With Linux, you can build your own supercomputer.

Almost all systems running on supercomputers are Linux, including those made up of Raspberry Pi Raspberry and PlayStation 3 consoles.

Supercomputers are a serious tool, and they are all made up of tall calculations. They are often used for serious purposes, such as atomic bomb simulations, climate simulations, and advanced physics. Of course, they are also very expensive. In the latest supercomputer TOP500 rankings, China National Defense University of Science and Technology development of the Tianhe 2nd ranked first, and Tianhe 2nd construction cost about $390 million!

However, there is also a supercomputer, which was built by a PhD Joshua Kiepert, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boise State University, with a construction cost of less than $2000.

No, I didn't make it up. It is a real supercomputer consisting of a ARM11 processor with a B-type Raspberry Pi that is overclocked to 1GHz and a videocore IV GPU. Each is equipped with 512MB of memory, a pair of USB ports, and a 10/100 BaseT Ethernet port.

So what does the supercomputer at Tianhe 2nd and Boise State University have in common? They all run Linux systems. Of the world's fastest supercomputers, 486 of the top 500 are also running Linux systems. This is the pattern that began more than 20 years ago. The trend now is that supercomputers are starting to be made up of inexpensive units because Kiepert machines are not the only supercomputers that don't care about budgeting.

Gaurav Khanna, an associate professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has created a supercomputer that uses less than 200 PlayStation3 video game consoles.

The PlayStation console is powered by a 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based Power processor. Each is equipped with 512M of memory. You can still buy one for $200, though Sony will phase it out at the end of the year. Khanna has built his first supercomputer with only 16 PlayStation 3, so you can have your own supercomputer for less than $4000.

These machines may have been built with toys, but they are not toys. Khanna has done serious astrophysics research with it. A white Hat hacker organization used a similar PlayStation 3 supercomputer in 2008 to crack the SSL MD5 hashing algorithm.

Two years later, the Condor Cluster, developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, uses 1760 Sony's PlayStation 3 processors and 168 general-purpose graphics processing units. This low-cost supercomputer runs about 500 trillion tflop per second, which makes it possible to do floating-point operations in a second.

Some of the other components that are cheap and suitable for building home supercomputers include professional parallel processing boards, such as the $99 Parallella card for credit cards, and high-end graphics, such as Nvidia's Titan Z and AMD's FirePro W9100. These high-end cards have a market price of about $3000, and some players who want a fantastic machine have taken part in the Intel Extreme Masters: League of Legends World Championship, and have won more than $100,000 in bonuses if they even got the first prize. On the other hand, a computer that can provide itself with more than 2.5TFLOPS computing power provides a way for scientists and researchers to have an economy that can have their own supercomputer.

And the supercomputer was connected to Linux, and it all started in the 1994 Goddard Space Center's first named Beowulf supercomputer.

According to our standards, Beowulf is not the most advantageous. But at that time, as the first homemade supercomputer, its 16 Intel 486DX processors and the 10Mbps Ethernet bus were a great feat. Beowulf was designed by the NASA contractor Don Becker and Thomas Sterling, the first "maker" supercomputer. Its "compute part" 486DX PC costs just $ thousands of. Although its speed is only one-digit GFLOPS (1 billion beats per second) floating-point arithmetic, Beowulf shows that you can create supercomputers with commercially available on-spot (COTS) hardware and Linux.

I wish I had been part of the creation, but I left Goddard in 1994 years and started my career as a full-time tech journalist. Damn it.

But even though I'm just using a laptop reporter, I can still see how COTS and open source software have changed supercomputers forever. I hope you can also read this article now. Because, whether it's a Raspberry Pi cluster, or more than 3 million Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips, almost all contemporary supercomputers can be traced back to the Beowulf.

Via:http://www.computerworld.com/article/2960701/linux/for-linux-supercomputers-r-us.html

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With Linux, you can build your own supercomputer.