|
Los Alamos, N.M. -- Some of the IT world's top
luminaries gathered here at Los Alamos National Laboratory
to witness the unveiling of a compact supercomputer which
proponents say could provide the model for high performance
computing systems in the years ahead.
Gordon Bell, one of the original brains behind the
minicomputer, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux
operating system, joined a collection of scientists for the
unveiling of the supercomputer, a Beowolf cluster called
Green Destiny and was built from hundreds of so-called
blade servers -- compact servers stripped down to their
most basic components.
Using server blades, Los Alamos scientists were able to
build a system that is much smaller, consumes less power
and is more cost-effective than typical supercomputers,
according to Wu-chun Feng, team leader of the Research And
Development In Advanced Network Technology (RADIANT) group
at Los Alamos.
"Current supercomputers are not addressing some of the
fundamental issues that will be key for this coming
decade," Feng said. "Simply doing bigger, faster machines
is not good enough any more."
Unlike many supercomputers that use specialized
components and can fill entire buildings, the Green Destiny
fits 240 server blades from RLX Technologies into a server
rack that would fit inside most closets. The blades use
low-powered processors from Transmeta and a version of the
Linux operating system.
The system consumes far less power than other
supercomputers and should also require less maintenance,
according to Feng. Using server blades meant trade-offs
were made for overall CPU performance and internal
bandwidth between components, but the research effort is
still in its relatively early stages, he said.
A smaller version of Green Destiny called MetaBlade has
been up and running for nine months without a failure,
unlike other systems which require "regular maintenance,"
Feng said.
The engineers who developed the systems here said they
preferred to use blades powered by Crusoe processors from
Transmeta because the Crusoe chips don't rely on boosting
transistor count to achieve faster performance, which they
said is the case with chips from rivals Advanced Micro
Devices (AMD) and Intel.
"In contrast to the traditional transistor-laden and
hence power-hungry CPUs from AMD and Intel, the Crusoe CPU
is fundamentally software based with a small hardware
core," Feng wrote in a white paper about the project which
is on the Web at
http://public.lanl.gov/feng/Bladed-Beowulf.pdf
"Because of the substantial difference in power
dissipation, the Transmeta processor requires no active
cooling, whereas a Pentium 4 [and most definitely an IA-64]
processor can heat to the point of failure if its not
aggressively cooled," he wrote.
Intel and AMD were not immediately available to
comment.
Some of the high performance systems at Los Alamos use
massive cooling systems to keep them working. The Green
Destiny, however, sits in a dusty warehouse here where
temperatures often exceed 80 degrees.
Bell, who is now a senior researcher at Microsoft,
attended the event because Green Destiny is in keeping with
his passion for making high powered computing systems as
cost effective and readily available as possible, he
said.
"I was the guy who screwed up scientific computing by
putting VAX out there," Bell said in a speech, referring to
his work on Digital Equipment's VAX minicomputer, which in
the 1970s helped lower the price bar for high-performance
systems. "Groups of scientists could have their own
computers out of the hands of big centers. This phenomenon
is happening all over again."
In this vein, Feng also proposed that a new technique is
needed for measuring the performance of supercomputers.
Instead of looking primarily at how many calculations a
system can run in a given amount of time, researchers
should also consider factors such as downtime, size, price
and maintenance requirements, he said.
Based on these measures, Feng said the smaller MetaBlade
system would cost US$33,000 to purchase and operate for
four years, compared to $120,000 for a comparable Pentium
4-based computer and $93,000 for a Pentium III-based
system. The premium paid for the Pentium-based systems
stems primarily from additional costs for system
administration, the amount of power consumed and cooling
costs, according to Feng.
Intel and AMD could come up with interesting techniques
to cool their chips in the coming years, Feng said, but he
urged fellow scientists to look hard at alternatives to
speeding chips by adding more transistors, which tends to
generate more heat. He didn't say that he had solved the
problem with Green Destiny, but that his team's efforts are
an important first move in that direction.
"This type of project could serve as the foundation for
the supercomputers of the future, but there is a lot of
work to be done before then," he said.
|
