Difference between revisions of "Big-FE-teragrid-abstract"

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Abstract:
 
Abstract:
  
There is a shortage of high performance computing resources for educational use.  Big-FE, short for Focus on Education, is a complete design and hardware prototype for a cost effective, electrically efficient, scalable high performance computing resource.  Our design is a combination of the classic Beowulf commodity-off-the-shelf cluster philosophy and the commercial, proprietary blade approach to computational cluster design.  Big-FE leverages the strengths of each approach to provide a cost effective computing platform for computational science education.   
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There is a shortage of high performance computing resources for educational use.  Big-FE, short for Focus on Education, is a complete design and hardware prototype for a cost effective, electrically efficient, scalable high performance computing resource.  Our design is a synergy of the classic Beowulf commodity-off-the-shelf cluster philosophy and the commercial, proprietary blade approach to computational cluster design.  Big-FE leverages the strengths of each approach to provide a cost effective computing platform for computational science education.   
  
 
We measure and compare the electrical consumption of the Big-FE prototype with popular commercial high performance computing platforms.  We describe our physical layout which is organized to  minimize both maintenance and cooling costs.  We detail the cost structure, both up-front and on-going, and estimated performance for Big-FE and compare these with popular commercial high performance computing platforms.   
 
We measure and compare the electrical consumption of the Big-FE prototype with popular commercial high performance computing platforms.  We describe our physical layout which is organized to  minimize both maintenance and cooling costs.  We detail the cost structure, both up-front and on-going, and estimated performance for Big-FE and compare these with popular commercial high performance computing platforms.   

Revision as of 15:07, 12 May 2006

Big-FE - A cost and power efficient platform for high performance computing education

Alex Lemann(*), Josh McCoy(*), Charles Peck. Cluster Computing Group, Earlham College.

Abstract:

There is a shortage of high performance computing resources for educational use. Big-FE, short for Focus on Education, is a complete design and hardware prototype for a cost effective, electrically efficient, scalable high performance computing resource. Our design is a synergy of the classic Beowulf commodity-off-the-shelf cluster philosophy and the commercial, proprietary blade approach to computational cluster design. Big-FE leverages the strengths of each approach to provide a cost effective computing platform for computational science education.

We measure and compare the electrical consumption of the Big-FE prototype with popular commercial high performance computing platforms. We describe our physical layout which is organized to minimize both maintenance and cooling costs. We detail the cost structure, both up-front and on-going, and estimated performance for Big-FE and compare these with popular commercial high performance computing platforms.

Notes

  • Topics to include:
    • Power consumption
    • Packaging and density
    • Cost of purchasing
    • Cost of ownership