NASA To Get 10,240 Node Itanium 2 Linux Cluster 249
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."
Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)
Nice...but a dupe. (Score:5, Informative)
Do the editors work for the USPTO as well?
Spin (Score:1, Informative)
Aren't you tired of hearing how supercomputers "may help solve" all the problems in the world. If anything the impact of that supercomputer on shuttle will be nil. Developing massively parallel software takes years, by then this supercomputer will be obsolete.
Another rant - why use Itanium processors? In order to get good performance from EPIC architechture you need specially optimized compilers, which won't be available for many years (by then this supercomputer will be obsolete). For now ibm's power architechture is a much better bang for the buck.
Re:Article not written by a technical person.. (Score:2, Informative)
Read the article:
"It is using an off-the-shelf system and taken that and built a powerful system around 512-processors which are then hooked together to give considerable power."
512 processors * 20 nodes = 10240
Official SGI Press Release (Score:5, Informative)
Rus
VT paid for the G5s (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, that's big but... (Score:3, Informative)
Okay and one question about the article. Was he saying 1000 Gb of RAM per system or 1000GB per system?
Re:Tax payer. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Article not written by a technical person.. (Score:2, Informative)
The article is stating that the weather pattern studies would now be able to simulate activity periods of weeks or months rather than just days - NOT that the simulation runs themselves would take months rather than days!
Re:Itanium? (Score:5, Informative)
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:VT paid for the G5s (Score:3, Informative)
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)
It does floating point a lot faster than Opteron.
Re:Spin (Score:3, Informative)
Mostly they use Itaniums because they are buying an SGI sollution. Nasa Ames has been a long time sgi customer. The cluster of itanium/linux altix machines is simply a kicker to their previous cluster of mips/irix origin 3000 systems, which replaced a cluster of o2000s, which replaced a cluster of power-challenge boxes. That's one of the reasons this purchase happen so quickly. All the physical/technical/knowledge/business infrastructure was in place.
If you read the sgi press release, they are also cutting nasa a huge break on the price to win the contract. It's about $2million each for those altix boxes including fibre channel cards, switches, and storage. I can't believe SGI is making any money on the deal.
the article is severely misleading (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:10240 is a strange number? (Score:5, Informative)
The article was written, unfortunately, by a rather clueless journalist. Here's a link to the proper information:
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2004/j
Re:Here's hoping (Score:5, Informative)
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:Tax payer. (Score:2, Informative)
Did I miss anything? Oh, yeah:
Re:Spin (Score:3, Informative)
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 not too difficult, since Irix is pretty much standard Unix (i did some porting from Linux to Irix and often the software simply compiles with no change).
Also, Altix systems are essentially the same hardware architecture as MIPS-based SGI Origin with the exception of the CPU (and a different OS on top), so the differences are really not that big; it's just the transition from Irix to Linux.
Re:Geez, that's pretty impressive... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Should help in units conversion ... (Score:3, Informative)
Engineers on the ground calculated the size of the rocket-firing using feet-per-second of thrust, a value based on the English measure of feet and inches.
However, the spacecraft computer interpreted the instructions in Newtons-per-second, a metric measure of thrust. The difference is 1.3 metres a second.
Re:VT paid for the G5s (Score:2, Informative)
ref: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/04/06/22/0222210.
Re:pork (Score:3, Informative)
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 range of customer database is wonderful and there is such variety in the areas of research (not just aeronautics and space technology, but biology, earth science, nanotechnology, optics, and so on). We all help each other to advance our knowledge, and computers like this make it a lot faster.
Re: NASA does not care about money. (Score:2, Informative)
Thanks for the troll post.. you're a wonderful example of how uninformed citizens can be. FYI: The government defines NASA's budget each year, so there is a very high concern for money. It takes months upon months of civil servants fighting for funding out of that money pool. There are a lot of research programs, and not nearly enough money to fund them. Particularly, in the case of Columbia, there were massive layoffs to fund this. I'd like to see you make your statement to all those who now do not have jobs because of the lack of money (many were needed operational engineers, not just research staff). It's sad when people lose their jobs over something like this, but it did allow something good to happen. It's unfortunate that arrogant fools are blind to such politics.