Takeaway #1
February 2, 2009 (Network World) Bruce Allen is perhaps the world's best do-it-yourselfer. When he needed a supercomputer to crunch the results of gravitational-wave research, he built one with his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.Takeaway #2
Since 1998 he's built three more supercomputers, all to observe gravitational waves, theoretically emanate from black holes orbiting each other and from exploding starsTakeaway #3
A cluster of 1,680 machines with four cores each, is in Hanover, Germany; a 6,720-core processor ranked No. 58 in the world. No. 79 on the current Top500 list," says Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute.
Takeaway #4
He builds his own gets more for his money.Takeaway #5
Dell or IBM at $2 million budget, comes back with a few CPUs," "If you then go and look at Pricewatch finding what the gear really costs, you find out that if you build something yourself with the same money you'll end up with two or three times the processing power." The problem is that big-name companies have a lot of overhead made up of layers of management and engineering. "They do sell good products, and you don't need to have any particular expertise to buy them," he says. "It's always been my experience that if I do it myself, I get more bang for my buck." For instance, his first supercomputer was built from a Linux cluster of bargain 48 DEC Alpha Servers that had been discontinued, each with a single 300-MHz, 64-bit AXP processor. "So I got a very good deal on them. I think the list price was $6,000, and I bought them after they were end-of-lifed for $800," Allen says. "The switch was a 3Com Superstack 100Mbit/sec. Ethernet switch. I think it was a pair of them, each with 24 ports connected by a matrix cable." The servers were housed in a room slightly larger than a closet, on particle board shelves bought at Home Depot. "It wasn't even racks, because rack-mounted systems would have raised the price significantly," Allen says. The whole thing used about 200 watts of power, and the university's facilities staff had to remove flaps from the air ducts feeding the room so they could dissipate the heat efficiently enough.
