Huinalu Linux SuperCluster

[Ron Brightwell]

> 
> > Actually, no it's not -- at least not for a cluster intended to support
> > parallel apps. The Siberia Cplant cluster at Sandia that is currently
> > #82 on the top 500 list has a peak theoretical perfomance of 580 GFLOPS.
> > It has demonstrated (with the MPLinpack benchmark) 247.6 GFLOPS.  The latest
> > Cplant cluster, called Antarctica, has 1024+ 466 MHz Alpha nodes, with a
> > peak theoretical performance of more than 954 GFLOPS.
> 
> The last NCSA Linux cluster (Urbana-Champaign, IL) provides 512
> dual PIII 1GHz, so a theoritical peak of 1 TFLOPS :
> http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Headlines/01Headlines/010116.IBM.html

I didn't think that machine had been deployed yet, since the above press
release says it will be installed in the Summer.  I restricted the Antarctica
number to what we currently have up and running as a parallel machine.
There are another 400+ 466 MHz Alphas sitting next those 1024 nodes that
will be integrated in the next few weeks.  And thoeretical peak performance
of a theoretical machine accurately measures your ability to do math...

> 
> > Keep in mind that peak theoretical performance accurately measures your ability
> > to spend money, while MPLinpack performance accurately measures your ability
> > to seek pr -- I mean it measures the upper bound on compute performance from
> > a parallel app.
> 
> Very true (actually, it measures the upper bound on compute
> performance of a dense linear algebra double precision
> computation, which indeed covers a large set of // apps. There is
> a lot of other codes that do not behave like LU, specially for the
> ratio computation/communication).

Yes.  This was an attempt at humor rather than an exact characterization.
(Do // apps scale worse than || apps? :)

> 
> I don't know MPLinpack. Don't you mean HPLinpack ?

Sorry, this may be Sandia terminology -- massively parallel linpack.  I was
speaking of the benchmark and not the acutal code.  The measuements I quoted
were using a Sandia-developed version of the solver, but we have been using
the HPLinpack code from UTK since it was released.

-Ron