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G5 Supercluster
- Thread starter Quadraman
- Start date
~tl
68kMLA Admin Emeritus
I believe Apple's server management software takes care of upgrades to machines remotely. You can just push a button and all the servers will update themselves. As for defragging, for the most part OS X takes care of that on the fly. How would it be any more of a nightmare to maintain than any other large cluster? I would be willing to bet that it would be a lot easier to maintain than most...
On the power front, the G5 Xserves drew about 400W. From the FAQ page on the VT site, it says that the whole cluster draws about 310kW per hour -- but I'm guessing that's for cooling, the networking hardware, etc, as well.
The main reason they built it was that it was cheap for the amount of processing power they were getting.
Still, this is VERY old news [
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Aoresteen
Well-known member
That's why a Cray is more effeicient. You don't need 1100 CPUs to to get to the Super Computer range.
In any event, it's never the CPUs that are the bottlenecks, it's the I/O channels that always lag the CPU.
I'd be interested in seeing what type projects get approved for the CPU time.
In any event, it's never the CPUs that are the bottlenecks, it's the I/O channels that always lag the CPU.
I'd be interested in seeing what type projects get approved for the CPU time.
Christopher
Well-known member
I would get an Xserve just because its so much power in that tiny space. Plus it's rack mountable!
Temetka
Well-known member
Cray's are also very expensive.
Virgina Tech built the G5 Tower cluster for around 5.25 million IIRC.
They also used infiniband for networking. This provides for far more bandwidth and much lower latency than even GigE.
Also the whole point of the cluster was to prove that G5's and Apple hardware can be used for large scale scientific computing purposes. Something for which I think the team over at VT did an excellent job of doing.
yeah, when the VT cluster was created the Xserves were only on the G4 revision, so in order to get any notable amount of computing horsepower, they rounded up a bunch of then-fastest G5 towers.
As far as supercomputers go, I'd personally prefer something like an SGI Onyx, capable of scaling to 512 or 1024 processors, and it's all on a single image, uses shared ram and cache, etc. Managing it, if you don't have to integrate it into an LDAP environment, is just as easy as managing one desktop computer.
Plus, they (nekochan.net) have ported a bunch of open source stuff, like firefox/thunderbird et al. to IRIX, so it's almost like using a modern desktop computer in that respect.
As far as supercomputers go, I'd personally prefer something like an SGI Onyx, capable of scaling to 512 or 1024 processors, and it's all on a single image, uses shared ram and cache, etc. Managing it, if you don't have to integrate it into an LDAP environment, is just as easy as managing one desktop computer.
Plus, they (nekochan.net) have ported a bunch of open source stuff, like firefox/thunderbird et al. to IRIX, so it's almost like using a modern desktop computer in that respect.
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