University of Kentucky
Wins Two Supercomputing Awards with Linux Clusters
Nov 27th, 23:19 UTC
In large part, the outstanding price/performance on the CFD application was due to two major advances in the design of the supercomputer that ran the code: KLAT2, Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2. KLAT2 is a cluster supercomputer that unites sixty-four 700MHz AMD Athlon PCs. November 2000, Dallas, Texas: (Aggregate.org) At the IEEE/ACM SC2000 conference on
high-performance networking and computing, The Aggregate
research group at the University
of Kentucky was the only group to win two unrelated awards.
For its application work, the group was given a Gordon Bell
award (Honorable Mention in Price/Performance); for the
architecture of the KRAA Z-MP cluster supercomputer, the group
received an HPC Games award (Most Innovative Hardware).
Since 1987, the Gordon Bell Prizes have been awarded to
recognize outstanding achievements in high-performance
computing. Awards in the price/performance category are given
to entries demonstrating an outstanding price-performance ratio
as measured in dollars cost per million floating-point
arithmetic operations per second (MFLOPS) achieved while
executing a genuine application. The Kentucky team, Thomas Hauser, Tim Mattox, Ray LeBeau, Hank Dietz, and George Huang, was given an
Honorable Mention in Price/Performance for its work "High-Cost CFD on a
Low-Cost Cluster." CFD - Computational Fluid Dynamics -
problems require notoriously complex computations; the group
achieved a record price/performance of $1.86/MFLOPS simulating
the airflow around a turbine blade.
In large part, the outstanding price/performance on the CFD
application was due to two major advances in the design of the
supercomputer that ran the code: KLAT2,
Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2. KLAT2 is a cluster
supercomputer that unites sixty-four 700MHz AMD Athlon PCs. Each of the
processors achieves unusually high performance by using the
3DNow! instructions, which were intended to speed-up
multimedia games, to provide a similar performance boost for the
CFD arithmetic. The second advance involves the way that the
PCs interact; a deliberately asymmetric Flat
Neighborhood Network (FNN) built using multiple standard
100Mb/s Ethernets yields performance comparable to gigabit
networks at a small fraction of the cost. Earlier this year,
these technologies were responsible for KLAT2 becoming the first
supercomputer to run a standard application benchmark
(ScaLAPACK) with price/performance
better than $1/MFLOPS.
At SC2000, the Kentucky team also competed in the first HPC (High-Performance
Computing) Games Challenge. The goal of the HPC Games was
to see who could achieve the best performance on a very large
set of benchmark programs using a machine that costs less than
$10,000. The Aggregate's entry was another Linux cluster ("Beowulf") supercomputer,
the KRAA Z-MP, Kentucky Research AMD
Athlons Z. - Multiple PCs. Although using only eleven
700MHz and one 1.2GHz Athlon, the KRAA Z-MP employs both the
3DNow! and FNN technologies used in KLAT2 and also
integrates an Aggregate Function Network
(AFN) and 3-monitor video wall. The special abilities of
this system were recognized by the "Most Innovative Hardware"
award. The team that "battled the benchmarks" using the KRAA
Z-MP live at SC2000 was Tim
Mattox, Bill Dieter,
Hank Dietz, Thomas Hauser, Todd Willey, Harry Peiris, and Jim Lumpp.
At SC99, The Aggregate
research exhibit demonstrated one of the first Linux clusters
built using AMD Athlons. It is interesting to note that the
SC2000 HPC Games were dominated by AMD Athlons: of over
650 benchmarks on which scores were reported, 96% were won
by AMD Athlons. In benchmarks that took advantage of the KRAA
Z-MP's special properties, such as measuring network bisection
bandwidth (using the FNN) or some of the cache/memory bandwidth
benchmarks (using our compiler support for MMX/3DNow!),
it was the clear winner. However, the special features of the
KRAA Z-MP made it impossible to run quite a few of the
benchmarks (e.g., PVM internally uses a routing scheme which is
somewhat incompatible with the FNN); for those benchmarks, "The
Red Team" from Rome Laboratories won with their cluster of
Athlons connected by a single 100Mb/s Ethernet.
More Information
This press release online, http://aggregate.org/press001122.html, provides a
number of links to supporting materials.
Contact Info
If you have any questions or comments, contact:
Professor Hank Dietz, James F. Hardymon Chair in Networking
University of Kentucky
College of Engineering
Electrical Engineering Department
453 Anderson Hall
(Office 307 EE Annex, Lab 672 Anderson Hall)
Lexington, KY 40506-0046
Office Phone: (859) 257 4701
Lab Phone: (859) 257 9695
Fax : (859) 257 3092
Email: hankd@engr.uky.edu
Home URL: http://aggregate.org/hankd/
(Submitted by John Wolley of Linux Today)
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