In the past several months, a good number of corporate, government, academic, and research institutions — Pixar, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Shell E&P, and others — have announced the installation of substantial, high performance Linux computing clusters. In the case of LLNL, for example, the largest of its three new clusters (built by Linux Networx) is composed of 252 Pentium 4 processors, capable of a theoretical peak of 857 gigaflops, making it one of the fastest clusters ever built. In the case of Pixar, a 1,024-processor blade cluster (using 2.8 GHz Xeons) from RackSaver is replacing the company’s existing Sparc-based render farm.
In the past several months, a good number of corporate, government, academic, and research institutions — Pixar, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Shell E&P, and others — have announced the installation of substantial, high performance Linux computing clusters. In the case of LLNL, for example, the largest of its three new clusters (built by Linux Networx) is composed of 252 Pentium 4 processors, capable of a theoretical peak of 857 gigaflops, making it one of the fastest clusters ever built. In the case of Pixar, a 1,024-processor blade cluster (using 2.8 GHz Xeons) from RackSaver is replacing the company’s existing Sparc-based render farm.
Four things are startling about these groups’ adoptions of commodity clusters. The first two surprises are the scale of the machines: the machines are enormous and simultaneously diminuitive. The machines have a mind-boggling number of fast CPUs, yet can fit in a series of 45U racks.
The next surprise is cost: clusters provide the biggest bang for your computing buck. Built from off-the-shelf parts, clusters leverage the pace of Moore’s Law and the dwindling prices of CPUs and memory.
And the last, albeit pleasant surprise, is that Linux is the operating system powering these clusters. Flexible, scalable, and perhaps most important, customizeable, Linux has earned its “street cred” in high performance computing. And as you’ll read in Dr. Thomas Sterling’s personal account of the history of Beowulf clusters, the symbiosis between Linux and Beowulf…
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