| Author |
Message |
Pete Zaitcev (OTID1)
Guest
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 Posted:
Thu Dec 09, 2004 11:02 pm Post subject:
Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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Quoth the press release:
The supercomputer was built by the Swiss company DALCO and has a total
of 530 AMD Opteron(tm) processors installed in High-Density Cooling
Enclosures supplied by American Power Conversion (APC). The software is
provided by Fluent. Sauber has established technology partnership
agreements with all four companies.
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) serves to analyse and design aerodynamic
components and is an important complement to wind tunnel work. [...]
[] The supercomputer can achieve a peak performance of 2.3 Tflop/s and
is being equipped with 1 TB RAM and 11 TB of storage.
They chose the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture.
I guess they could not afford an Itanium based cluster, being a relatively
small team and everything...
I'm surprised to learn that APC is in this line of business. But perhaps it
is a rather stock rack with a built-in UPS. No word on the interconnect
they (DALCO?) used to build this thing. Direct Connect Architecture? Huh?
-- Pete |
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Tony Hill
Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Dec 10, 2004 11:05 am Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:02:32 -0800, "Pete Zaitcev (OTID1)"
<ot16a6ca05878e44c0@comcast.net> wrote:
| Quote: | Quoth the press release:
The supercomputer was built by the Swiss company DALCO and has a total
of 530 AMD Opteron(tm) processors installed in High-Density Cooling
Enclosures supplied by American Power Conversion (APC). The software is
provided by Fluent. Sauber has established technology partnership
agreements with all four companies.
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) serves to analyse and design aerodynamic
components and is an important complement to wind tunnel work. [...]
[] The supercomputer can achieve a peak performance of 2.3 Tflop/s and
is being equipped with 1 TB RAM and 11 TB of storage.
They chose the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture.
I guess they could not afford an Itanium based cluster, being a relatively
small team and everything...
|
Ferrari also choose an AMD cluster, and they are anything but a small
team. Of course, AMD is also a sponsor of Ferrari.
Toyota, on the other hand, has teamed up with Intel and has an Itanium
cluster...
Hmmm... last years standings:
Ferrari - 1st place - 262 points
Sauber - 6th place - 34 points
Toyota - 8th place - 9 points
Well.. I guess that proves it! AMD has the better processor :>
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Fri Dec 10, 2004 10:29 pm Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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Pete Zaitcev (OTID1) wrote:
| Quote: | I'm surprised to learn that APC is in this line of business. But
perhaps it
is a rather stock rack with a built-in UPS. No word on the
interconnect
they (DALCO?) used to build this thing. Direct Connect Architecture?
Huh? |
Try a Google search on: InfraStruXure high density
or look at:
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/0315edit.html
APC [nasdaq:APCC] has been expanding into this turf in an intelligent
fashion for several years now, i.e., worrying about more complete
infrastructure for power & cooling, so that people don't have to spend
as much time engineering their own.
With increasing density, power/cooling issues keep getting tougher and
tougher, i.e., mechanical engineering matters a lot!
Historically, it's been an intersting cycle:
1) In the 1970s & 1980s, people doing Bipolar mainframes and
supercomputers were doing amazing (& expensive) things for cooling and
power, perhaps exemplified by the old saw "Seymour Cray was a plumber."
:-) I.e., water-cooling, or even Fluorinert in Cray-2.
2) CMOS kept getting faster, at much lower power, to the point where it
was much easier to build reasonable systems without cooling
superheroics,l and Bipolar essentailly disappeared from this domain.
3) But, the CMOS keeps getting faster and hotter, so we get things
like:
a) Computer rooms that sound like wind tunnels.
b) www.cooligy.com/ for dealing with the heat density on individual
chips.
c) Very hard work on the part of systems designers, and infrastructure
providers like APC.
d) And the Cray X-1 brings back Fluroinert!
Disclosure: I own a modest amount of APCC. |
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Greg Lindahl
Guest
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| Posted:
Sat Dec 11, 2004 12:45 am Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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In article <pan.2004.12.09.18.02.31.761815@zaitcev.lan>,
Pete Zaitcev (OTID1) <ot16a6ca05878e44c0@comcast.net> wrote:
| Quote: | I guess they could not afford an Itanium based cluster, being a relatively
small team and everything...
|
I think this customer was more interested in price/performance than
the absolute price of a single cpu.
| Quote: | Direct Connect Architecture? Huh?
|
This is a relatively new marketing slogan from AMD which refers to HyperTransport.
-- greg |
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Patrick Geoffray
Guest
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| Posted:
Sat Dec 11, 2004 10:05 am Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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Pete Zaitcev (OTID1) wrote:
| Quote: | Quoth the press release:
The supercomputer was built by the Swiss company DALCO and has a total
of 530 AMD Opteron(tm) processors installed in High-Density Cooling
I'm surprised to learn that APC is in this line of business. But perhaps it
is a rather stock rack with a built-in UPS. No word on the interconnect
they (DALCO?) used to build this thing. Direct Connect Architecture? Huh?
|
The interconnect is Myrinet. It's not on the Press Release, you have to
dig a little.
Patrick |
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Klaus Fehrle
Guest
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| Posted:
Sun Dec 12, 2004 2:18 am Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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"Greg Lindahl" <lindahl@pbm.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:41b9fce9$1@news.meer.net...
| Quote: | In article <pan.2004.12.09.18.02.31.761815@zaitcev.lan>,
Pete Zaitcev (OTID1) <ot16a6ca05878e44c0@comcast.net> wrote:
I guess they could not afford an Itanium based cluster, being a relatively
small team and everything...
I think this customer was more interested in price/performance than
the absolute price of a single cpu.
Direct Connect Architecture? Huh?
This is a relatively new marketing slogan from AMD which refers to
HyperTransport.
|
If I understand it right the new term includes intradie core-to-core
connection, which goes beyond Hypertransport. But I believe I have seen it
used for inter-chip-connections as well recently - obviously refering to
Hypertransport. Insofar, it is used as stringent as marketing terms are
usually :-)
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Yousuf Khan
Guest
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| Posted:
Sun Dec 12, 2004 4:26 am Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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Pete Zaitcev (OTID1) wrote:
| Quote: | Quoth the press release:
The supercomputer was built by the Swiss company DALCO and has a total
of 530 AMD Opteron(tm) processors installed in High-Density Cooling
Enclosures supplied by American Power Conversion (APC). The software is
provided by Fluent. Sauber has established technology partnership
agreements with all four companies.
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) serves to analyse and design aerodynamic
components and is an important complement to wind tunnel work. [...]
[] The supercomputer can achieve a peak performance of 2.3 Tflop/s and
is being equipped with 1 TB RAM and 11 TB of storage.
They chose the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture.
I guess they could not afford an Itanium based cluster, being a relatively
small team and everything...
|
It's not surprising they chose AMD, as Ferrari also use an AMD system.
And AMD is a Ferrari sponsor. Sauber and Ferrari seem to have a big &
little brother relationship with each other.
| Quote: | I'm surprised to learn that APC is in this line of business. But perhaps it
is a rather stock rack with a built-in UPS. No word on the interconnect
they (DALCO?) used to build this thing. Direct Connect Architecture? Huh?
|
DCA is a new marquitectural term coined by AMD. It's the combination of
Hypertransport and onboard RAM controller. Easy way to describe it,
isn't it?
Regarding the APC rack, you haven't read the press release carefully
enough. It's not simply a rack with a built-in UPS (what good is that?),
it's a water-cooled rack!
Yousuf Khan |
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Romain Dolbeau
Guest
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| Posted:
Sun Dec 12, 2004 11:43 pm Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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Yousuf Khan <bbbl67@ezrs.com> wrote:
| Quote: | It's not surprising they chose AMD, as Ferrari also use an AMD system.
And AMD is a Ferrari sponsor. Sauber and Ferrari seem to have a big &
little brother relationship with each other.
|
IIRC, Petronas engines are really rebadged Ferrari engines (excess
inventory or previous year inventory or whatever). Maybe it's just for
binary compatibility :-)
--
Romain Dolbeau |
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YKhan
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Dec 14, 2004 1:35 am Post subject:
Re: Sauber installs "a supercomputer", ahem |
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Romain Dolbeau wrote:
| Quote: | IIRC, Petronas engines are really rebadged Ferrari engines (excess
inventory or previous year inventory or whatever). Maybe it's just
for
binary compatibility :-)
|
Actually, this year, they've been the current Ferrari engines (not the
year-old engines), due to the fact that new engine regulations have
made last year's engines completely obsolete. Ferrari would've had to
do simultaneous development work on this year's engine as well as last
year's engine to bring last year's engine upto this year's spec. So
they just decided to give them the same engines as what they have too.
Yousuf Khan |
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