[Beowulf] SC13: the Limulus boxen appear ...

[Douglas Eadline]

Responding to my own post, I recently tested the i7 haswell variant
of our Limulus and was 1.7 GFLOPS short of 0.5 TFLOPS (498.3 GFLOPS)
running HPL. I suppose with a little more fussing I could find
2 extra GFLOPS, but I'm impressed with what AVX2 with FMA can do,
at least for HPL, I have not checked anything else yet.

Latest results are here:
http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/wiki/LimulusBenchmarks

Has anyone else seen any similar big jumps in performance?
(of course compiler support is needed)

--
Doug


> Thanks Joe,
>
> BTW, after getting our software stack to run on Haswell,
> I managed to get 385 GFLOPS (HPL, double precision, CPU only)
> on the entry level Limulus. That is approximately $15.6/GFLOP
> More information:
> http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/wiki/LimulusBenchmarks
>
> I'll be publishing more HPC benchmarks as I run them.
> And, I'll have more Hadoop benchmarks as well.
>
> --
> Doug
>
>
>
>> [Disclosure:  we do have a business relationship with Basement
>> Supercomputing. ]
>>
>> I have to say, that one of the most popular aspects of the show for us,
>> was the Limulus system that Doug Eadline had set up in our booth.  This
>> is a terrific system.
>>
>> I really like the concept of a personal supercomputer, one where, as
>> Doug puts it, you own the reset switch.  We tried, and did not succeed,
>> in building interest in "muscular desktops" with huge amounts of
>> processors, IO, and graphics.  It cost way to much to build these.
>>
>> Doug comes along and in very beowulf-ish fashion, says "hey, lets build
>> a very low electrical power many core distributed system from lower cost
>> parts".  It took a few years from project inception, but the concept is
>> sound.  Far more sound than the "muscular desktop" strategy.
>>
>> He ran hadoop on it, and was showing off running the overall system.  I
>> think the configs for hadoop might be slightly different than whats on
>> the product page:
>> http://www.basement-supercomputing.com/index.php/products/hikashop-menu-for-products-listing
>> , but its similar enough that you can get the concept.
>>
>> I was simply blown away by this.  The response came anywhere from "thats
>> exactly what we need" to "this is very cool" with everything in between.
>>   They are awesome boxes, and it looks like it could fill a very nice
>> niche for a number of folks.
>>
>> If you've not checked out the Limulus project in the past
>> (http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/ and twtr @LimulusProject) ,
>> definitely have a look at it.  Returning to our core value proposition,
>> of power at lower cost, with creative designs, is deeply gratifying to
>> me.  Have a gander at the benchmark page:
>> http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/wiki/LimulusBenchmarks
>>
>> It needs to be emphasized that this is not a toy system.  You can do
>> real work on it, and its trivial to setup and get going.
>>
>> Bravo to Doug!
>>
>>
>> --
>> Joseph Landman, Ph.D
>> Founder and CEO
>> Scalable Informatics, Inc.
>> email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
>> web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
>> twtr : @scalableinfo
>> phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
>> cell : +1 734 612 4615
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>
>
> --
> Doug
>
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-- 
Doug

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