And You Thought Your Computer Was Beastly...

[Ste]

Well I think its being funded by the Tax Payers dollars since it is the department of energy. :/

 

[Crysalis]

watch the thing have ONE single IRQ conflict and blue screen.

that would be NICE.

 

[Ste]

watch the thing have ONE single IRQ conflict and blue screen.

that would be NICE.

I doubt they would overlook something like that possibly happening, besides this computer system by itself is actualy individual computers that are "somehow" ( As I do not know how) Linked or networked together.

All in all they call it a super computer....

 

[horndude]

^^^ its done using a cluster, usually in a master node and lots of slave nodes

most of the time linux is used, but you will also find unix also sometimes

uses a special kernel which allows processes to migrate from one machine to the other with a load balancing arrangement, that way you can avoid having to specifically write apps to work in parallel---see openmosix or beowulf clusters on google

a cluster that size is a special deal though, it will be 100% custom down to every piece of software on it, and they will spend more than a year refining it and tuning it

you can build your own cluster at home, it isnt hard, there's even a knoppix version setup using openmosix just for this reason, Ive built an 8 node cluster before.........the hard part is dealing with the networking end of it, latency and bandwidth is tough to deal with unless youve got lots and lots of $$ to spend

 

[Ste]

Hrmm Thats intertesing, I am wondering How F@H would be affected if 8 Computers all with the Same hardware setup were made into a cluster.

Would be interesting to see the result.

 

[horndude]

unless F@H has multiple threads it wouldnt do any good, its the same as symmetric multiprocessing having multiple cpu's on one motherboard, same exact idea only the machines are separate and connected by a network instead--->only does some good if you have multiple tasks running at the same time

 

[Ste]

I guess we would have to reprogram it then.

 

[joshd]

You beat me too it.

Anyone ever read, Dan Browns Digital Fortress? In it he talks about a computer with a couple million cpus running in it for decoding purposes, its pretty cool.

i LOVE that book.

'ooooooo dear, the freon cooling system has broken. BOOM!'

lol.