Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, February 3, 2005

Clusters of Xserve G5s -- Comment()
UIUC sets up 640-node Turing Xserve Cluster: "The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is one of the latest educational institutions to set up a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster using Macintosh computers. The university's Turing Xserve Cluster comprises 640 Apple Xserve G5 systems." [MacCentral News]

A reader commented my impressions of the G5 cluster at Virginia Tech regarding my estimate of a factor of 10 difference in the power consumption figures:

The simple answer is two fold.

Peripherals although I don't suspect that's the big area.
Cooling. Cooling is particularly inefficient in such a system and would easily start pushing you up over the MW range. You want around 15 - 20% excess just in case meaning you want a rough operating area of 1.2 MW. Even using liquid cooling somewhere along the line you have to remove the heat and the liquid has to flow. All of that requires pumping, fans and electricity.

This answers seems to have solved the dilemma. Using air for cooling is indeed very inefficient. At work we used to have a liquid-cooled Cray T3E, which was very compact and very easy to maintain despite having 544 processors.

-- Comment()
Software Taming Gene Data Pool: "After years of hype, gene-expression research finally starts to pay off. The discoveries come thanks to a new niche of software tools that give scientists easy access to huge piles of data generated by genetic research." [Wired News]

-- Comment()
Finland receives first PhD in trolls: "Master of Philosophy Camilla Asplund Ingemark, 30, has researched the subject for six years. She will defend her doctoral dissertation, which is classified as a work on folklore, at the Åbo Akademi University in Turku on Friday." [Boing Boing]