组装超级计算机1Do-It-Yourself Supercomputers.docVIP

Do-It-Yourself Supercomputers? By Ilan Greenberg Page 1 of 1 04:00 AM Jul. 03, 1998 PT Building supercomputers has traditionally been one of the most specialized niches in the computer industry, a science reserved for gurus like HYPERLINK :80/hpc/seymour/seymourbio.html Seymour Cray. So researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratories recently startled the supercomputing world by building in-house one of the fastest computers ever -- using common computer components -- at the modest price of US$150,000. The HYPERLINK /avalon/ Avalon computer, which was ranked as the 315th fastest computer in the world at the recent HYPERLINK http://parallel.rz.uni-mannheim.de/sc/sc_eng.html Supercomputer 98 conference in Mannheim, Germany, is poised to radically upset the incremental evolution of very fast computers. The purchase of supercomputers -- the elite machines used by businesses and laboratories to crunch millions or even billions of calculations -- has long been limited by their million dollar price tags. By making supercomputing power and assembly cheap and accessible, control over the worlds very fastest machines shifts from a few supercomputer vendors to a much broader community. Technology has reached the point where it doesnt take many people to build one of the 500 fastest computers in the world. Avalon means we have given ourselves this vast computing power rather than having to use the Internet to transfer data to and from supercomputers in remote locations, says Michael Warren, a staff member at Los Alamos and lead designer of the new computer. Avalon is built out of 68 off-the-shelf, high-end personal computers that use Digital Equipment Corp.s Alpha microprocessor, connected by 3Com network switches similar to those found in businesses and research institutions. In a classic case of parallel processing -- piling numerous chips together to create a system much more powerful than its individual parts -- each processor in the Los Alamos supercomputer amounts