pturner@ese.ese.ogi.edu (Paul Turner) (11/15/90)
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you have 10-20 RS6000s you are well on your way to having a supercomputer. Given that a bare 320 sells for app. $8k means a 10 unit setup has a 400 MFLOP theoretical peak, 80 Mb of memory, 1.2 Gb disk, etc. All for $80k. Compared with a similarly configured parallel machine of your choice, I would imagine it is cheaper to buy RS6000s - not to mention that the RS6000s would have other uses. The recent article by Dr. Ron A. Bell, "IBM RISC System/6000 Performance Tuning for Numerically Intensive FORTRAN and C Programs," indicates that a substantial portion of the theoretical peak can be realized in specific applications. The obvious problems are a programming interface, load balancing, and communication bandwidth. My questions, then, are along the lines of software to make use of this horsepower, Linda or others, and something other than ethernet to improve communication. Any ideas welcome. BTW, does anyone have performance figures for the 550? I'll summarize any email I receive to the net. Thank you, --Paul Paul J. Turner pturner@ese.ogi.edu
karish@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Chuck Karish) (11/15/90)
In article <13997@ogicse.ogi.edu> pturner@ese.ese.ogi.edu (Paul Turner) writes: > >It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you >have 10-20 RS6000s you are well on your way to having a >supercomputer. Given that a bare 320 sells for app. $8k means >a 10 unit setup has a 400 MFLOP theoretical peak, 80 Mb of memory, >1.2 Gb disk, etc. Not much of that 1.2GB of disk will be useful, though; count on another $10,000-20,000 for a disk farm. Still, a bargain. This'll all be even more attractive after cards are available for the slots IBM reserved for high-speed (fiber optics) communications cards, and an operating system supporting distributed computing is available (an OSF-based version of AIX). It looks to me like this approach has been part of the plan for some time. -- Chuck Karish karish@mindcraft.com (415) 323-9000 karish@forel.stanford.edu