“In the history of supercomputing, there always has been the
notion that super speed requires exotic technologies and monumental
cost. Our newest supercomputer proves that if you use the right
exotic technologies, you don’t need much money — not even as much
as a “normal” Beowulf would cost. It’s appropriate that we invested
a good bit of engineering toward that goal; after all, the
University of Kentucky’s old slogan was “A Tradition Of Value.”
“A popular measure of supercomputer speed is how many billions
of floating-point arithmetic operations it can perform per second
(GFLOPS) while executing a useful program. Less than a decade ago,
supercomputers cost more than $1,000,000 per GFLOPS. Traditional
supercomputers still cost around $10,000 for each GFLOPS delivered.
Linux PC clusters, “Beowulfs” like LANL’s Avalon, bring that cost
down to around $3,000 per GFLOPS. It was the addition of two rather
exotic new technologies to a Linux PC cluster that allowed us to
get a GFLOPS for $650 each. The way to get super speed is parallel
processing: executing multiple portions of a program simultaneously
allows the program to complete in less time. The more parallelism
you can use, the greater the potential speedup. A modern
supercomputer doesn’t really execute operations much faster than a
high-end PC, it just executes more operations simultaneously. Thus,
the key to making a cluster of PCs perform like a supercomputer is
to use as much parallelism as possible.”
“KLAT2, Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2… made news not
because it is yet another “Beowulf” cluster (YABC), but because it
uses a couple of new technologies to improve the parallelism
without increasing the cost of the system, thus achieving over 64
GFLOPS for about $41,000. The nicest thing about these two new
technologies is that we implemented them by creating tools that
anyone can use to build and program their own supercomputers.
So, when you saw the stories about KLAT2’s record
price/performance, you were only seeing the result of the first
application of these tools. The new supercomputing technologies
that we developed for KLAT2 are
- a new type of cluster interconnection network and
- a way to exploit the power of 3DNow! in a cluster.”