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G5 Supercomputer could be No. 2 in world

updated 10:55 am EDT, Wed October 15, 2003

reliminary numbers show that the new could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to Wired News: "The Big Mac's final score on the Linpack Benchmark won't be officially revealed until Nov. 17, when the rankings of the Top 500 supercomputer sites are made known at the International Supercomputer Conference. But Jack Dongarra, one of the compilers of a Top 500 list, said Tuesday that preliminary numbers submitted to him suggest Big Mac could be ranked as high as second place."

"Dongarra said Big Mac's early numbers were based on tests run on 128 processors, or about 5 percent of the machine's total 2,200 processors. 'It just gets worse as you add more processors,' he said.

"The machine is the first supercomputer based on Macs; it is one of the few supercomputers built entirely from off-the-shelf components and it cost a bargain-bucket price -- only $5.2 million. By comparison, most of the top 10 supercomputers cost about $40 million and up. The Earth Simulator cost $350 million." (Late yesterday we also updated our Dell vs. Apple cluster report with more accurate information on pricing considerations.)

by MacNN Staff

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10/15, 11:00am | report spam | close Reply |
it will be

number 1 in my heart...

ahh how tweeet....

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10/15, 11:05am | report spam | close Reply |
I think they are just

I think they are just using it for file sharing ;)

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10/15, 11:07am | report spam | close Reply |
best thing is....

its SNAPPY

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10/15, 11:12am | report spam | close Reply |
YES!

YES!, Just being possible to be number two is enough for me. this should (i hope) queltch some of the "PC's ar faster" people who doubted Apple's ability to perform in real world situations. And just think of the cost of the G5's versus the dell one from yesterday.I bet they will be sad that they wasted their money.

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10/15, 11:19am | report spam | close Reply |
Big Mac?

I didn't even know McDonalds made computers.

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10/15, 11:21am | report spam | close Reply |
Shoulda used Athlon 64

Not trolling, I'm a Mac diehard! :) But Slashdot article from PC World is humbling. Sure it's biased, but even in the Photoshop test, the Dual 2GHz G5 is only slightly faster than the SINGLE Athlon 64 2.2 GHz.

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10/15, 11:21am | report spam | close Reply |
Isn't there some way

...that the Mac community can publicly humiliate and embarrass the UT decision maker who bought the Dell system with these relentlessly publicized G5 benchmarks? Can something be done to make this the headline story in the Austin American Statesman, and the campus UT newspaper, plus some other papers like the NY Times and others with a high profile? This story needs to break out into mainstream news, not just nerd-journals. Any ideas?

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10/15, 11:25am | report spam | close Reply |
But R they extrapolating?

They say the early numbers are from 128 processors. Does that mean they're extrapolating the results for all 2200 processors? That kinda makes some assumptions don't it?

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10/15, 11:32am | report spam | close Reply |
Yes, but...

Dongrarra is one of the keepers of the list. That would imply he has some expertise in the area, and if he thinks extrapolating gives a ballpark guess of the final number range, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, they're upfront that it's very preliminary.

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10/15, 11:34am | report spam | close Reply |
They are preliminary'

That the results are based on just 128 processors is likely why Dongarra mentioned that things do not scale with the number of processors. It remains to be seen how well it will do when fully configured.

This is why we are waiting until Nov. 17 to get final numbers.

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10/15, 11:36am | report spam | close Reply |
lame

I get 20 Teraflops on my PDA! Apple is s***.

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10/15, 11:43am | report spam | close Reply |
and now imagine...

... a beowulf cluster or these.

Ooops, sorry wrong forum.

Andreas

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Re: and now imagine

Ummm. This is a beowulf cluster. Do you understand what the term means?

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10/15, 12:12pm | report spam | close Reply |
Hope its #1

If I recall Japan has the worlds fastest super computer. And they are following the Crays philosophies.

It would be very interesting if we could see a cluster of cheap machines beat the Japanese super computer with specialized hardware.

Just dont forget the G5 upgrade processor cards when they come out! :)

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10/15, 12:19pm | report spam | close Reply |
Sore fingers

Now there's a job I'd love to avoid - installing 1,100 upgrade cards! Man, my fingers hurt just THINKING about it...

Sounds like a job for a peon grad student. Of course, by the time he or she would be done, the next generation of upgrades would be out and they'd have to start all over again!

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theory

The Big Mac's theoretical peak is 17.6 teraflops, which would easily put it in second place behind Japan's Earth Simulator, a monster machine composed of more than 5,000 processors operating at 35.6 trillion calculations per second.

Dongarra warned that no machine ever performs at its theoretical peak. But even if the Big Mac comes in at 80 percent of its theoretical limit, it still will make No. 2 on the current list.

"We're just making up numbers here," Dongarra cautioned. "We don�t have real numbers yet. If they get 80 percent, it will be slightly faster than (ASCI Q, the current No. 2 on the Top 500 list)."

Built by Hewlett-Packard for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, ASCI Q is based on 8,000 Alpha processors and operates at 13.8 teraflops.

Dongarra said Big Mac's early numbers were based on tests run on 128 processors, or about 5 percent of the machine's total 2,200 processors. "It just gets worse as you add more processors," he said.

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10/15, 12:25pm | report spam | close Reply |
benchmarking

I hope that they disabled all those start up daemons. They could get more juice out of each machine. Also, run the box in the lowest color resolutions...

He he...this would be so much fun. I want them to get #1.

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10/15, 12:28pm | report spam | close Reply |
Not EXACTLY Macs..

You guys DO realize that this cluster is NOT running X, don't you? They are running Linux. The question I have is how might that compare to running under Mach/Darwin?

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10/15, 12:31pm | report spam | close Reply |
Rev B

I am waiting for rev b to buy one

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10/15, 12:33pm | report spam | close Reply |
They ARE running Mac OS X

Try again. They're running Mac OS X, NOT Linux.

See the presentation at:

http://don.cc.vt.edu/tcfslides.pdf

Also, the project director is speaking at the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference (Hint: about Mac OS X) this month:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/macosx2003/view/e_sess/4824

So know what you're talking about before you speak.

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re: Rev B

I'm waiting till I have three grand to buy the rev b.

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10/15, 12:36pm | report spam | close Reply |
Macs

The article I read from VT said that it was running MacOS X. Either way, it doesn't matter, the vindication is in the hardware - because none of us have anything that's going to run on a cluster like that anyway.

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OS X = TRUE

Yes, it is running OS X. I know because I worked on the project and installed cards in a bunch of them myself. So if we get #2 that means not only is it mac hardware, but a huge step for X as well.

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nice

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,pg,7,00.asphttp://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,pg,7,00.asp

Apple touts its new 64-bit Power Mac G5 as the world's fastest personal computer, but our initial tests indicate bragging rights may belong to PCs using AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 chip.

Even Apple's 2-GHz dual-CPU G5 unit had a hard time keeping up with a single-chip FX-51 PC in most tests. (Tests were not exhaustive, however: Working with our sibling publication, Macworld, we selected four applications available on both platforms and then ran seven hand-timed tests. Our test suite, PC WorldBench 4, cannot run on Macs.) The new Macs aren't great values either, as the top-of-the-line G5 ($3549 as configured) costs about $200 more than the similarly configured Alienware Aurora. (Prices do not include a monitor or speakers.)

The dual-G5 sparkled in one main area: our Photoshop test, which it completed in 18 seconds, or about 17 percent faster than the Aurora's 21 seconds. The 1.8-GHz single-chip G5 ($2999) trailed at 27 seconds.

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Man

interesting mix people here... you still have children who think first post is a cool (on a dinky little site, no less) versus serious who do not get obvious attempts to humor (beowolf) and and to troll (running Linux). Weird.

-Ken

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steve simulator

Next year Steve should set up 2000 of the Dual 3Ghz G5's in his house. That "should" oust Japan's Earth Simulator, by a teraflop or two... and still be a fraction of the cost.

;)

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OS X, not Linux

It couldn't run Linux if they wanted to. I don't believe any of the Linux vendors have their wares running on the G5s yet. And since the fan control and cooling system is OS controlled (which is why the machines run at full blast when in Firewire disk mode), they will need to get the fan control code in there before it will work (or deliver ear plugs with the Linux release, one or the other is fine).

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Re: nice

Yeah, but the problem there is that you have to use Windows, and all its wonderful security flaws and annoyances. Add that to your TCO.

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Re: nice

Nice troll.

D+ for effort, F for creativity.

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Re: PC world

Those tests were hardly meaningful. When the most machines got a score from 3 to 4 on most of the tests, you don't have good data that shows how much, if at all, one is better than the others. Plus frame rates on some game isn't the end all be all of test. It is most likely that the graphics card was responsible for the difference and not the processor. When, Maya retuned their code for the G5, they realized that the CPU was so under utilized and faster then the graphics card, that they stopped using the GPU to do most of the processing. Games will never be rewritten to take advantage of this since it is platform dependent.

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Re: OS X, not Linux

"It couldn't run Linux if they wanted to. I don't believe any of the Linux vendors have their wares running on the G5s yet. And since the fan control and cooling system is OS controlled (which is why the machines run at full blast when in Firewire disk mode), they will need to get the fan control code in there before it will work (or deliver ear plugs with the Linux release, one or the other is fine)."

Exactly!

Red hat does run on AMD's AMD64 architecture, and YDL will be supporting G5's soon(preinstalled), but nothing as of yet...

That poster was thinking of Texas's supercomputer blurb he read the other day...

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Re: PC World

Yeah but the Photoshop test is one Apple's own benchmarks and Adobe did update Photoshop for use with the G5 (at least some plugins) correct? And yet the DUAL G5 only slightly beat the SINGLE Athlon 64.

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Re: Macs

Can you imagine the Genie-type effects that Jobs could do with 17 Teraflops? I'm sure OS X can use more of those!

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quiet

Well at least we know it is the World's Number one most quiet supercomputer.

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re: quiet

That would only be true if they used G4 Cubes for the supercomputer! But then they billed the Cube as a supercomputer all by itself didn't they?

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Hold on!

Jack Dongarra said that based on preliminary numbers it could rank as high as #2. But he also said preformance gets worse as you add more processors. So it could realistically rank lower than expected when it comes to absolute performance. I do hope they will place in the top 10 for both performance and GFLOPS/$$.

The comment that is on of the few built with off the shelf components is debatable since the list is littered with with clusters made from Intel boxes, Alpha Servers, SGI Origins, IBM SP3's, etc. Not off the shelf from BestBuy, but readily available from their respective manufacturers.

As for the PCWorld comparison between the AMD and G5 - laughable at best. And the same goes for anyone that puts stock in such fluff, be it from PCWorld or Apple. Lets see them use proven and accepted scientific techniques such as those supported by Jack Dongarra and his associates.

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G5 cluster cheap/fast

Just like a single G5 machine! You don't need 2200 G5s to realize a nice price/performance ratio!

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Re: MacDonald's

"I didn't even know McDonalds made computers."

WELL i think the order will come with Chips . . . that's British for French Fries . . . get it . . . "chips?"

bwahahahah haha aha
hah aha ahaha haa

hah aha I just crack myself up

nowif we could just rig up ONE of the VA G5s to be a milkshake machine . . . yah!

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Yes, but

the winner takes it all....

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Re: Re: McDonald's

I wouldn't put that milkshake machine anywhere close to a computer or otherwise liquid sensitive piece of technology... Have you ever seen an attempt to fix them go bad? Milkshake all over the place!

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G5 Supercomputer could be No. 2 in world

updated 10:55 am EDT, Wed October 15, 2003

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it will be

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Shoulda used Athlon 64

Isn't there some way

But R they extrapolating?

Yes, but...

They are preliminary'

lame

and now imagine...

Re: and now imagine

Hope its #1

Sore fingers

theory

benchmarking

Not EXACTLY Macs..

Rev B

They ARE running Mac OS X

re: Rev B

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nice

Man

steve simulator

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