F1: BMW-Sauber's Albert2 comes into view

[Yousuf Khan]

Well, ever since Intel became the official sponsor for the BMW-Sauber
team, we knew that Sauber's original Albert supercomputer was not long
for this world, because it used AMD Opteron processors. They used the
exact same vendor they used for the original Albert computer to put
together Albert2, except they made them use Xeons rather than Opterons.
Other than that, it seems pretty similar to what was there before.

Why Albert2 is more than just 512 processors in 10 boxes
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36371

Supercomputer Albert2's Woodcrest cores are hot-swappable
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36367

 

[Tony Hill]

Well, ever since Intel became the official sponsor for the BMW-Sauber
team, we knew that Sauber's original Albert supercomputer was not long
for this world, because it used AMD Opteron processors. They used the
exact same vendor they used for the original Albert computer to put
together Albert2, except they made them use Xeons rather than Opterons.
Other than that, it seems pretty similar to what was there before.

Why Albert2 is more than just 512 processors in 10 boxes
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36371

Hmm.. somehow I *REALLY* doubt that Albert2 is "Europe's No: 1
Supercomputer" as The Register states! Spain's "MareNostrum" and
France's "Tera-10", both with ~10,000 processors (PPC 970 and Itanium2
respectively) both rank on the top 10 of the current Top500 list.
Hell, I would guess that even Ferrari or Toyota's Formula1 teams have
bigger and badder superclusters.

In any case, it seems like a rather luck-luster upgrade. Going from
512 single-core Opterons up to 512 dual-core Xeon 5360 (Woodcrest)
chips is definitely an upgrade, but it hardly seems worthwhile. At
best they are probably looking at doubling performance for a fairly
large increase in cost.

Of course, being worthwhile had nothing to do with this.

Supercomputer Albert2's Woodcrest cores are hot-swappable
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36367

I guess that's not a bad feature for maintenance sake, though I'd
think it's much more important to be able to dynamically take a node
out of the cluster for maintenance. After all, processors aren't
really the high on the list of failure-prone parts. Sure, if you've
got 512 of them, one or two might die, but you're likely to have a lot
more dead motherboards first.

Now the real trick is when they start implementing hot-swappable
motherboards!

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Hmm.. somehow I *REALLY* doubt that Albert2 is "Europe's No: 1
Supercomputer" as The Register states! Spain's "MareNostrum" and
France's "Tera-10", both with ~10,000 processors (PPC 970 and Itanium2
respectively) both rank on the top 10 of the current Top500 list.
Hell, I would guess that even Ferrari or Toyota's Formula1 teams have
bigger and badder superclusters.

Yeah, I had my doubts about that too.

They're talking about restricting the amount of wind-tunnel work,
sometime after 2008. So these F1 design computers can only grow larger
by that point.

In any case, it seems like a rather luck-luster upgrade. Going from
512 single-core Opterons up to 512 dual-core Xeon 5360 (Woodcrest)
chips is definitely an upgrade, but it hardly seems worthwhile. At
best they are probably looking at doubling performance for a fairly
large increase in cost.

Of course, being worthwhile had nothing to do with this.

Probably entirely paid for by Intel. The previous Opteron cluster was
paid for directly from Sauber's operating budget, since there was no AMD
sponsorship on the Sauber cars.

Yet, it was surprising that they waited this long to replace the
cluster. We were thinking they must've already replaced the cluster last
year.

Yousuf Khan