Posted on 08/31/2007 9:15:39 AM PDT by N3WBI3
Student, prof build budget supercomputer
August 30 , 2007
When Tim Brom 07 set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didnt know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England. Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet.
Its small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk, said Brom. This may prove useful next summer when Brom and others from his graduate program travel to England to do work that will require a significant amount of computing power. And as the price of commercial supercomputers is often prohibitive for many educational institutions, bringing a personal supercomputer like Microwulf could be a cost-effective solution for the group of graduate researchers. So far as we can tell, this is the first supercomputer to have this low price/performance ratiothe first to cost less than $100/Gflop, said Adams. This is a significant achievement considering that Microwulf is more than twice as fast as Deep Blue, the IBM-created supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and cost only a fraction of the $5 million spent to build Deep Blue. Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.
Supercomputers like Microwulf are used to solve problems that take too much number-crunching for an ordinary desktop to handle, either because its processor is too slow, or because it doesnt have enough memory, said Adams. Truly huge supercomputers (more than 100 times as fast as Microwulf) are used by organizations like the National Weather Service to process meteorological data and by the United States Missile Defense Agency to simulate nuclear tests. Microwulf is considered a Beowulf cluster, a group of networked computers that run open source software and work in parallel to solve a single problem. Beowulf clusters are so named because their homemade, cost-effective nature liberates researchers from expensive commercial options for super-computing, much like Beowulf of the Old English poem liberated the Danes from the tyrannical rule of Grendel. Do Brom and Adams see themselves as liberators by unveiling of a system like Microwulf? Were taking the liberation a step further, said Adams. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own. Just two years ago, building a personal supercomputer like Microwulf for the price of a high-performance desktop was out of the realm of possibility for Adams and Brom. But when they saw a portable Beowulf cluster called Little Fe at a conference in October 2005, they began to think about building their system.
I was really enjoying my high-performance computing class and wanted to keep working in that area after the class ended. I was also thinking about graduate school at the time and a project like Microwulf looks good on a curriculum vitae, said Brom.
So by the summer of 2006 when the price of hardware materials needed to build Microwulf had gone down, Adams asked his academic department to provide $2500 for the project. He also asked Brom, then beginning his last year at Calvin, to help him build the supercomputer. In January of 2007, they began to piece together their system and by March, they were running tests to see just what Microwulf could do. In the end, the project came in under budget with Microwulf donning a price-tag of just $2470. With current hardware prices, another system like Microwulf would cost half of what it cost Adams and Brom to build earlier this year. Though supercomputers are typically evaluated on their price/performance ratio, Adams built Microwulf giving attention to its power/performance ratio as well. In other words, he wanted to pay attention to the systems energy consumption. This is becoming increasingly important, as excess power consumption is inefficient and generates waste heat, which can in turn decrease reliability, said Adams on his Web site. Adams and Brom managed to build Microwulf so that it could plug into one standard 120V wall outlet. This feature only enhances the systems portability, allowing it to be taken to classrooms and other research labs where large power supplies are unavailable. Adams isnt going to let Microwulf gather dust in the supercomputing lab in the Science Building. Instead hes going to take it out on the road, mostly to middle school and high school classrooms to try and get teenagers hooked on computer science. Microwulfs inventors arent set on keeping their blueprints for the supercomputer a secret. In fact, theyve just published a detailed description and evaluation of their project on Cluster Monkey so others can build their own portable and affordable supercomputers.
It remains to be seen whether Brom will be able to get his wire-filled personal supercomputer past airport security next summer. ~written by Allison Graff, web communications coordinator |
OSS Ping..
Imagine a Beowulf of thes... wait, wrong board.
That’s some fast, economical communism......
lol
You have a bit of experience with these, whats your take..
Kewl... can it run “Doom”?
Ping
“...Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams...”
Work from one of those darned private Christian colleges!
(The department head when I was in grad school was a Calvin grad;
and son of Christian missionaries to China).
What Makes Calvin Unique?
U.S. News - America’s Best Colleges 2007
Numerous college guides give high praise to Calvin.
Calvin is the distinctively Christian, academically excellent
liberal arts college that shapes minds for intentional participation
in the renewal of all things.
Pretty cool. I recently finished installing the first Dell Cluster of the Intel Quad Core boards for the Navy. 126 Nodes, 1008 Cores, and the theoretical peak was about 10 TFlops.
I only bring it up because the chips seem to be the same.
I've seen an article in the past on Linux Journal about a guy who built a cluster in a tool box that he would connect to his laptop. I'll have to go look for that article again...
That would be really cool to see..
With a game server like that there would be no lag.
So this is that free software you’re always talking about that countries like Iran and North Korea can all download for free?
Dude that is so cool it makes me want to go drop 2500 for parts but with the next osx coming out and the fact I want to max out my PB’s memory so I can do more playing around with qemu (If you know of a better x86 emulator Id love to know) My computer budget is set for a bit.
Someone mailed me asking me to reply to this so Ill pop off greasmonkey for a few seconds.
This is a story about a kids at a Christian college putting together an affordable super computer which will help his dept, his school, and others to make distributed supercomputing more possible. You cant come on and compliment the *hardware* design can you?
You cant come on in and contribute anything of worth can you?
Nope you just come in at troll level nine... This is why you have earned the nickname Ort.
Ok folks GE is now in the 'Its powerful software' mode, he has switched from 'Its a inferior foreign clone'.
You apparently are fine with that, doesnt even cross your mind
When Windows does something neat does it cross your mind that Microsoft has allowed the Chinese extesive access to the source code? When Apple does something cool does it cross your mind first that the core of their OS called Darwin (Named after an evolutionist /snicker) is free for them to download and use? Funny I dont see you trolling on the mac threads?
The clustering software is American, despite your fantasies.
Microsoft has allowed the Chinese extesive access to the source code
Only as a commercial response to guys like you who support the Chinese taking Red Hat for free, legally renaming it, then reselling it as "Red Flag".
Named after an evolutionist/snicker
I see your best buddy is starting to mold you into a puppet for all his causes.
The OS being clustered is not..
Only as a commercial response to guys like you who support the Chinese taking Red Hat for free, legally renaming it, then reselling it as "Red Flag".
You mean the Red Hat that got its start by taking a Finnish made Kernel?
I see your best buddy is starting to mold you into a puppet for all his causes.
I see something flying over your head... The snicker was aimed at you because were a project under the GPL named Dawrin (or for example a dirsto) you would surly claim it as evidance of the products evil nature.
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