Two months ago, the Kronos “value cluster” set a new record for price-to-performance, yielding 14.53 gigaflops at the cost of $171 per gigaflop. But is that the best Kronos can do? Or can some additional investment of time and effort push the extremes a little further? Discover if Kronos hits the proverbial wall, learning more cluster optimization techniques along the way.
Two months ago, the Kronos “value cluster” set a new record for price-to-performance, yielding 14.53 gigaflops at the cost of $171 per gigaflop. But is that the best Kronos can do? Or can some additional investment of time and effort push the extremes a little further? Discover if Kronos hits the proverbial wall, learning more cluster optimization techniques along the way.
Douglas Eadline
The November 2005 feature story “Life, The Universe, and Your Cluster” (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-11/value.html) presented Kronos, the “value cluster,” built for a paltry $2,500. While small and inexpensive, Kronos nonetheless delivered 14.53 gigaflops (52 percent of peak) on the famous Top 500 High Performance Linpack (HPL, http://www.top500.org/) benchmark. That’s a record of sorts: only $171 per gigaflop. Can Kronos crunch even faster?
When fixing a car, here’s a general rule of thumb: Replace the cheapest, most accessible part first. Then, if necessary, move again and again to the next easiest and cheapest part to replace, continuing until you (hopefully) correct the problem. As any grease monkey will tell you, it’s far simpler and cheaper to replace a gas filter than it is to replace a carburetor.
When optimizing a cluster, the same rule applies. As was done in November to tweak the value cluster, you can start with the easiest and most accessible components: fiddle…
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