Guest Posted October 12, 2003 Report Share Posted October 12, 2003 Everyone would love a supercomputer but with a price tag of around $100m each they are not easy to come by. More than 1,000 G5s have been linked up But in the United States staff and students at Virginia Tech have built one of the world's most powerful supercomputers for just $5m by plugging together hundreds of the latest computers from Apple. The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by side, making it the world's most powerful "homebuilt" system. It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes. "Each individual G5 is a dual processor, 2GHZ machine with 4GB of memory. So it's extremely fast," said Pat Arvin, Project Coordinator at Virginia Tech. The network is linked using 2,900 cables and runs at about 100 times faster than an average corporate network. But the hard part of making a supercomputer is stability. The project's chief architect, Srinidhi Varadarajan, had to write a special program called Deja Vu to ensure that if an individual computer crashed in the middle of a calculation lasting weeks, if not months, another computer would take over seamlessly. "This is pretty much like open heart surgery because you're working on a computer and moving an application while it still continues to run," said Dr Varadarajan "You cannot stop the program, actually, and that's the speciality of this system." Heat and water The supercomputer, unofficially nicknamed Big Mac, was built in just three months. Chilled water is piped into the facility Right from the start there were major hurdles that could only be overcome with significant construction in and around the building. Running 1,100 computers in a 3,000-square-foot (280-sq-metres) area sends the air temperature well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). The heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60-mph (95 km/h) winds. Specialised heat exchange cooling units were built that pipe chilled water into the facility. "There are two chillers for this project," explained Kevin Shinpaugh, Director of Cluster Computing. "They're rated 125 tonnes each in cooling capacity, and they pump 750 gallons per minute each. The water is at about 45 degrees Fahrenheit." The power supply was another huge challenge. The supercomputer uses the same amount of electricity as 3,000 average sized homes. In early September, the G5s started arriving by the lorry load and technicians rushed to install the hundreds of computers. "We did 238 machines in little under two hours, so we were humming along as an assembly line," said Jason Lockhart, director of high performance computing. A speedy installation was essential because Virginia Tech had to comply with an October deadline set by the National Science Foundation. Missing that deadline would have meant automatic disqualification from the NSF's global supercomputer rankings, thereby denying the college any chance of competing for top scientific research projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. "A system of this size generally sees its best application in what is known as big science research; massive simulations, models, computational engineering systems," said Dr Varadarajan. "Examples of these include things like nanoscale electronics; if you're trying to invent computer chips 30 years from now you're looking at atomic levels with a single atom acting as a switch." Arguably Virginia Tech has revolutionised the world of supercomputing with a simplistic setup that can be duplicated around the globe by other institutions. It has documented how it did this from start to finish so if others want to follow suit, they can send off for a kit that tells them how to do it. source: BBC Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
monkey Posted November 9, 2003 Report Share Posted November 9, 2003 looks good :o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Grim Reaper Posted November 9, 2003 Report Share Posted November 9, 2003 as we type i am building a supercomputer out of old 386 chips......i need another 3 million and i will be there!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andsome Posted November 10, 2003 Report Share Posted November 10, 2003 How is it on making greetings cards? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moon Posted November 10, 2003 Report Share Posted November 10, 2003 Should I put rubber washers on my mobo screws ? :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Grim Reaper Posted November 10, 2003 Report Share Posted November 10, 2003 Virginia Tech is planning to release its novel supercomputer technology in a “supercomputer kit” sometime early next year. The homemade installation -- built around off-the-shelf components -- has just taken its place among the top-performing supercomputers in the world. A university spokeswoman said the Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties unit is working out licensing and patenting issues before the technology will be offered in what university officials say will be a “supercomputer kit.” She added that several traditional supercomputer users including the National Security Agency and the Argonne weapons laboratory have expressed interest in the technology. The machine can handle 17 trillion operations a second, still short of the Earth Simulator in Japan, which can handle 35 trillion operations a second. The big difference is price -- $5.2 million for the Virginia Tech installation and more than $250 million for the Japanese installation. The Virginia supercomputer is the brainchild of Srinidhi Varadarajan, assistant professor of computer science. He initially targeted IBM's 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor, but IBM had already committed deliveries of the microprocessor to others including Apple Computer which uses dual 970's in its G5 Mac personal computers. When Varadarajan told dumbfounded Apple executives that he wanted 1100 5Gs, they initially didn't believe himGuru3DI can have one of those!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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