 each!
    Anyone want to go into business with me?

  • I'm sure those engineers would love to further optimise Linux to work even better on their BEOWULF clusters. I fully expect to see even greater support for clusters very soon.

    The possibilities of Linux are just WAAAY too exciting! :)
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Man, those Beowulf clusters are FAST. Just think what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of them...
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Use Distributed IPC (DIPC). Patch the kernel and change one line in your program and suddenly you are a Beowulf cluster.
  • Well, there's a difference between POSTing a bunch of processors and actually scheduling processes on them in an effective way. From what I read, the current 2.2 kernel doesn't scale well beyond 8 processors. Sure, it booted on a 16 processor Sparc [linux.org.uk] but whether it makes effective (or any) use of those processors is a different matter entirely.

    Nick

  • Because Beowulf machines aren't computers in the normal sense. Linux doesn't really support more than 8 processors on a shared memory machine - such as a Starfire or O2K. Beowulf clusters are exactly that - clusters of computers, each having their own processor, memory and kernel, and connected by a high speed network.

    To use this as something approaching a supercomputer you have to custom write your applications using a message passing library such as MPICH. An ordinary program, even a multi-threaded one, will not show any speedup on a cluster as the standard Beowulf model does not support process migration (although MOSIX does this). Even with process migration, you still don't have shared memory so things are a lot slower than a real supercomputer.

    Nick

  • It is possible, that a perfect game might actually end up with such simplicity as "first move wins". That, IMO is equally boring. Or it might turn out that "second move wins", which IMO, is equally boring. Anything else, is definitely not a perfect game.
  • Since two "perfect"ly capable chess players playing a perfect game would always end up in a draw...boring.

  • Man, those Beowulf clusters are FAST. Just think what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of them...

    All I have is just a 464 Celeron A.

    *sniff*

    I'm just a node.

    Everyone picks on me.

    Just because I'm a little node of a large cluster.

    I bend over to crack RC5 and the winbiff team comes up from behind to number two [distributed.net].

    Get cracking for the slashdot team [distributed.net] and be a part of supercomputing. Do it in init.d. Do it now.
  • Note that this is not a Beowulf cluster, as they wanted to include some components that aren't exactly cheap (eg, the Myrinet).
    Nodes: 64

    CPU: Dual Pentium II 450's

    Cache: 512 Kb ECC RAM

    RAM: 512 Mb SDRAM

    Hard Disk: 6.4 GB UDMA EIDE

    Network: 100BaseT, Myrinet

    OS: Linux 2.2.1, Redhat 5.2

    Check out Roadrunner [unm.edu] or Myrinet [myri.com]

    Atticus, a UNM student.

  • Oh I agree :) .. It'll be interesting to see how it develops and from what I've seen the whole thing will probably split into two areas, the single processor to 8 processor market and then another flavour for 8+ processor systems. With Linux apparently only supporting 4 processors well atm it might be a while yet. Still, progress marches ever onwards.
  • >With enough machines working in parallel, the ability to play perfect chess might become possible, and we'll have to find a new game to succeed chess.

    Hmm.. Maybe we could just play against fellow humans instead and have the computers play a new game called 'calculate the Nth prime' or 'find patterns in noise a la SETI' .. or something that could be more suitable for lots of processors :)
  • In an interview with Linus a while back on LinuxWorld he mentioned that there might be forthcoming versions of the kernel that support >8 processors.. if the current kernels don't then how different is the Beowulf project from the standard 'thread' of Linux? .. I'm sure an enlightened /.er will tell us :)

    As for the power requirements, maybe some sort of thermocouple could be used to recycle back into electricity all that heat produced by the processors ! .. Or even just don't bother with central heating any more .. the processors will do it for you ! :D

    A multiprocessor machine would be fun, no doubt .. Here's looking forward to a quad K7 :)
  • > (who am I kidding! I couldn't pay the electricity bill to run 128 P2s!)

    look at the bright side..

    at least you'll not need to worry about heating bills. :-)
    --------------------------------
    check out my music [mp3.com] .
    you might actually like it.

  • Honey, part of the point of beowulf is that all the nodes are dedicated to the cluster. Makes them easier to manage, simplifies partitioning the workload,etc.

    This isn't to say that you couldn't do something like you are talking about. Interestingly, the parallel APIs used in beowulf also run on NT...
  • The greatest thing coming out of the new Linux/Internet supercomputer paradigm is the way no-one from the old top-down power structure can do anything about it. Distribute and devolve and you give up a bit of control - something the old order can't dream of doing - but gain vast amounts of robustness.
    Of course, we're not quite there yet - we'll need a far more distributed and less wired Internet than we have today. (You may laugh at Melissa infecting Windows homegenity, but would you laugh if an analogous problem got into the 80% of the Net that runs on Cisco routers?) But the day gets closer. Distribute and give up control.
  • I had mine running at 450 for a while but it'd
    reboot if I ran gcc. I'm an even slower node now at 337mhz so don't feel bad.
  • I know this may sound a stupid question, but how does one actually go about running, say, a Fortran program on a Beowulf cluster?

    Is a special compiler needed, or libraries?

    And is it reasonably straightforward to convert a non-parallel program to run on such a cluster?

    I've done some programming on a Cray-T3D and for the right kind of problem it's actually very simple to effectively exploit its parallel nature , for instance, using High Performance Fortan or one of its newer incarnations, such as 90.

    For the correct problem is it this simple to get the full benefit of the Beowulf cluster?

    Many thanks,
    Paul
  • I don't know where you get that idea. There is no proof one way or the other as to what the result of perfect play might be
  • Correct, you have to use MPI or something similar to run a single app across a cluster. BUT: There are tons of applications in science where one essentially runs 100s or 1000s of smallish calculations while varying some input parameters or input data. For these, a Linux cluster is the perfect match.

    We are currently planning a 1000 CPU cluster for such an application where not even a high-speed network is needed, just lots of cycles to get the job done before we grow old.
  • Ah, send 'em over here, my skool would love 'em!
  • To use this as something approaching a supercomputer you have to custom write your applications using a message passing library such as MPICH.

    This is sort of a moot point. To use just about any modern supercomputer you need to write your code using mpi, so this isn't really a downside to the Beowulf clusters. Trying to get around using mpi would be foolish, as it would result in nonportable code. The cool thing about Beowulf clusters (as I see it) is that you can pretty much take any mpi code you have and just recompile.

    Of course, you would also need compilers and the relevant libraries, which might be a problem. The code I use (a plane wave pseudopotential DFT code, if that means anything to you) requires certain libraries (plus a f90 compiler) which I don't think are available for intel. :( But then again, it requires a lot of internode communication, so it would be really slow on a Beowulf cluster anyways.

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