Advice on a 'supercomputer'

tadhgrrr

Ive been asked to get some quotes for a 'supercomputer' at work, something that will be used for fairly heavy-duty number crunching but that wont require any video card or sound capability. I dont have too much experience with this sort of thing but I reckon a dual processer (Xeon 3.0GHz) and about 4GB ram should see me through...is there anything obvious im forgetting and does anyone have any recommendations on where to get such a machine besides dell or HP...thanks in advance

Esel

Saw a Cray on ebay recently for $150,000 - original cost (AFAIR) $50m.

Included all manuals.

Capt'n Midnight

What sort of budget ?
What programs/OS will run on it ?

http://www.orionmulti.com/products/solutions - runs linux *
12 CPU systems from $ 10,000
96 CPU systems avaliable soon - 230 GFlops peak

*Based on Fedora Core 2
Linux kernel 2.6.6 with performance-optimized Orion drivers

tadhgrrr

budget of about €5k euro....not really a supercomputer more a ''soupedup'computer' ... i think the main application it will be running requires windows platform...

Saw a Cray on ebay recently for $150,000 - original cost (AFAIR) $50m

....funny guy

deRanged

what exactly do you require the machine for?

what's the profile of the jobs executing on the machine - are they
cpu intensive, memory intensive etc.

Do you need multiple cpus operating on the same data -
i.e. UP, SMP or a big NUMA machine?

Do you need ultra fast disk access?

Will you require any expansion in the future?

What OS do you intend to run, do you need specialised compilers?
e.g. Intel Compilers are often preferred to GCC by HPC people.


There's many places to purchase machines - Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, Fujitsu Siemems and lots lots more.

If you can post up some more info answering some of those questions we can advise you a lot better.

Or - just ring a salesperson in any of the companies above and they'll advise you.

Capt'n Midnight

tadhgrrr wrote:

budget of about €5k euro....not really a supercomputer more a ''soupedup'computer' ... i think the main application it will be running requires windows platform...

That rules out a lot of options since you need a more expensive license to use more processors (home=1 / Pro=2 / server =4 IIRC etc.) I'd hate to think how much a license to run windows on the 96 CPU monsters would cost.

Again with the App question , unless the app can efficiently use multiple CPU's you might as well get a single CPU system and oodles of RAM - actually the best people to ask are the people who sell/support the application they might just have an idea of what it likes best.

Kali

For that sort of money I'd probably go with a Dell Poweredge 2850 - Dual 64bit Xeons and will easily take 4GB RAM... and right about the 5grand mark... throw in full redundancy options for another 500 or so.

If you want to spend a bit more money on a quad processor machine then I'd heartily reccomend a HP DL580 G2.. very stable machine... we've two of them in work here with very favourable workrates and uptime (especially for Windows boxes).. plus theres HP specific things like Smartstart & iLO, which really make management a whole lot easier.

They're both assuming you have a cabinet to put them in.. if you don't then maybe have a look at HPs ML class.. or the Dell 2800.

stevenmu

The type of application will also determine what RAID level you want for your hard disks, RAID 5 for example is useless for database applications, in some cases it can reduce performance by over 50% :eek:

tadhgrrr

thanks for the help guys, the applications are mainly memory intensive but dont need

ultra fast disk access

its not a database application...just numerical analysis using off the shelf programs like matlab, mathematica, labView and VPI

think ill try to get onto a sales person and see what they come up with...thanks again

case_sensitive

Mac Minis + XGrid , I dare ya..

http://www.red-lobster.it/pages_45.html

http://www.trndstr.com/archives/technology/index.html


no, flamers, I'm not serious...

Capt'n Midnight

would this be of any use ?
http://freshmeat.net/projects/quantian/
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=quantian

Quantian is a directly bootable and self-configuring Linux system on a single CD-ROM/DVD. Based on Knoppix and clusterKnoppix, it provides out-of-the box support for openMosix, as well as about 1.3 GB of additional software with a quantitative, numerical, or scientific focus. Such software includes R (with many packages from CRAN, BioConductor, and Rmetrics), Octave (including several add-on packages), Python (with Scientific Python, NumPy, and BioPython extensions), several computer-algebra systems, several graphics and visualizations packages, as well as a large number of other scientific or numeric packages, programming tools, and general utilities.

if the apps do what you want then you setup all of the PC's on the lan to PXE boot. If Quantian is running then the PC's would join the cluster, if not or you press a key to bypass PXE boot then they run as normal.

deRanged

case_sensitive wrote:

Mac Minis + XGrid , I dare ya..

I'm trying to convince my boss to buy me a couple of minis for a small cluster.
XGrid is handy enough at what it does.

nesf

tadhgrrr wrote:

thanks for the help guys, the applications are mainly memory intensive but dont need

its not a database application...just numerical analysis using off the shelf programs like matlab, mathematica, labView and VPI

think ill try to get onto a sales person and see what they come up with...thanks again

For mathematica or matlab intensive work what I've used in the past is quad AMD Opteron Systems running Win Server. You can pick up a board for it from komplett.ie iirc, but you'll have to search elsewhere to find a case that will fit the board, ie it's non-ATX.

Couple that with a nice bit of memory like at least 6Gb, and a good fast HD, and your sorted.

You can source most of what you need off Komplett, you could prob get away with running with dual processors, and then using Win Xp 64, i think mathematica has a version that supports 64bit windows afaik. What you really need for the system is Opteron Processors, they are scary good when doing heavy mathematica work.

I remember the dual processor machines we used have in college for mathematica and similar, they were speedy little buggers when it came to the number crunching.

Hope the above helps, if you want you can PM/email me about it, I can give you some knowledge from what i've learned from doing numerical computing for the past few years.

USER X

I have a Dell Poweredge 2650 that I would like to sell, it has 2 GB of RAM, a 2.4GHZ Xeon, 2 16GB SCSI's in the RAID. It has a redundant power supply in case the other were to fail.

The machine can easily take a second processor, up to 6GB of RAM and it has 5 HD Bays in the RAID.

The Machine is in perfect working order and is still under warranty perhaps untill as far as JAN 2006 (Not 100% sure but I can check it out with Dell). I am looking for €2500 for the machine, you could easily upgrade it to full spec with a budget of 5K. I could even help you source the components if you like. Oh, the machine is also licenced for use with Windows 2000 server and I could leave it pre-installed on the machine.

Regards,
~User X

Capt'n Midnight

The PE2650 sounds a bit high in price relative to a new Dell of similar spec (I'm NOT taking into account RAID or 5 year contract since HDD access doesn't seem critical)
PE2800 - 2GB RAM 2 Drives (73GB each) with Windows 2k - €2,439.00

Both the 2650/2800 use 400HMz ram so you might want to look else where since the use seems more memory intensive than drive - then again with RAM you have a trade off tween lots of cheap ram or less fast ram - how much will the app use - or should you be looking at CPU's with large cache ?

USER X

Capt'n Midnight,
Did you take into account the fact that full redundancy (included in my PE2650) costs an extra €500,
It also comes with a full on-site warranty (parts and service) untilll JAN 2006?
You said you did not take into account RAID, this PE2650 has the PERC 3DI RAID Controller.
I also forgot to mention that it has two Gigabit Ethernet ports which would easily provide enough network bandwidth.

~User X

nesf

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

The PE2650 sounds a bit high in price relative to a new Dell of similar spec (I'm NOT taking into account RAID or 5 year contract since HDD access doesn't seem critical)
PE2800 - 2GB RAM 2 Drives (73GB each) with Windows 2k - €2,439.00

Both the 2650/2800 use 400HMz ram so you might want to look else where since the use seems more memory intensive than drive - then again with RAM you have a trade off tween lots of cheap ram or less fast ram - how much will the app use - or should you be looking at CPU's with large cache ?

For the apps he's talking about what you want is the best CPU's as you can afford with as much cache as possible coupled with a large(ish) amount of the best RAM you can afford. RAID is nice but not necessarily needed unless your doing alot work from databases as opposed to numerical solving. He didn't specifiy either, so I'll assume numerical since mathematica is best suited to that.

It's definitely something that you are better off building rather than picking up a server for in my opinion. But that is only if you are serious about it and need the specilised power for the apps. Otherwise just pick up some random machine with 2GB of RAM and 2 Athalon 64 processors and run 64 bit XP Pro off it. It'll be effective, just not as fast.

Nietzschean

i've yet to see a 2650/2850 without dual gige ports....

Anyway we did some comparasons between our dual xeon's with EM64T (3ghz 2850 PE's) , some nice dual opertron boxes, and well a normal run of the mill powerbook 17" (all test machines had 2gig+ of ram), the powerbook won doing floating point calcuations.... so personally i'd go with an Xserve failing that a dual/quad opertron machine, xeon wuold be well below the opertron in proformance then again...

i know the Xserve doesn't run windows but most of what u have listed are generally available on mac/linux aswell as windows.

USER X

Darth Bobo,
If you doubt the ports, check em out for yourself:
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2650_specs.pdf

~User X

Capt'n Midnight

USER X wrote:

Capt'n Midnight,
Did you take into account the fact that full redundancy (included in my PE2650) costs an extra €500,
It also comes with a full on-site warranty (parts and service) untilll JAN 2006?
You said you did not take into account RAID, this PE2650 has the PERC 3DI RAID Controller.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

(I'm NOT taking into account RAID or 5 year contract since HDD access doesn't seem critical)

You've a nice mission critical fileserver, but tadhgrrr is looking for a number cruncher.

As an aside I can remember when Dell released the first workstations , the poweredges had a better chipset and so were a good bit faster and were cheaper and had 4 hour on site too, so don't get taken in by salespersons spiel as in many cases they will sell what is profitable..

Interesting Article
http://fisher.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/aim/epubs/MatrixInverseTiming/default.htm
36 seconds - PC with a 732 MHz Pentium III processor running Win2K with 256 MB RAM.
15.8 seconds - PC with 2 Xeon CPUS at 2 GHZ with 2 Gig RAM

Hobbes

If you have the cash I believe you can outsource your number cruching to IBM.

tadhgrrr

thanks for the help guys, i must admit some of the advice is a bit above my level of understanding (classic example of a non-techie having trouble communicating with techies! )

Im afraid I wont be able to purchase the 2nd hand machine as Im operating from within UCC and need a paper trail for admin to be able to follow, invoices, reputable suppliers etc.

Also building my own machine isnt really an option as I dont have the experience and messing around with that sort of cash is asking for trouble.

I think ill try and get in touch with nesf and see if I can get this converstaion to a level which will be more usefull to my end goal of getting a machine soon enough

thanks again

-t