Hearing it from the front line is really interesting Chuck. I am a little envious at the excitement a project like that must produce.
Do you know of Joe Deken and the "suitcase supercomputer" project? He is a big Pd proponent (and friend of Miller I believe) and they are also looking at R-Pi boards for their next portable cluster (I'm probably telling you stuff you already know) best Andy On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 10:26:56PM -0500, Charles Henry wrote: > On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Andy Farnell > <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 10:24:45AM -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote: > >> now my question is; > >> > >> spending 4k to build a Pi supercomputer can give you more power and > >> possibilities than with a top of the line MAC for example (which will cost > >> just as much, and be a quad core 2.7 intel i7, 1.6GHz bus, 16GB Ram). > > > > > > We keep using the word 'supercomputer', and maybe a bit of > > perspective would help clarify matters of scale. > ... > > > A supercomputer is, by definition, that which is on the cutting edge of > > feasible research. Most supercomputers are in a single location and not > > distributed or opportunistic, they usually have a building dedicated to > > them and a power supply suitable for a small town of a thousand homes > > (a few MW). A team of full time staff are needed to run them. They cost a > > few hundred million to build and a few tens of millions per year to operate. > > Current supercomputers are measured in tens of Peta FLOPS, ten to a hundred > > times more powerful than the equivalent mainframe, and are primarily > > used for scientific modelling. > > Yeah, but when I tell people what I do, do you think I say "cluster > computing" or symmetric multiprocessing or CUDA applications engineer? > No, I tell them I work with "supercomputers"--It's not a term for > practitioners, since there's more specific things to say, ... and it > keeps people from thinking I'm going to waste time talking about nerdy > shit that I don't want to talk about anyway :) > > > The current guise of the 'mainframe' is what we would now see as a > > Data Center, a floor of an industrial unit, probably much like > > your ISP or hosting company with many rows of racked indepenedent > > units that can be linked into various cluster configurations > > for virtual services, network presence and data storage. > > Aggregate CPU power in the region of 10 TFLOP to 0.5 PFLOP > > At the moment, I'm (the engineer) putting together the proposal for a > grant for GPU computing resources (for the researchers and > scientists). We're looking to spend about $750,000 on hardware that > will perform about 100 TFLOPS. Mostly it will be made up of--whatever > NVIDIA Tesla is most cost/power effective--in servers that will hold 4 > GPUs. Altogether, we hope this fills up 5-10 racks (in our shiny new > energy efficient data center with 32 racks, that the f'ing fire > marshall won't let us into for another month, when we've been > postponed since June anyway). > > > Supercomputers are still supercomputers, by definition they are > > beyond wildest imagination and schoolboy fantasies unless > > you happen to be a scientist who gets to work with them. > > A bunch of lego bricks networked together does not give you 20PFLOP, > > so it does not a supercomputer make. > > > > However, there is a different point of view emerging since the mid > > 1990s based on concentrated versus distributed models. Since the > > clustering of cheap and power efficient microcomputers is now > > possible because of operating system and networking advances, > > we often hear of amazing feats of collective CPU power obtained > > by hooking together old Xboxes with GPUs, (Beowulf - TFLOP range) > > or using opportunistic distributed networks to get amazing power > > out of unused cycles (eg SETI at home/BOINC and other volunteer > > arrays, or 'botnets' used by crackers) (tens to hundreds of TFLOPS). > > Clustering is currently the most scalable model for supercomputers. > Many expensive options exist for systems with large numbers of cores > and shared memory--but year after year, more circuits get put on a > single die. Generally when you think of supercomputers these days, > it's a network of systems that each have a lot of x86_64 cores and a > maybe nice co-processor (like the NVIDIA Tesla's). > > Some of the IBM machines (and Cray, still?) use pipelined multi-core > processors of a different architecture and 1000s of cores on a single > system, but I don't see that as a trend that will survive. > > Chuck _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
