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Virginia Tech Supercomputer - We're Still #3!
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Re: Re: Re: They found the other 44 machines!
About 10 years ago or so Harvey Mudd College used to update all the Mac IICI's over the network.
MacOS server does remote admin and update.
I suspect updating to panther is as simple as debugging a single mac, making an image and propogating it to all units essentially instantly.
Of course if there is a bug one has to downgrade
I doubt there is a Panther bug of note to simply running a benchmark since they do not use filevault or FW800 at all.
Rocketman
About 10 years ago or so Harvey Mudd College used to update all the Mac IICI's over the network.
MacOS server does remote admin and update.
I suspect updating to panther is as simple as debugging a single mac, making an image and propogating it to all units essentially instantly.
Of course if there is a bug one has to downgrade
I doubt there is a Panther bug of note to simply running a benchmark since they do not use filevault or FW800 at all.
Rocketman
you know i live only about 20-30 miles away from va tech and i had to go to macrumors to fiind out about this! funny thing is i was talking to one of their techies couple of years ago and they were questioning why i would use a mac nowadays!what a turnaround!
Apparently it tries to crawl into top-ten charts.
Seriously, as a long-time Mac user I would get a lot more satisfaction from learning that Big Mac was used to find a cure for AIDS. Benchmarks are not an end in themselves. It is about time Virginia Tech did something useful with Big Mac.
If it's number 2 or 3, it will. I'm sure the research facility will have plenty to do if the #'s look good.
I say even if they don't make #2 by the 20th I believe they will be very close and they probably will hit #2 unoffically by the end of Nov.
I think if they can get all the coding done to use Panther before the 20th then I say they will take the #2 spot.
I'm just wondering doing this same cluster with next G5's pushin 3Ghz clock speeds? I figure that in next couple yrs Apple will have the fastest cluster if folks use it in way Va Tech has.
I think if they can get all the coding done to use Panther before the 20th then I say they will take the #2 spot.
I'm just wondering doing this same cluster with next G5's pushin 3Ghz clock speeds? I figure that in next couple yrs Apple will have the fastest cluster if folks use it in way Va Tech has.
Big Mac upsized!
I am sure that someone, somewhere will read about Big Mac and think "Hey, if they can do that with $5 million worth of PowerMacs imagine what I can do with this blank cheque!" Needless to say, bigger Big Macs are inevitable and I suspect that most institutions would do the sensible thing and wait for G5 XServes to become available.
I am sure that someone, somewhere will read about Big Mac and think "Hey, if they can do that with $5 million worth of PowerMacs imagine what I can do with this blank cheque!" Needless to say, bigger Big Macs are inevitable and I suspect that most institutions would do the sensible thing and wait for G5 XServes to become available.
Its sort of ironic to think that computers have returned to room sized machines. In 20 years we'll be reminising about how our mobile phones contain more power than this machine.
some other thoughts
One thing to remember the machine cluster cost 5million, but the building and support infrastructure probably cost just as much if not more than that. And then you have payroll, which could easily be 1 million a year.
Iwould like to be around when the scrap the thing in 5 years, think I could buy it for cheap?
One thing to remember the machine cluster cost 5million, but the building and support infrastructure probably cost just as much if not more than that. And then you have payroll, which could easily be 1 million a year.
Iwould like to be around when the scrap the thing in 5 years, think I could buy it for cheap?
Re: They found the other 44 machines!
Unfortunately they can't use altivec for the benchmark - to qualify you need to use at least 64-bit floating point, which altivec doesn't do. If they were using altivec, they could be getting nearly triple the performance (the two floating point units doing 2 ops per cycle, plus the altivec unit doing 8 ops per cycle, tripling the number of ops that can be done per cycle).
Altivec is great for a lot of things, but unfortunately not for 64-bit floating point math.
Unfortunately they can't use altivec for the benchmark - to qualify you need to use at least 64-bit floating point, which altivec doesn't do. If they were using altivec, they could be getting nearly triple the performance (the two floating point units doing 2 ops per cycle, plus the altivec unit doing 8 ops per cycle, tripling the number of ops that can be done per cycle).
Altivec is great for a lot of things, but unfortunately not for 64-bit floating point math.
This is great! If only they could get it up to 12.....then so and so forth. Could you imagine a 5000 node G5 setup? Besides causing a new El Nino, we'd get awesome TF!
So there's a few things to keep in mind. One is that there's probably something in the grant that says they're going for this-and-such level of performance, so they need to benchmark in order to fulfill that part of the grant.
VT is hiring lots of new faculty members to keep this thing fed. So the publicity also helps them get better applicants--I know at least two friends applying.
I can understand the "frustration" sitting on the sidelines. But I can tell you that even with a 30-40 node Linux cluster setup that it takes some time to get things up to speed and stable. A recent cluster here took about a month to work out the kinks in the network drivers. Some of this time for benchmarking would be needed anyway before they open it to the campus. It allows them to improve uptime and reliability as well as overall performance. Since they'll effectively charge for the CPU time, it's worth it to VT to spend a few weeks optimizing!
I'd guess they'll "open for business" quietly in a few more weeks and maybe more publicly in Dec./Jan. And I'm sure they'll get some innovative research projects--it's a lot of new horsepower!
GUI overhead?
Im actually somewhat amazed they are even using OSX for the OS on these systems. I have to imagine a certain % of the CPU is being used for the GUI, even if it is a small % since the GPU handles a good % of the GUI. Going with something like one of the various flavors of Linux, that is already optimized for 64-bit computing, but most likely not for the 970, I have to imagine a pure command line environment with no GUI would be able to squeeze a tad more performance out of these systems.
Im actually somewhat amazed they are even using OSX for the OS on these systems. I have to imagine a certain % of the CPU is being used for the GUI, even if it is a small % since the GPU handles a good % of the GUI. Going with something like one of the various flavors of Linux, that is already optimized for 64-bit computing, but most likely not for the 970, I have to imagine a pure command line environment with no GUI would be able to squeeze a tad more performance out of these systems.
Re: GUI overhead?
The GUI environment only requires CPU time if there is something that it actually needs to do - I've literally seen the CPU usage say 0% at times on a PBG4 400 when I just wasn't doing anything at all (yes, a pre-quartz extreme machine). That, and if the machines are running headless, I'm pretty certain OS X won't try to draw anything. As for linux, there isn't a distribution that can control the G5's cooling systems yet (I imagine it's pretty loud in there now, imagine with 9900 fans going full blast too). And they are planning on moving up to Panther anyway, so it doesn't look like linux is an option in their opinion.
But wouldn't it be ironic if someone forgot to set the Energy Saver performance setting to Highest when they setup the machines?
The GUI environment only requires CPU time if there is something that it actually needs to do - I've literally seen the CPU usage say 0% at times on a PBG4 400 when I just wasn't doing anything at all (yes, a pre-quartz extreme machine). That, and if the machines are running headless, I'm pretty certain OS X won't try to draw anything. As for linux, there isn't a distribution that can control the G5's cooling systems yet (I imagine it's pretty loud in there now, imagine with 9900 fans going full blast too). And they are planning on moving up to Panther anyway, so it doesn't look like linux is an option in their opinion.
But wouldn't it be ironic if someone forgot to set the Energy Saver performance setting to Highest when they setup the machines?
Re: Re: GUI overhead?
They jump from #3 to number #2 with the click of a mouse. That would be funny as heck.
They jump from #3 to number #2 with the click of a mouse. That would be funny as heck.