Over the past few years, this column has covered a wide variety of topics in high-performance computing (HPC), primarily with an eye toward Beowulf-style, Linux clusters. Since the first such commodity clusters were built in the mid- to late-1990s, they have increasingly served as the model for commercial supercomputers. And as supercomputer vendors have died off, the often-struggling vendors that remain are using more commodity components and processors. While the cluster architecture was in use long before the first Beowulfs, clusters now make up almost 73 percent of the fastest supercomputers in the famed “Top 500” list (http://top500.org/).
This adoption of commoditized components has been reflected in software as well. Supercomputer vendors are increasingly relying on third-party system software and compilers to support their supercomputing systems. For example, Silicon Graphics sells the Intel compilers for their Intel Itanium 2- based Altix systems, and Cray sells the Portland Group compilers for their AMD Opteron- based XT3 and XD1 clusters. Moreover, Linux has played a significant role in HPC commoditization, since it’s frequently used as the starting point for operating systems on large commercial supercomputer clusters. Although most vendors must make significant changes to Linux for their own hardware, some of the more general purpose improvements and additions to the kernel are contributed back for potential inclusion in future releases of Linux.
While this commoditization transformation certainly saves money for the vendor (as well as resulting in improvements to Linux), it has…
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