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Los Alamos mail-order supercomputer among world's fastest
Hello there.
This is a forward from the (quite good) cypherpunks list; may be of interest.
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Los Alamos mail-order supercomputer among world's fastest
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 18, 1998 - A supercomputer built from
ordinary personal computer components is among the 500 fastest
computers in the world, an international survey reported today.
The Avalon computer cost just $150,000 to build, and can compute
more than 20 billion mathematical operations in a second, said
Michael Warren of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Theoretical
Astrophysics Group.
Avalon made the 315th spot on the 11th TOP500 list released at the
Supercomputer '98 conference in Mannheim, Germany. The list is the
best-known ranking of supercomputer performance.
"It's now possible for a small group of motivated people to design
and build their own parallel supercomputer using off-the-shelf
computer parts and easily available software," Warren said. "Only a
handful of companies in the world produce a computer this fast, and
the least expensive costs well over a million dollars."
Avalon is built out of 68 high-end personal computers that use the
Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha microprocessor, connected by
3Com network switches similar to those found in a university
department or small business. Each processor in the Los Alamos
supercomputer is an ordinary PC, using the same type of memory and
disk drives found in a computer on an office desktop.
"Each of these processors theoretically is capable of performing
over one billion operations a second, and we bought them at consumer
prices," said Warren.
But hardware is only half of the equation. Software is the hardest
part of getting many processors to work together on the same problem.
The Los Alamos team used an open source Linux operating system and
other software available on the Internet.
"The key to the success of these machines lies in their software,
and the most important part of that software is the Linux operating
system," Warren explained. "Linux can be obtained at no cost through
the Internet, but that is minor compared to its other advantages. I
my experience, the reliability and performance of Linux has no peer.
"We have stressed Linux well beyond where one would expect it to
fail, and it has performed admirably. Because it was developed as
open source software, we can go to the source code and fix many
problems immediately," Warren continued. "If we can't fix it
ourselves, we can tap the huge pool of Linux expertise on the
Internet."
While some question the reliability, complexity and difficulty of
installing software on a "do-it-yourself" supercomputer, Warren and
his team had no problems.
"We got most of the parts for Avalon on Friday, April 10. Three
days later, the machine was computing at over 10 billion operations
per
second." he said.
By Wednesday, which was the deadline for TOP500 list entries,
Avalon had achieved 19.2 billion floating point operations per
second. The computer hasn't suffered a single hardware failure or
operating system crash on any of the 68 processors during the last
six weeks.
Working with Warren to build Avalon were David Neal, systems
administrator for Los Alamos' Center for Nonlinear Studies, and
David Moulton and Aric Hagberg, both from the Mathematical Modeling
and Analysis Group.
In its short life, Avalon already has performed some significant
scientific computations.
One of the first simulations followed the evolution of a shock wave
through 60 million atoms. The simulation ran for more than 300 hours
on Avalon, calculating about 10 billion floating point operations per
second.
Physicist Peter Lomdahl, who won the Gordon Bell prize for
significant achievement in parallel processing using the Connection
Machine 5 supercomputer at Los Alamos said the Avalon system was
extremely easy to use.
"We ported our molecular dynamics code over in about a day and have
been able to perform state-of-the-art simulations of shock-waves in
metals that ordinarily would have required the Lab's large-scale
shared-memory parallel systems" Lomdahl said. "Not only does the
Avalon system run slightly faster than a similarly sized commercial
system, it does it at a tenth of the cost, and is much easier to use.
"Warren will use the machine in his computational astrophysics
research, performing simulations of galaxies.
"I am interested in simulating the evolution of the universe from
its very early stages up to the present day," Warren said. "We can
test different ideas about the way the universe is put together by
comparing the galaxies simulated inside the computer with real
observations made by the latest generation of telescopes. Avalon puts
the computational power we need to do those simulations inside our
own building, at a price we can afford."
In its "spare time," Avalon helped crack the Certicom Elliptic
Curve Cryptosystem challenge, winning a $4,000 prize that was donated
to the Free Software Foundation. The Foundation led the development
of many of the software tools Avalon uses.
The code-breaking calculations ran at the same time as other large
simulations, but only made progress when the computer didn't have
anything else to do.
Initial funds to buy and build Avalon came from the Center for
Nonlinear Studies. Other funding came from the Laboratory Directed
Research and Development program and the Theoretical Division.
Shi-yi Chen, deputy leader of the Center for Nonlinear Studies, said
"Avalon will be used for fundamental researches in nonlinear sciences
for a variety of areas, including applied mathematics, material
sciences, complex systems and climate modeling."
Warren has used parallel computers throughout his career, including
several which have held records as world's fastest at the time. In
1996, he built his first off-the shelf computer, Loki, which last
year won the Gordon Bell prize in the "price to performance"
category.
"Loki proved itself as the most cost-effective way to perform
large-scale scientific simulations last year, and now Avalon provides
ten times that performance for only three times the price," Warren
said.
Computers using off-the-shelf technology like Loki and Avalon are
called "Beowulf" computers, after the project begun by Thomas
Sterling at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
"Avalon is a dramatic demonstration of the long-term potential of
the Beowulf model for scalable, high-end computing to perform real-
world applications in science and engineering at unprecedented price-
to-performance ratios," Sterling said. "Since 1994 when the earliest
Beowulf systems were developed at NASA, a rapidly growing community
world-wide has emerged to apply the Beowulf approach to a broad range
of important problems.
"Avalon represents a new generation of Beowulf systems -- breaking
new ground in performance and extending their utility to new and
important areas," Sterling said.
Warren thinks that Avalon's success is only the beginning.
"In the future, I imagine hundreds or thousands of machines of this
type, working on important science, engineering and business
problems," he said. "You will probably never hear about those
computers, because they are simply a tool; the problems that they
solve and the progress they enable is the important news."
More information about Avalon is available at the following URL on
the World Wide Web: http://cnls.lanl.gov/avalon
Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of
California for the U.S. Department of Energy.
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