China, AMD team on Opteron supercomputer

[Julio Franco]

China plans to create the world's third most powerful supercomputer, which will also be among the first such machines to use the Opteron processor from U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices.

According to China's People's Daily, Chinese supercomputer maker Dawning Information Industry will use 2,000 of these chips to make the Dawning 4000A, with help from AMD.

In a related note, The Inq hints that Opterons may have already outsold Itaniums in only three months after its launch. Not so easy to tell given that Intel hasn't reported the number of Itaniums sold, however Inq's hint does make sense after all.

 

[Phantasm66]

We are hopefully getting a high performance cluster at my work soon (which I will hopefully be administering.) It should comprise about 100 Opteron CPUs. Not as cool as the above, of course, but nice.

 

[agissi]

Originally posted by Phantasm66
We are hopefully getting a high performance cluster at my work soon (which I will hopefully be administering.) It should comprise about 100 Opteron CPUs. Not as cool as the above, of course, but nice.

lol, still very impressive. What are you going to be using that computer for?

 

[Phantasm66]

If we get this kit, it will be being used to do some mathematical computations. We have several PhD students here, also Professors and research assistants that want to do some calculations that even on currently fairly powerful PCs just take far too long (I am talking one experiment taking over one month!) We are looking at ways to calculate these things more quickly, without getting a true supercomputer, which is beyond our budget.

there is much more to it than that, of course. certain types of tasks compute better and faster on parallel setups like the kind of cluster that we want, and tailoring it to our needs is almost a full time job.

We are hopefully getting something like this:

http://www.cray.com/products/systems/hpccluster/

 

[agissi]

Sweet.. what kind of job do you have/what are you caluclating? Interesting

 

[Phantasm66]

I am a computer technician / network administrator at a university.

Essentially, the kit is used for number crunching (computations with large matrices, etc).

 

[JSR]

and, doesn't the amd processor

do that (number crunching) ..............best of all?

 

[young&wild]

JSR....those are very big mambo jambo calculations. Not just simple 1 +1 ..ehhehe .

 

[JSR]

young

you may be able to beat up on the x man, but, don't mess with a sr, ......jr...... an opteron processor is, an amd part....and, when the hammer arrives, this next month, ........that too, will also be an amd part......and, my question to phant, is simply this........that the amd component, pound for pound..........even in the 1+1 processors (as this was manifested to me by a washington state math student, whom had similar aspirations in math calc, as does phant), were, and still are, better for number crunching huge applications, and that is the reason for their worth, and, continued popularity.

 

[young&wild]

Re: young

I think i got your previous post wrong. Try to write something in a more organised way or else you might end up confusing alot of people.


P.S Pls stay away from drugs.

 

[JSR]

yes, you did

could you keep your crib, .....in a more organized manner
p.s. stay off the nipple :grinthumb

 

[Phantasm66]

Re: Re: young

Originally posted by young&wild
I think i got your previous post wrong. Try to write something in a more organised way or else you might end up confusing alot of people.

True.

 

[JSR]

yes, i have

always...............known this :grinthumb but, i know everyone ......hehe...............accepts me :darth: ........warts and all ;P so, phant, back to my question.......does the amd processors prove to be the best at number crunching? i have always believed so, but, it would be nice to retrieve some corroboration from you

 

[Phantasm66]

We don't actually have it, yet. We may still not get the budget.

If we do, in about 6 months, I will be able to answer your question.

 

[JSR]

ok

thx,....... i believe you have made the right choice, for the direction you are headed.

 

[Phantasm66]

Originally posted by Phantasm66
We are hopefully getting a high performance cluster at my work soon (which I will hopefully be administering.) It should comprise about 100 Opteron CPUs. Not as cool as the above, of course, but nice.

Remember, of course, that this is a cluster of machines, not one singular monster of a computer...

But when you invoke certain software, the cluster ACTS AS ONE MACHINE. At least, that's the theory. I still have a lot of work to do in this area, as it invovles writing optimised code and so forth.

 

[JSR]

10/4

no,...... i copy that. it obviously is the path being taken by many.........the leapfrog to new architecture should be a boon

 

[Phantasm66]

Basically, clustering (which isn't that new) is increasingly being seen as a cheap alternative to supercomputing. At least, that's the theory.

A secondary, related theory is that 64-bit computing on clusters will help to further augment this.

 

[JSR]

here's a link

http://www.aspsys.com/about/news/press/default.aspx/6.aspx

 

[Phantasm66]

That not a bad link. I just read that and it was interesting, albeit brief.

With high speed myrinet, that ASPEN system is probably quite a beast.

With clusters, its not just the speed of the individual nodes, or how many you have, but also how fast the nodes can talk to each other which is the real factor. Network speed between nodes can be a real bottleneck, since the whole technology is based on the notion of "passing messages." Indeed, the implimentation I will initially be looking at (if we get the money) will be MPI, which is "Message Passing Interface." There is an MPI optimised compiler, and MPI runtime tools.

 

[JSR]

well, then

another link http://www.rlx.com/solutions/solutions_clust_mpi.php

 

[JSR]

and, another

http://www.mpi-softech.com/products/felix/productsheet/Felix-ProductSheet.pdf

 

[Phantasm66]

Of course, a cluster is only really a step up from a single PC.

The article, here :

http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-5055317.html?tag=fd_top

which julio posted about refers to a different, and greatly more powerful animal.

 

[JSR]

too bad

obsolesence comes in a flash.........and, i think it's exponential............things are just going to .....rocket

 

[Phantasm66]

Well, in a sense these things age differently from PCs, because they are a completely different kind of computer, created for a very different purpose.

Of course they do age, though. A device like we are talking about has so many more factors go into it than a PC does, and its subject to different kinds of rules.

It also has a completely different set of problems, in some ways, but there is one problem we can never really escape....

HEAT!

Heat is the tormentor of computers, their arch enemy.