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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster

Posted by Hemos on Mon Aug 09, 2004 11:37 AM
from the building-it-better-safer-and-faster dept.
Software Science Linux
starwindsurfer writes "US space agency Nasa is to get a massive supercomputing boost to help get its shuttle missions back in action after the 2003 shuttle disaster. Project Columbia, a collaboration with two technology giants, will mean Nasa's computing power will be ramped up by 10 times to do complex simulations."
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NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster 50 Comments More /

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  • Geez, that's pretty impressive... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Skyshadow (508) * on Monday August 09 2004, @11:38AM (#9921081) Homepage
    ...but someone ought to tell them that Doom 3 runs pretty well just on moderately-new hardware...

  • Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gothmolly (148874) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:39AM (#9921093)
    10240x more dupes? [slashdot.org]
  • Well, I guess they're not using it to serve that webpage.

    -m

  • Nice...but a dupe. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Agent Green (231202) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:41AM (#9921110) Homepage
    http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/ 1427228&tid=163&tid=139&tid=103 [slashdot.org]

    Do the editors work for the USPTO as well?

  • What Would SCO's Take Be Worth? (Score:4, Funny)

    by geomon (78680) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:43AM (#9921126) Homepage Journal
    About $7.2 Million.

    Talk about a software tax!

    • Moderators must be having a bad day. I've seen several other attempts at humor moderated 'offtopic'.

      I wonder if this is a Monday phenomenon? I wonder what the distribution of 'Funny' moderation is through the week.

      • Re:What Would SCO's Take Be Worth? (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I wonder if this is a Monday phenomenon? I wonder what the distribution of 'Funny' moderation is through the week.

        Sounds like the moderators are having a case of the Mondays?
        • Actually I was referring to other topic areas other than this one. I wasn't even referring to my own attempt at humor. I was making a rather broad commentary about moderations in general and how those marked 'funny' are running rather low today...

          ....you humorless fuck.

  • Should help in units conversion ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by xmas2003 (739875) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:43AM (#9921127) Homepage
    This should help 'em convert feet to meters [slashdot.org] ... ;-)
      • Yea, it was actually a "force" measurement (you did say Newtons and (I assume meant) pounds-force) - see attached snippet from one writeup [canoe.ca] ... plus the incorrect deviations from the flight path weren't noticed, which is argueably a distance measurement (there was a fair amount of miscommunication going on too, so lotta blame/mistakes on this one unfortunately) ... but I simplified to feet/meters in my attempt at humor. NASA has (obviously) done a GREAT job with the current Mars Landers, but boo-boo's happen

  • Good news for Intel (Score:5, Funny)

    by thebra (707939) * on Monday August 09 2004, @11:43AM (#9921135) Homepage Journal
    This is great news for intel. They will double the number of itanics shipped in a single deal!

    Hahaha, my comment is a dupe!

  • NASA vs RIAA/MPAA (Score:5, Funny)

    by grunt107 (739510) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:44AM (#9921143)
    The system will have 500 terabytes of storage, the equivalent of 800,000 CDs.

    In related news, the RIAA has filed a writ of discovery for illegal downloads of 'Major Tom' at NASA.

  • I hope technology will help (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09 2004, @11:44AM (#9921144)
    But I wonder if moving from a spreadsheet to a supercomputer simulation will make it any more likely that engineers with concerns will whistleblow to non-responsive management. This is a government bureaucracy problem, not a technical problem.

    • Re:I hope technology will help (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The two biggest failures at NASA, Challenger and Columbia, absolutely would not have been fixed with more computing power.

      In the case of Challenger, engineers whose opinions should have had the most weight were ignored when they expressed concerns about the seals on the solid fuel rocket boosters. The decision was made by bureaucrats who didn't have the technical savvy required to even form an opinion.

      In the case of Columbia, many engineers at NASA were concerned about possible damage to tiles and request
    • you hit the head on the nail.. Along with the supercomputer they need to put in place a oversight committee of engineers that can take anonomous comments from other engineers and completely override and bypass Nasa administration.

      99% of the time major failures lies in the hands of management, or the failure of management. Yes going to space is hard and dangerous, but they KNEW that something went wrong on launch and management chose to ignore it.

      dont believe me? show me one corperation failure that was
      • Instead of saying "In my best engineering and technical judgement, based on years of training and experience, I think this is a bad idea", the engineers can say "Our really expensive computer thinks this is a bad idea".

  • Tax payer. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty (9119) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:45AM (#9921148) Homepage Journal
    I'm rather mad at this idea, the system costs more than an opteron system, costs more to run (heat/power) and is slower. But it at least runs linux.

    Also, why is the BBC the first news tidbit about NASA's new supercomputer?

    • Re:Tax payer. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geomon (78680) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:47AM (#9921163) Homepage Journal
      Also, why is the BBC the first news tidbit about NASA's new supercomputer?

      Science isn't sexy news in America.

      Not unless they declare they've created a satellite system that will track and kill bin Laden.

      • Re:Tax payer. (Score:4, Funny)

        by legoleg (514805) on Monday August 09 2004, @12:03PM (#9921323)
        Just wait till the last week of October... I'm sure he'll conviently pop up around then.

      • Science isn't sexy news in America.

        To be fair, science isn't exactly sexy news in the UK, either. The BBC covers stuff like this because (a) it's mandated to, and (b) there's no profit motive keeping the unsexy news off the (metaphorical) frontpages. Which is nice[1].

        [1] ...provided there remain alternative broadcasters to keep the Beeb on its toes.

      • Science isn't sexy news in America.

        When Paris Hilton has nightvision camera sex with the Hubble Space Telescope, you'll be singing a different tune.

    • Re:Tax payer. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by flabbergast (620919) on Monday August 09 2004, @01:10PM (#9921999)
      Because you can't buy an opteron system with NUMA link (3.2 GB/s between bricks) and you can't simply build a 500 TB data cluster by purchasing some CAT5, 100 250GB drives, 10 Gigabit ethernet cards and call it a day. SGI thrives because it can put together a clustered supercomputer and has the technology to build a 500TB data center. 20 Altix racks, 128 Altix bricks/rack (4 processors/brick X 128 = 512 proc) and has globally shared memory thanks to numalink. This means that even though each brick can run independently, you can also build a 512 proc system with a single Linux system image that has the combined memory of all the bricks (thanks SHUB and NUMAlink!). So, when you can build a 512 processor, global shared memory system out of Opterons, then you go ahead and sell it. This is a clustered supercomputer where each cluster is a supercomputer.

  • Article not written by a technical person.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cbreaker (561297) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:50AM (#9921192) Journal
    .. or a very good writer.

    "They can also be modelled over a time period of weeks or months instead of over just a few days."

    Ohh sweet, so then what used to take days now takes months?

    And at one point in the article, it says "20 nodes" and then at another part it says "512 nodes." So like, what is it?

    You know what, I don't even care.

  • Cluster != Supercomputer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChaosMt (84630) on Monday August 09 2004, @11:54AM (#9921227) Homepage
    I can understand the BBC making this mistake, but slashdot?! I'm sure this was also noted in the dupe.
    • It is a cluster of supercomputers :-)

      Seriously, the way the Altix is laid out... I believe it is a cluster of 512 processor supercomputers.

      This isn't uncommon. Look at ASCI BLUE, or some of the other large IBM SP2 based systems.

  • Okay, that's big but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hamlin (543598) on Monday August 09 2004, @12:16PM (#9921423)
    if they'd gone with G5 Xserves they could have had 23,888 Dual 2GHz systems with 17.916 Petabytes of storage (assuming they just went stock on the high-end systems).

    Okay and one question about the article. Was he saying 1000 Gb of RAM per system or 1000GB per system?

    • the article is severely misleading (Score:5, Informative)

      by halfelven (207781) on Monday August 09 2004, @12:55PM (#9921834)
      It makes you believe this supercomputer is made out of commodity components.
      That's blatantly false.

      The SGI systems are highly proprietary equipments that provide very large bandwidth between the nodes, extremely low latency and tight integration. They're not regular Beowulf clusters. They really are single systems with hundreds or thousands of CPUs, all of them running the same single instance of the OS (as opposed to typical clusters which run one OS instance per node).
      Because of the tight integration, the software does not have to obey the same constraints as when running on commodity clusters. Especially the requirement for total parallelization does not stand anymore.
      Therefore, problems which cannot be translated into 100% parallel algorithms, and therefore do not run efficiently on commodity clusters, are easily tackled on SGI supercomputers.
      That's why they can charge a high price on their systems - because they can solve problems that are not accessible to "normal" computers.

      That being said, the system at NASA is indeed a cluster, but it's a "small" cluster (a handful of nodes), each node being a supercomputer with hundreds of CPUs. It's a hybrid that provides the best of both worlds.

  • where is SUN? (Score:3, Funny)

    by linuxislandsucks (461335) on Monday August 09 2004, @12:41PM (#9921701) Homepage Journal
    where is SUN Microsystems?

    well someone had to ask :)

  • There are limits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sakusha (441986) on Monday August 09 2004, @01:13PM (#9922032)
    There is a limit to what computer power can do for you. I'd rather see the money being spent on human resources: people who know what they're doing. There's an old saying in the business world, I wish I knew who first said it, "for any technological problem, the limiting factor is never technology, but rather, human resources." In other words, if your technology has problems, throwing more tech at it is unlikely to solve the problems. Only more human intelligence applied to the situation will improve things.
    Having the fastest supercomputer in the world won't help you one bit if nobody thinks to run a simulation of what happens when a chunk of foam blows a hole in a wing. I keep thinking about Frank Borman's statements to the Apollo 13 Commission, he said it wasn't a failure of technology, it was a failure of imagination, nobody ever imagined there could be a problem. Computers have no imagination. They give answers, but nobody's asking the right questions.

  • SCO Tax (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nonillion (266505) on Monday August 09 2004, @02:32PM (#9922825)
    They better pay their $7,157,760 ($699/CPU) in SCO tax or McBride is going to be stomping around saying "NASA is screwing us!"

    • Re:AGG! (Score:5, Funny)

      by foidulus (743482) * on Monday August 09 2004, @11:50AM (#9921185)
      So Hrathgar carries Hrunting into a bar. The bartender asks him "Why the long face", and Hrathgar cuts his head off with Hrunting singing, "A hrunting we will go, a hrunting we will go!"
      *Rimshot
    • Apple didn't give VT any computers, they paid for them because they were the cheapest solution.
      • Yes, that's why I said that Virginia Tech bought them. The point was that they were cheapest because Apple gave them a huge price break, presumably for the promotion it gave them (i.e. "Holy shit! Our computers are so fast and awesome that they're using them in supercomputer clusters!").

        You'll notice that no large clusters have built out of G5s since, and it's because nobody else is going to get price breaks significant enough to make it the cheapest solution.
        • Apple gave them no price break on the G5 towers. The systems were purchased at EDU pricing straight from the Apple Store, online.

          Apple DID cut them some slack on the additional RAM, charging industry-norm prices for the memory instead of their usual markup. They probably saved them some money on the sidegrade to Xserves, too, but I don't know the details.

          Anyway, when the initial cost assessment was done, the G5s were cheapest not because of a price break, but because they were... well... cheapest.

    • Re:Itanium? (Score:5, Informative)

      by djohnsto (133220) <dan.e.johnston@g ... .com minus berry> on Monday August 09 2004, @12:20PM (#9921463) Homepage
      Think of it less of a win for Itanium and more of a win for SGI Altix (that happens to use Itanium). The SGI Altix machines have a single system image with 512 processors (there are 20 of these clustered together). As far as I know, this is actually the cheapest and highest performing system that can use 512 nodes in a single system image. Other choices (which I'm not even sure scale to 512 processors) include Sun (slow), Power (expensive), and MIPS (SGI predecessor to the Altix - slower). Also, they are working on methods to increase single system image size to 2048 nodes, I believe an industry first. Some workloads just like running in single system images much better than on clusters.

      As for Itanium vs. Opteron - the Itanium kicks the Opteron's ass in floating point. Since NASA is presumably going to be doing a lot of engineering simulations, good FP performance is highly desirable. Having 6 MB of cache per node probably helps the Itanium beat out the Opteron for large memory footprint workloads as well.

      Basically, until Cray releases Red Storm (not sure if they'll stay in business that long), an Opteron system doesn't exist that can match the performance of the SGI Altix.

      Finally, Itaniums are NOT "rediculously more" compared to the 8xx Opteron line (which is the Itanium's real competitor in this area).

    • Re:Itanium? (Score:5, Informative)

      by harlows_monkeys (106428) on Monday August 09 2004, @12:24PM (#9921507) Homepage
      Can anyone point out any significant advantage of the Itanium that justifies the fact that it costs ridiculously more than its competition (i.e. AMD Opteron)?

      It does floating point a lot faster than Opteron.

    • Does anyone know of a better site than /. to discuss tech related topics because, as the post I am responding to shows, /. users are getting dumber and dumber as time goes on.

    • Re:Spin (Score:3, Informative)

      by flaming-opus (8186)
      Why use itaniums? Because itaniums are very fast at floating point math, and have 9MB of cache. It's not a perfect CPU, but it's not bad. Nasa is more than willing to optimize their code extensively. (Yes the optimizing compilers ARE available, just not in gcc. Both intel and hp have very good compilers for ia64) The IBM power architecture is also a very good architecture, but they are also VERY expensive.

      Mostly they use Itaniums because they are buying an SGI sollution. Nasa Ames has been a long time sgi

    • Re:Spin (Score:3, Informative)

      by halfelven (207781)
      How did this comment got moderated "informative"? There's definitely something wrong with the moderators today.

      SGI Altix uses the Intel compilers. They're pretty damn good on IA64. They're available today.

      Also, the massively parallel software is already up'n'running. NASA has been using for decades SGI supercomputers - traditionally it's been the MIPS/Irix architecture. A while ago, when SGI told NASA that they were going to migrate to Intel/Linux, NASA simply recompiled their software to Linux, which is

      • Re:Irony emulator (Score:5, Interesting)

        by kenaaker (774785) on Monday August 09 2004, @12:49PM (#9921771)
        I worked on the space shuttle simulator (lo, these many years ago), and the shuttle computers are derivatives of the computers that IBM originally used in the B52's. They were called AP-101's, and if I remember correctly were Harvard Architecture systems with a separate instruction and data store memories. I think they had 128K (32 bit?) words for instructions and 64K (16 bit?)words for data.

        The simulator originally ran on IBM System 360 mod 75's (serial numbers 1, 4, and 5). When I was working on it, the simulator was running on a IBM 3033 (370 architecture) machine running MVS, and had a hardware interface that attached 3 AP101's to the system IO channels. The shuttle hardware outside of the AP101's and environment were modelled in the 3033, even including the "slosh dynamics" of the fuel in the external tank. The simulator was written in 370 Assembler with macros for the programming control structures.

        One of the funniest things about running the simulator came out of the major failure tests. The simulator had a distinct "abend" that indicated that the vehicle had a position that was below the surface of the earth.

    • Re:Here's hoping (Score:5, Informative)

      by halfelven (207781) on Monday August 09 2004, @01:00PM (#9921902)
      The "firmware" (the equivalent of BIOS) they have on the Altix is pretty damn smart, it's like an OS of it's own. It can do diagnostics, and inventory and a truckful of other things.
      Powering up a huge complex beast such as an Altix is no easy task. You need lots of "intelligence" at the hardware level to do that.

      • Re:pork (Score:3, Informative)

        by nboscia (91058)
        NASA is not the sole user of the system. Anyone within the U.S. can use it. We support many university projects that require the use of supercomputers. This purchase is a benefit to the entire country, not just NASA.

        It is most unfortunate that people are not aware of all that NASA does for them. A majority of all research projects are in collaboration with industry vendors, universities, non-profit organizations, scientific corporations, and so on. There are few that are specific only to NASA. The rang

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