[118725] in Cypherpunks
IP: Cluster of Pentium processors becomes supercomputer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Oct 6 15:53:10 1999
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Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 13:49:56 -0400
To: cryptography@c2.net, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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From: believer@telepath.com
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 11:42:11 -0500
To: ignition-point@precision-d.com
Subject: IP: Cluster of Pentium processors becomes supercomputer
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Source: Cornell University
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct99/cluster.ws.html
At Cornell, cluster of Pentium processors becomes a supercomputer
FOR RELEASE: Oct. 5, 1999
Contact: Bill Steele
Office: (607) 255-7164
E-Mail: ws21@cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- You may have a piece of a supercomputer on your desk --
that is, if you can get together with a few friends.
A project at Cornell University has linked a cluster of 256 Intel Pentium
III microprocessors together to act as a supercomputer, the largest
"tightly-coupled" system of its kind so far, using the largest hardware
switch ever assembled and new control software written at Cornell. Most
importantly, it may be the most cost-effective supercomputer around. Since
the system is built entirely with off-the-shelf components, such a cluster
could easily be built almost anywhere and used for many scientific and
business applications, Cornell experts say.
"Just as your PC is getting cheaper, this is going to drive the price of
supercomputing down," says David Lifka, associate director of the Cornell
University Theory Center (CTC), which makes supercomputing facilities
available to the university's scientists. "The thing that makes this
machine special is that we used all commodity-based [off-the-shelf]
components," Lifka said. "We can show that this machine is easy to
replicate, for commercial, computer science and computational science
applications."
The Cornell installation doesn't consist of a room full of desktop PCs,
although in theory, Lifka says, the technology could be used to link all
the desktop computers in an office for special number-crunching jobs. The
machine, called the AC3 Velocity Cluster, is made up of 64 rack-mounted
Dell Poweredge 6350 servers, each incorporating four Pentium III chips and
running the Windows NT operating system. The servers are mounted in racks
of eight and communicate with one another at 100 megabytes per second
through a cLAN Cluster Switch made by the Giganet Corp. of Concord, Mass.
Jobs running on the system are managed by software called the Cluster
ConNTroller, written at Cornell over the past two years. The software has
been licensed for commercial use to MPI Software Technology Inc. of
Starkville, Miss.
The resulting system runs at a speed of 122 gigaflops, a technical term
meaning that it can perform 122 billion arithmatic operations per second
while keeping track of the decimal point. The supercomputer that has been
the centerpiece of CTC up to now, a parallel-processing IBM SP, runs at
about 76 gigaflops, Lifka said.
Cluster systems can be assembled at a cost about one-fourth to one-fifth
that of a traditional supercomputer, Lifka says.
At present the AC3 cluster system is in its early user testing phase, with
about 20 Cornell research groups trying out applications they had
previously run on the IBM supercomputer, including a hugely complex
simulation of protein folding.
The cluster project is the result of a collaboration with Dell, Intel,
Microsoft and Giganet, all members of CTC's Advanced Cluster Computing
Consortium (AC3 ), established to bring together businesses,
higher-education institutions and government agencies interested in the
further development of cluster computing. AC3 also includes 15 members from
the software industry. Consortium members will receive technology
briefings, training and consulting services from Cornell's Cluster
Computing Solutions Group, which can provide assistance in planning
commercial off-the-shelf systems.
-30-
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional
information on this news release.
The Cornell Theory Center: http://www.tc.cornell.edu
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
