Posted on 06/24/2020 3:33:30 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Tech Ping
Los Alamos has been using “Beowulf Clusters”, 16 off the shelf PC’s running Linux and networked, to model tectonic plate behavior and solar flare behavior. Cheaper than a Cray.
I'm in the middle of building one now for work.
These are not just computers. They are committees, or you might say mobs, of tied-together computers. Some of them have over 200,000 individual processors.
I think most of the individual processors are all doing the same thing.
No--mobs have no leader. Supercomputer clusters all have a leader, an organizer. They are more of a republic. :)
“When it comes to high-performance, it’s a Linux world.”
Linux is pretty amazing. It’s what happens when fallible humans apply engineering principles (however chaotic) over decades. It now dominates the scene everywhere except corporate computing, which consists of Windows laptops, desktops and servers for internal business use.
Linux runs on everything from all 500 top supercomputers, to every phone running Android. It runs on even smaller devices embedded in toasters, toys and who knows what. You can buy a complete credit card sized computer to learn and develop on for under $100 total. Most prominently, Linux powers most Internet servers, whether running databases, web servers, or a myriad of other compute chores.
Something better is needed, and will come along at some point. Neither Windows nor macOS are it. Linux is like democracy, “The worst possible system except for all the rest.” Speaking of democracy, it’s worth considering the free aspects of Linux, and it’s tremendous contribution to entrepreneurial innovation!
I’m typing this from Ubuntu Chrome, running a beautiful 2560x1440 (1440P) desktop on my primary monitor. Hat’s off to Linux!
“No—mobs have no leader.”
They can have a leader but “mob” was not a good term.
My point is that remember, once upon a time, the battle for speed consisted of faster clock speeds and multiple instructions executed at the same time, to produce the fastest possible execution of a single instruction stream.
Now the speed race is a matter of running more and more instruction streams (cores) at the same time.
The former is like having great ideas. The latter is like increasing the headcount. The former is science. The latter is like administration.
To me a ‘computer’ is a core running a single instruction stream, and a ‘supercomputer’ is the committee of computers.
Especially as the systems grow, the mechanics of coordinating the activities between disparate cores can become as complicated or even more complicated than the mechanics of what has to happen inside the core.
Summit -- with its Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs -- is the second-fastest supercomputer. It delivers 148.8 petaflops on HPL.
When I read stuff like this, I feel old. :^)
The folding@home project promotes that it has over 2 exaflops of processing power.
Pretty amazing considering where we were just a couple of years ago.
The tags at the top work, such as http://freerepublic.com/tag/scotus/, and I can navigate to threads by number, like http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3859124/posts.
I know not everyone is having this issue, cause there are a lot of current threads and comments. But it's not a install-specific, either, because it's doing it on both my phone and computer.
Win 7 Ultimate on the PC
Opera v68.0
Android phone
Tagging you guys to my #15 for tech support. Thanks!
Click the articles tab.
Weird. I did that, it worked, and now the forum and keyword links are working again.
What the heck did I do?
I spent a semester writing assembly-language code for a UNIVAC 1105 machine that had vacuum tubes for memory.
vacuum tubes for memory
That must have sucked!
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