On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 4:11 AM, Andy Farnell <padawa...@obiwannabe.co.uk> wrote: > > 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
Actually, I just read the post yesterday from Joe--I was sort of aware of the San Diego Supercomputing Center before now. The RPi boards are interesting, and since the best you can do is 100Mb/s, the switch gear should be relatively cheap (and old). However, if you can consolidate your systems more, you need fewer cables, smaller switches, etc... So--look forward to the Kontron KTT30 board which hosts the Tegra 3 SoC. There's no word yet on the price, but it's about 4x as powerful as a Raspberry Pi. So, if it comes in low enough (say $120-140, then it just might beat the RPi for cost. > > > > On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 10:26:56PM -0500, Charles Henry wrote: >> On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Andy Farnell >> <padawa...@obiwannabe.co.uk> 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 _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list