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Love Calm Quiet · May 12, 2004, 03:59 PM

So CNN says U.S. wants to outstrip all super computers: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/05/12/f....ap/index.html

Do they miss the obvious or what? They don't need all that lag time since the tech is already there (as in VA Tech). The cost of Mac systems is lower, easily expandable, and could be easily upgraded (e.g., by 50% when we go from 2.0MHz to 3.0

Shouldn't Apple be bidding on this, for the publicity as well as the immediate revenue?

"PowerMac... it's not just for breakfast anymore."

willab · May 12, 2004, 10:24 PM

by 50% when we go from 2.0MHz to 3.0

Why do people always say MHz instead of GHz?

Lateralus · May 12, 2004, 10:48 PM

Because they know that is pisses uber geeks who lose sleep over such things off.

Cadaver · May 12, 2004, 10:52 PM

While the VA Tech Mac cluster is no doubt fast, there's still a huge gap between it and the #1 fastest (the Earth Simulator in Japan, built I believe by NEC).
Even a cluster 5 times the size of the VA Tech system would have a hard time reaching such speeds - there's a ceiling to efficiency in such systems.
(But please don't press me for details... I'm not a large systems engineer; just an avid reader of science and engineering magazines.)

ddma · May 12, 2004, 11:12 PM

I think the US wants to build the supercomputer by a experienced company. And Apple is still young in the market. This is a rather big project so they must have to be ensure everything goes right.

prolix · May 12, 2004, 11:20 PM

that new project is utilizing cray x1 technology, you can't pull something out of the consumer market and expect it to compete with that. cray systems are the ultimate and if they do this right they will blow the doors off the earth simulator. that kind of power is just scary...

what VA tech did with the g5's is quite impressive, but like cadaver said, to scale that project out to even approach the power of what they want creates a lot of other problems and becomes seriously inefficient, not to mention a maintenance nightmare.

this has nothing to do with apple not being reliable or too young, the fact is apple makes consumer systems. apple can call the g5 a supercomputer all they want, but in the end there are 'supercomputers' and then there are "SUPERCOMPUTERS"

Scotttheking · May 13, 2004, 04:05 AM

The gov't wants a solution. Apple doesn't provide solutions. The companies that are working on it will provide a single solution, not just a pile of independent computers.

Love Calm Quiet · May 13, 2004, 07:31 AM

[ oh - sorry about the synapse failure; since I'm still on a 667MHz Tibook, fingers aren't used to typing "GHz" ]

Although Apple's not providing "a solution", the VATech people seem to be -- and sharing their documentation and expertise.

And also, are there really any limits to *how many* Mac CPUs can be ganged together?

Link · May 13, 2004, 11:41 AM

The government wants a solution. What this means is the sales reps need to use as many buzzwords as possible and cram it all into a low price...

The government only uses REAL computers.

In all reality.. I'd LAUGH if they were stupid enough to try to get into the top 500 using windows. Take this for it's entertainment value only

southtdi · May 13, 2004, 12:08 PM

If they did that think how many times it would either be hacked or brought to it's knees because someone opened up a dman attachment in an email due to all of the holes windows has. If they did build it they could call it the big swiss.........

Scotttheking · May 13, 2004, 03:22 PM

Funny. You decide they must want to run windows on it. Wake up please.

digiology2 · May 13, 2004, 04:12 PM

What defines a supercomputer?
Apple's G4s obviously had a technical detail that made it a supercomputer what was it?

Is it something to do with speed relative to 'ordinary' computers or what?

Link · May 13, 2004, 04:38 PM

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
Funny. You decide they must want to run windows on it. Wake up please.

Should I even waste my time getting really mad for you at not reading my ENTIRE POST?

"In all reality.. I'd LAUGH if they were stupid enough to try to get into the top 500 using windows. Take this for it's entertainment value only "

Yeah.. sarcasm has a funny part. It's too bad most of macnn is too stupid to understand it.

goMac · May 13, 2004, 04:45 PM

Originally posted by Love Calm Quiet:
And also, are there really any limits to *how many* Mac CPUs can be ganged together?

No, there isn't a limit. However, at a certain point the network will no longer be able to handle the traffic, and the node controllers will not longer be able to handle the ammount of data going through. This means you'll get very very small gains by adding more computers.

Eug Wanker · May 13, 2004, 04:59 PM

Apple hardware might be very inappropriate for their usage. There are certain applications that just wouldn't be ideal on a Mac supercluster regardless of how large it was. And of course, Apple has almost no experience in building these things, VT excepted.

And don't forget that VT's supercomputer isn't even running at the moment. It looks like the Xserve G5 delays have got to them too.

zen jihad · May 13, 2004, 05:38 PM

Of note.

http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?t=2427

Judge_Fire · May 13, 2004, 07:11 PM

Originally posted by digiology2:
What defines a supercomputer?
Apple's G4s obviously had a technical detail that made it a supercomputer what was it?

Apple's systems are fast and nice, but the build and component quality don't necessarily fulfill the "failsafe" criteria required from big iron. Apple is still a bit of a sports car, while servers require that Abrams tank thing.

J

wily · 12:41 AM

Deleted

digiology2 · May 14, 2004, 05:42 PM

No I meant is there a definition of 'supercomputer' that entitled Apple to call the G4 one? Also the ad campain about how it was a weapon mentioned pentium pcs were harmless (ie not classed as supercomputers).
Im confused considering a pc a year later would have kicked a G4s ass (i mean the g4 back when the ad came out)

Any thoughts?

itai195 · May 14, 2004, 08:19 PM

Originally posted by digiology2:
No I meant is there a definition of 'supercomputer' that entitled Apple to call the G4 one? Also the ad campain about how it was a weapon mentioned pentium pcs were harmless (ie not classed as supercomputers).
Im confused considering a pc a year later would have kicked a G4s ass (i mean the g4 back when the ad came out)

Any thoughts?

It has to do with the US computer export policies. The G4, thanks to AltiVec, could do over a billion floating point operations per second, thus it would have been classified as a supercomputer under US export laws at the time. Obviously the law has been amended, as I recall reading that the Sony PlayStation 2 would also have been classified as a supercomputer (and in fact, the Japanese government did limit exports of PS2s for a short time).

sniffer · May 14, 2004, 08:34 PM

Originally posted by digiology2:
No I meant is there a definition of 'supercomputer' that entitled Apple to call the G4 one? Also the ad campain about how it was a weapon mentioned pentium pcs were harmless (ie not classed as supercomputers).
Im confused considering a pc a year later would have kicked a G4s ass (i mean the g4 back when the ad came out)

Any thoughts?

Hum.. It must have been their 1 gigaflops campaign with the 500 MHz G4. http://www.theimac.com/news/article/167.shtml

Superchicken · May 14, 2004, 11:52 PM

I believe the article listed IBM as part of the dev team. I suspect that since they MAKE the G5/PPC 970, 970FX etc. They are probably better suited to handle this sort of thing. Although it'd be nice if they threw a nice apple logo on thar.

djohnson · May 15, 2004, 12:22 AM

Cray's are the way to go if you want real power... I would love to work in a 10,000 node xServe farm or maybe work on a cray.

DBvader · May 15, 2004, 12:52 AM

"The cost of Mac systems is lower, easily expandable, and could be easily upgraded (e.g., by 50% when we go from 2.0MHz to 3.0"

Performance doesn't increase linearly with clockspeed. That said, IBM and cray are a lot better equipped than Apple to put out the world's fastest super computer. The G5 doesnt compare to the Power 4/5 (and I'm sure to whatever IBM will use for this comp). Cray has had some of the most innovative CPU/hardware design over the ages, and I'm sure they still got it if they are being commissioned by the largest entity in the world.

Apple isn't any force in the super computer market. Though I think the VT system is nice, I'm sure the US' super computer will be much faster than the fastest out now (while a huge cluster of G5s only keeps up with the high end competition)...Either way, If you have the money, you might as well go with the pros.

ngrundy · May 18, 2004, 09:33 AM

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
I believe the article listed IBM as part of the dev team. I suspect that since they MAKE the G5/PPC 970, 970FX etc. They are probably better suited to handle this sort of thing. Although it'd be nice if they threw a nice apple logo on thar.

IBM Also make the MCM (Multi Chip Module) Vector Processor Unit that Cray use in the X1.

If I remember rightly each MCM holds four VPU cores each core running at 800MHz and each backed by 16MB of full speed cache. the X1 chasis hold 4 (air cooled) or 8 (water cooled) processor boards each board holds four MCM's and up to 16GB of Rambus RAM.

Graymalkin · May 18, 2004, 07:23 PM

IBM's already stated they've got a POWER5 based supercomputer cluster in the works that will whomp the Earth Simulator. There's a big difference between the ES and VT's Big Mac systems. The Earth Simulator was specially designed for its task, it won't be much good in any other areas of research without a major overhaul of the system. Instead of typical general purpose CPUs it uses a slew of VPUs all mangled together like the old Cray supercomputers used to do. It is kind of like giving a computer a gigantic video card and throwing a ton of data at it. The VT Big Mac and ASCI White et al are built out of general purpose computers linked together with high capacity low latency interconnects like Myrinet or InfiniBand. What makes all of these systems "super" are the quality and speed of the interconnects. Simulating nuclear explosions or the weather requires a lot of data to be shared between the processors working on the calculations. There's a high level of data dependency between any two processes or threads in the sumulation which makes the interconnect bandwidth and latency of prime concern.

These clusters are opposed to ones with a low degree of data dependency, so-called embarrassingly parallel clusters. Some problems like prime number hunting or testing encryption keys can be done with little communication between processing nodes. In these clusters you can make do with 100BaseT networking as long as you've got switches of decent quality connecting everything. In some systems high speed network connections aren't even needed (SETI@Home, distributed.net).

There are situations where different types of clusters will do the proposed job better. Apple isn't exactly inexperienced at building high availability clusters and they're releasing more hardware and software suited to such jobs. I think they're trying to get more supercomputer/cluster deals like the VT one. There's a lot of money to be made in the HA cluster segment of the server market. There's no dominant players in it and much of the software is self developed/maintained and targetted for Unix-based systems. It would be silly for Apple to ignore the market considering they've got powerful server hardware and a real OS to drive it all.

macaddict0001 · Jun 15, 2004, 02:19 AM

Originally posted by Cadaver:
While the VA Tech Mac cluster is no doubt fast, there's still a huge gap between it and the #1 fastest (the Earth Simulator in Japan, built I believe by NEC).
Even a cluster 5 times the size of the VA Tech system would have a hard time reaching such speeds - there's a ceiling to efficiency in such systems.
(But please don't press me for details... I'm not a large systems engineer; just an avid reader of science and engineering magazines.)

which would you buy a G5 2.5ghz for $4000 or a G4 400 for $4 which is better value