Linux On Steroids: DIY supercomputer +Distributed Terascale Facility

[Faustine]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Faustine wrote:

> 232.6 billion operations a second still looks fairly impressive to me. 
> 
> ~Faustine.

>>Cryptographically speaking, *yawn*.

"Fairly impressive" in that it's better than what I've got in my basement 
right now. And for me, part of the appeal lies in the satisfaction of 
putting something like that together entirely yourself out of components 
other people considered worthless and discarded. Not to mention being able 
to use it for whatever you want, whenever you want, without depending on 
anyone else's machine: a wonderful blend of self-sufficiency, ingenuity and 
megalomania, ha. Personally, I'd like to run problems through some 
optimization and simulation software, do a little code-based qualitative 
analysis, etc. without hogging resources somewhere else with all the old 
wizards looking over my shoulder, tapping their feet. Tim made a lot of 
great points about the drawbacks. Still, it's "a nice toy", as someone here 
characterized it.

Here's something you might find a little more interesting:

Linux supercomputing grid unveiled for science use

By TODD R. WEISS 
The National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday announced a $53 million 
project to connect a series of remotely located powerful computers into a 
high-speed Linux supercomputer grid that could open vast new opportunities 
for scientific and medical breakthroughs. 
The project, to be funded by a three-year grant from the NSF, will be built 
by the middle of next year, giving scientists and researchers access to 
massive combined supercomputer power they have until now only dreamed 
about. 

Called the Distributed Terascale Facility, the project will link powerful 
servers running Linux into a high-speed grid that will allow researchers to 
use all the computing resources they need, regardless of where the servers 
are located. At their disposal will be computing power of huge proportions, 
with a total of 8.1 TFLOPS and the ability to perform 13.6-trillion 
calculations per second. The grid will have storage of more than 450TB of 
data through a high-speed optical network called a TeraGrid, which will 
link computers and data at four academic research facilities in the U.S. 

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM will provide more than 1,000 IBM eServer Linux 
clusters that will be running more than 3,300 of Intel Corp.'s upcoming 
McKinley Itanium processors for the system, as well as IBM data storage 
products and support services. Qwest Communications International Inc. in 
Denver will provide a 40-gigabit high-speed network for the grid system, 
which will be 16 times faster than what is available today. 

The supercomputer grid will link the National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications in Illinois, the San Diego Supercomputer Center in California, 
the Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago and the California 
Institute of Technology in Pasadena into a cohesive group of computers with 
tremendous research potential, according to project organizers. 

"This is the first salvo in transforming how science and engineering 
research is done in the world," said Dan Reed, the director of the National 
Center for Supercomputing Applications. 

The facility is expected to reach peak performance of 13.6 TFLOPS by April 
2003, and will be used for a wide range of projects, including research 
related to storm, climate and earthquake predictions; development of more-
efficient combustion engines; chemical and molecular factors in biology; 
and physical, chemical and electrical properties of materials. 

"This facility will stretch the boundaries of high-performance computing 
and give U.S. computer scientists and other researchers in all science and 
engineering disciplines access to a critical new resource," said National 
Science Board Chairman Eamon Kelly. 

Eventually, similar grid computing systems are seen as having many uses for 
business computing, according to proponents. 

The announcement is the second related to grid computing this week. On 
Monday, IBM announced that it's building a worldwide grid computing network 
to tie together systems at its various data centers to combine their 
computing power for customers. Users would pay for processing time on an as-
needed basis, similar to any other utility. IBM also said it's been chosen 
by the British government to build a national grid for various universities 
for collaborative scientific research. 

The grid will be run using middleware being built under the open-source 
Globus Project, a research initiative funded by various U.S. government 
agencies. Globus software will allow servers and computers to be connected 
into seamless networks that can be used together to conduct research and 
other work. 

Also involved in the project are cluster computing vendor Myricom Inc., 
software vendor Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.