Binary Freedom: Linux Cluster Overkill; Q&A with Dan Reed (NCSA) & Dave Gilardi (IBM)

[ Thanks to Brian
for this link. ]

“It’s not often you get a press release on your desk that
informs you that two of the biggest names in high-performance
supercomputing have decided that for their next two-teraflop baby,
they’d like to use x86 servers and Linux. Not often at all, in
fact. Historically, we’ve seen rooms full of Cray processors, SGI
servers, and Sun babies with ten gig of RAM. Understandably, then,
I was a little askance when I received an e-mail saying that the
NCSA were to team up with IBM to build two Linux clusters- one
being deployed in February and running Red Hat, and a second being
implemented in the Summer, and running Turbolinux. Wondering
whether I’d received a mis-timed April Fools’ joke, I spoke to the
Director of the NCSA, Dan Reed, and to Dave Gilardi; the Director
of Linux Clusters at IBM.”

“Binary Freedom: There’s been talk about the
clustering potential of Linux for a while- we’ve had Sun employees
working on clustering leave to form the Linux Clustering Cabal, and
various other Operating Systems have been ditched in favour for
something with more computational power and less kernel locks…
how scientific was the process of choosing Linux for the cluster?
Is there some property of Linux that’s going to help you out
here?

Dan: Linux was chosen for a number of reasons.
The first is the level of acceptance that it has gained in the
scientific computing communities. … The second is the
availability of Linux on commodity hardware from a large number of
vendors. … It was also clear that Linux and Intel’s Itanium
systems are a very strong combination. We have been using them for
quite some time and have seen very good performance on
applications.”

“Binary Freedom: Let’s get down to hardware. We
gather from your press release that there are two clusters being
built. Can you give us some specs on this?

Dave: NCSA’s Linux clusters will include more
than 600 IBM eServer xSeries Intel processor-based servers, running
Linux and Myricom’s Myrinet cluster interconnect network.
Specifically, NCSA has purchased 512 IA32 xSeries servers and 160
Itanium eServers. The Itanium cluster, to be installed this summer,
will be one of the first to use Intel’s next generation 64-bit
Itanium processor. The two clusters will expand the proven
capability that NCSA has already demonstrated with Linux clusters
and both Intel architectures.”

Complete
Story