The Space Simulator: Modeling the Universe from Supernovae to Cosmology

Author

Warren, Michael S. ; Fryer, Chris L. ; Goda, M. Patrick

Author_Institution

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico

fYear

2003

fDate

15-21 Nov. 2003

Firstpage

30

Lastpage

30

Abstract

The Space Simulator is a 294-processor Beowulf cluster with theoretical peak performance just below 1.5 Teraflop/s. It is based on the Shuttle XPC SS51G mini chassis. Each node consists of a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1 Gb of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM, an 80 Gbyte Maxtor hard drive, and a 3Com 3C996B-T gigabit ethernet card. The network is made up of a Foundry FastIron 1500 and 800 Gigabit Ethernet switch. Each individual node cost less than $1000, and the entire system cost under $500,000. The cluster achieved Linpack performance of 665.1 Gflop/s on 288 processors in October 2002, making it the 85th fastest computer in the world according to the 20th TOP500 list. Performance has since improved to 757.1 Linpack Gflop/s, ranking at #88 on the 21st TOP500 list. This is the first machine in the TOP500 to surpass Linpack price/performance of 1 dollar per Mflop/s.

Keywords

Beowulf; N-body; astrophysics; cluster; price/performance; Astrophysics; Computational modeling; Cooling; Costs; DRAM chips; Ethernet networks; Foundries; Permission; Space shuttles; Switches; Beowulf; N-body; astrophysics; cluster; price/performance;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Supercomputing, 2003 ACM/IEEE Conference

Print_ISBN

1-58113-695-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SC.2003.10032

Filename

1592933