Big Blue's open-source computer beats Cray
March 15, 1999 (Vol. 21, Issue 11)
By Ed Scannell
Trying to burnish its engineering image as well as demonstrate
the technical possibilities of Linux, IBM showed an "open-source
supercomputer" at the LinuxWorld Expo held earlier this month
that was built around a cluster of Pentium II Xeon chips.
Using a subset of the Beowulf clustering technology, 17 of IBM's
Netfinity servers containing 36 Pentium II chips and running an
off-the-shelf copy of Linux matched the scalability and
performance of a Cray supercomputer. The IBM system executed a
computer graphics-rendering application called the PovRay
benchmark.
The PovRay benchmark is intended to serve as a guide for the
relative mathematical performance of a wide variety of chips,
systems, and compilers. It is a ray-tracing, image-rendering
application with which a picture or image can be inserted in a
movie such as Toy Story or Antz and subsequently be rendered
displaying all of the shadows and the rays of light falling
relative to that picture or image.
"It is a big computational job. Ten years ago it would take a
[Digital Equipment] VAX [minicomputer] 10 or 15 minutes to do. A
Cray can do it in 3 seconds today," said Tom Figgatt, IBM's
e-business manager, in Somers, N.Y.
During the demonstration, IBM's Linux-based supercomputer matched
the current benchmark record of 3 seconds, which was set by the
Cray T3t-900-AC64. That mark had surpassed what is now the
second-fastest time of 9 seconds.
The message IBM was trying to convey to users is that Linux has
some innate capabilities for linking together parallel computers
that are not only working in clusters, but also working robustly
using existing hardware and software off the shelf or from the
Web.
"I think we showed how easily Linux clusters together and allows
you to link multiple systems readily so you can spread your
workload across multiple systems," Figgatt said.
In addition to the 17 servers, IBM used a 100MB Ethernet network
and hub to connect the servers, and a piece of parallel computing
software to ensure the system's computations connected. As for
the copy of Red Hat's Linux, IBM purchased it at a local Barnes &
Noble the day before the demonstration.
Although the demonstration of the application would be considered
exotic by most Fortune 1000 companies, IBM officials said they
believe many commercial accounts need this level of computing
power for many of the company's existing and upcoming
electronic-commerce applications.
The advantage of the IBM-based system over the Cray, of course,
is its more attractive price performance, according to company
officials. The Netfinity/Linux benchmark was executed on
approximately $150,000 worth of equipment, while the cost of the
Cray was $5.5 million, IBM's officials said.
IBM also used the demonstration to flex the muscles of its
X-architecture features and capabilities, which now are included
in all of IBM's servers up to the mainframe-class machines. For
example, during one of the rendering demonstrations IBM took one
of the servers offline. The rendering screen missed several
pixels during the fail-over process, but it filled them in by the
time the rendering was complete.
The benchmark results are available at www.haveland.com/pov
bench. Users must click on the button labeled "list all parallel
results."
IBM Corp., in Armonk, N.Y., can be reached at www.ibm.com. |
