From Infobeat:
10:09 PM ET 04/19/99
Plugged In: Linux showing up in supercomputers
By Therese Poletti
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Linux -- the renegade operating
system that is among the hottest topics in Silicon Valley -- is
also making its way into the most serious bastion of computing,
the supercomputing world.
Linux, developed by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds in
1991, is given away over the Internet and managed by a
far-flung group of programmers, part of what is known as the
open source movement. Linux has been catching on among some
corporations and Internet service providers as a reliable
system to run Web servers or e-mail servers.
Several high-performance computing centers, universities
and government laboratories are also looking at Linux, inspired
by its low cost, its development model of sharing software code
and its closeness to Unix, the operating system typically
preferred by engineers and serious computer designers.
"Some of the supercomputing research community would like
to start moving to Linux," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the
general manager of International Business Machines Corp.'s
Internet division and former head of the computer giant's
supercomputing business.
"In the high-end supercomputing world, everyone is a small
community and that model (of open source software) is very
appealing."
Supercomputing represents a slow-growing $2.2 billion
segment of the computer industry, where massive systems are now
achieving speeds in excess of one teraflop: one trillion
operations per second. They are used for scientific "grand
challenges," such as weather forecasting, nuclear simulations,
molecular modeling, and many other number-crunching intensive
applications where machines can work on a problem for a week.
While Linux is not yet running any of the ultrafast,
teraflop-level machines, it is now being used by a few
supercomputing centers in so-called clusters or superclusters.
Scalable clustered systems are more powerful than a desktop
workstation, but not quite as hefty as the multimillion-dollar
supercomputers, the fastest computers in the world. Scalable
means that they can add more processors, to improve performance
or to add additional users.
In 1994, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) pioneered the use of Linux for building extremely cheap
clusters with a project called the Beowulf project, building
very low-cost clusters with off-the-shelf computer parts. But
these sprawling systems took up a lot of floor space and there
was no computer maker to support the patched-together systems.
So as funding is obtained, some of the high-performance
computing centers are now buying cluster computers running
Intel Pentium II processors -- the brains of a PC -- and the
Linux operating system.
Just last week, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing
Center, located on the University of New Mexico campus, turned
on a workstation supercluster system it calls Roadrunner, which
basically consists of stacks of personal computer technology
running multiple Intel Corp. Pentium II processors and Linux.
Albuquerque bought its $400,000 system from a small,
privately held company called Alta Technology Corp., based in
Sandy, Utah, which develops clustered computer systems starting
at $15,000, with either Intel processors or Digital's Alpha
processor.
Albuquerque's Roadrunner has 128 Intel Pentium II
processors, running at speeds of 450 megahertz, similar to the
massively parallel supercomputing systems which gang together
multiple processors and distribute the work among the chips.
"We are not trying to reinvent the supercomputer," said
David Bader, an assistant professor of computer engineering at
the University of New Mexico. "We hope to get maybe half the
performance at 10 percent of the price."
Albuquerque will be looking at environmental modeling, such
as computing the climate in the Rio Grande corridor, and
simulations on nuclear stockpiles under certain conditions and
of accidents involving trucks carrying nuclear waste.
And with Linux, Albuquerque's engineers will be able to
share their work with other colleagues at other supercomputing
centers, because Linux runs on Compaq Computer Corp.'s Digital
Alpha processor, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sparc technology,
IBM's PowerPC processor architecture and others.
This will be especially useful for Roadrunner, which is the
latest system to be connected to what is called the National
Technology Grid, an emerging network that will link a broad
range of supercomputers from Boston to Maui, so that scientists
around the United States, far from the centers, can have access
to vast computing power without having to leave their own
desks.
"Linux has already been ported to machines made by most of
the major vendors, unifying the marketplace instead of
fragmenting it," said Pete Beckman, a senior computer scientist
at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. "Laboratories from around the
world can collaborate more easily, sharing and testing
extensions and improvements made to or for Linux ... without
being hampered by non-disclosure agreements and licensing
restrictions (for vendor-controlled software)."
Los Alamos is experimenting on several applications with
its own Linux cluster system from Alta Tech, which it calls the
Little Blue Penguin, installed about eight months ago.
Some applications at Los Alamos include a computational
accelerator, which models a linear accelerator with 200 million
particles, and an ocean modeling code that is part of a global
climate modeling project.
Linux is competitive in many areas of high-performance
computing, but there are several areas where it falls short,
with missing components. For example, the Linux kernel -- the
core of the operating system -- has not been optimized to run
on large shared memory machines with eight to 128 processors.
Beckman said, however, that there are either commercial or
open source software development projects addressing Linux's
shortfalls in high-performance computing.
"What we are seeing here across all the national labs is
really an unprecedented cooperation with Linux clustering,"
said Remy Evard, manager of advanced computing at Argonne
National Laboratory, operated by the University of Chicago for
the U.S. Department of Energy.
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