SGI Altix 4700 Supercomputer Extreme Teardown
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- čas přidán 31. 01. 2017
- With 256 Processing Cores, 1TB of RAM and weighing just under a tonne, this system is the biggest teardown I've ever done on CZcams.
This video was previously uploaded, but the audio was distorted.
The original video has now been removed, but the comments posted have been archived here: imgur.com/a/wQb1j - Věda a technologie
Wonderful teardown and very nostalgic.....I was one of the designers for that Analog Devices chip right next to the processor.... the adm1021.
It's a thermal diode monitor which measures the temperature of a diode on the CPU and controls/throttles the clock.
Quite an interesting time.....I remember doing an fft of Intel's noise data (which didn't have units of time for the x-axis) only to find out that no one in either company could tell if any amount of signal conditioning or filtering would extract accurate readings. We threw everything at the analog signal conditioning and digital filtering and were lucky.
A bit of luck involved for both companies and a very aggressive schedule - functional silicon in 3 months after seeing the data sheet.
It was also used on the mobile module, and was on just about every Intel laptop for a while.
Quite nostalgic.... thanks for sharing.
that's a great story. thank you.
wish i knew what you said dave sounds interesting. any teardowns of new super computers
I didn't know that Analog Devices is still in business today since i lost sight of them since 1977 due to carreer changes.
@@Tubemanjac WHAT??? They make a shit ton products.
"Now I'm going to carefully remove this to expose the die" 3:35
Lol you commented it first XD
haha... *grabs hammer*...
LOL
Yes he said "carefully" LOL
I also wanted to comment that fucking funny shit there
I used to broker SGI gear. My last opportunity to do a take-out on an SGI machine was in 2013. It was an Altix 4700 just like this one but at 40 racks it was bigger. Fastest computer in the world at one point - for about 5 days. It had been running at NASA/Ames and was named "Columbia" after the space shuttle. By the time I was asked to make an offer on it, it had been deinstalled, moved off-site and was occupying 6 full-sized units in a self-storage facility. It was worth nothing and I had to walk away. Very melancholy experience.
3:33 - "I'm going to carefully remove [the heatsink] to expose the die." Pulls out hammer and screwdriver.
Thief spotted
Also after clamping it down in a vice.
LOL yeah, and BAM BAM BAM! I hope the guy is gay, otherwise he'd have a really hard time dealing with delicate women
That's exactly what I thought. There was nothing careful about that :)))
epic
what an excellent video and a great presentation.
So many presenters constantly repeat the same piece of information over and over again which makes me hit the fast forward button.
I never went anywhere near the FF button I listened to every word of his presentation.
I became a programmer in 1963 when "MAINFRAMES" ruled the world, we wrote in machine code and assembler language, IT WAS GREAT FUN.
I had a MARVELOUS career, working for Honeywell, Cisco, 3Com and other pioneers in the communications field, both in England and the USA.
I ended up working for Silicon Valley startups on the bleeding edge of new technology.
I went from the vacuum tube, core memory, tape drive era through integrated circuits to micro processors, solid state memory, smartphones and clothes washers with NFC and MEMORY coming out of our ears.
I keep saying that I should write a book, maybe I will.
It looks like the thermal material is indium. There are a couple companies that use it specifically for that application and it looks and feels exactly like you showed. Cool!
Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.
If a scientist from the 1700s looked at this machine, perhaps the strangest thing would be the aluminum.
Why so? Perhaps they didn't use aluminium in the 1700s, but there's a lot weirder stuff in there, like the fiberglass for instance
Donnie Russell II the circuit board would have blown their minds.
Nah, the actual operation running on a display screen would easily blow them away. People have seen strange objects and metals throughout history, but no one of that time could even imagine a machine capable of outputting information, of a machine doing something so complex.
They will worship it...
@@masaratech SGI's second coming.The prophecy.
Fascinating video, it's amazing to think that a car from that era is still perfectly usable but this multi million dollar machine is ready for the scrap bin, its a shame in a way.
what's a shame is that cars don't increase their energy efficiency as fast as CPUs.
It is absolutely not ready for the scrap bin, and i think it's a shame that these things are discarded in this way.
I would gladly take it in.
It's an obsolete processor architecture, and the energy consumption was phenomenal as I explained at the beginning of the video.
Yes, it is a shame that it couldn't be used, but why would you spend over £100 (US $124) every day on energy just to keep it running, when you could have the same, if not more computing power from a modern system for probably £3 (US $4.50) a day in energy with a fraction of the floor space occupied?
Burt Holiday But it is obsolete. A modern $400 graphics card from Nvidia has 10 times the processing power of this super computer array.
carlstechshed Why drive an old car? Why play old consoles?
I run lots of old "obsolete" architecture machines.
SPARC, MIPS, HP-PA, ALPHA, old 68K macs, 68k ataris, etc.
Are they as efficient as newer machines? Of course not.
Should they just be thrown in the bin? No.
Throwing them in the bin is a much bigger waste of resources than trying to learn from them and run them once in a while.
When i see videos like this, i cry a little inside.
One of the most interesting aspects of the SGI Altix systems (and the UVs that followed) is that they functioned as a single system. They are NOT clusters. One operating system could run on the whole system, resulting in a 256 core system with 1tb of memory. In the mid to late 2000s, that’s pretty special.
Fascinating teardown, it just shows how quickly supercomputer based systems becomes obsolete, and especially now with GPU based computing (compared to pre-models based only on CPU's)
.6 tflops of computing performance? Damn. My 980ti has almost 6tflops. How far technology has advanced.
For reference, the current M1 MacBook air has 4.3x the amount of flops/s while consuming about 0.1% of the power. The amount of progress in such a small amount of time is incredible.
my S21 has more processing power
I use the power supplies for all sorts of stuff around my house, including running every HAM radio and amplifier I have. Those things were built well, output lots of power and offer no noise to my gear.
The university I went to had one of these in storage. One of the graduate students wanted to get it running again to do computations on, I was seriously surprised how difficult to explain how a modern $1000 graphics card pulling
A SINGLE GPU, by an order of magnitude? Incredible indeed! THANK YOU!
Beautiful teardown footage and just crazy that this stuff has moved to obsolesce.
These days, I can put 1TB of RAM in a 1U rackmount server running on a standard North American 120V, 15A circuit if I really wanted to. Oh and the best part: The cost is similar to a car. Even small companies can lease or even outright buy this kind of power now.
Here's an example of one of these little monsters...up to 3TB in 1 rack slot! www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/1028/SYS-1028U-TRT_.cfm
outstanding video! thanks for going in complete detail on everything. Subbed
it makes me sad seeing these beasts being torn apart, but at the same time, knowing modern machines using the latest manufacturing techniques and arcitecture make this thing look like a 386 among modern i7s with less power consumption provides some comfort.
Ron Laws There were probably a couple of thousand of the Altix 4700 model which were decommissioned from universities and businesses - mostly oil and gas exploration - all over the world, which were then shamelessly ripped apart or dropped into shredders at the end of their useful lives. Fortunately, I had the opportunity of obtaining one of these and being able to create this CZcams video, before it was carefully stripped down and recycled.
How much actual gold is used in this entire machine? I'd guess a couple of ounces.
I wouldn't know the exact amount, but I doubt it's more than that. The ICs will have solid 24K bond wires, the boards have a layer of Gold which is a few microns thick in places. I think overall, with a system this large with many thousands of ICs (RAM included) then it's not unreasonable to expect a couple of ounces.
I like to know, the DDR2- RAMS and fans, will they be resold, any market for that or break down into pieces?
thx for your hardwork in sharing, very informative! learnt a lot.
Is there one of these preserved for museum purpose?
Intel itanium? Until 2017 I never heard about this,good to learn something new :)
Awesome video man i always wondered what the insides of one of these looked like
I guess people's definition of carefully varies widely.
Great video! I worked on SGI systems way back when, and I also worked on HP Superdome Supercomputers....had fun bringing Linux up on the machines...the Superdomes with hardware partitioning, we were able to run three different operating systems on the Itanium based machines at the same time, HP-UX, WIndows Server, and Red Hat Linux. Fun times!
Man.
Old high end stuff is interesting.
(Actually, high end stuff in general is interesting but older stuff is obtainable)
41kW. For a wall plug rated at 220V/10A we have about 2kW at full capacity. So running this thing would be like having a two-story house where each and every wall plug is running at breaking point.
Gosh you had me in tears when you busted the heat sink off. Had to remember - Me calm down, have to learn when to let equipment go
connect cpu and memory directly via soft cable is unheard of now
Thanks for the re-upload.
No problem. It was frustrating to find that one of my most interesting videos had a corrupt audio file.
ditto, good vid
audio is still a little off from the mouth movements, JUST noticeable, don't worry about it.
They may be worthless, but those racks are a fantastic design. If it's possible to mount regular 19" components in them I'd love to get hold of one
I wonder how long it will be until one of these are sitting in every home
Awesome video man I was excited when you said let's take a look to see what's under the heatsink I was like man I can't wait to see that CPU lol
Thanks! I'm on the hunt for my next big teardown item now.
Excellent video.
I think it's indium solder on that CPU
Sick setup bro gonna get back into my servers soon and nodes and stuff mannnn
Very interesting, would be good to know more about what these systems did.
nice teardown i would like to have one of those processors
I hope some of these machines make it to a museum. Its a shame to see them turned into scrap.
The liquid metal thermal compound is most likely Gallium (also indium is used) it stays solid under about 80F(26C). I use it for my high end watercooled pc.
Incredibly fantastic!!! That was the future of some long ago time that now has past by. The future continues to run away from us!!!
Wow! I would not mind getting those processors and a motherboard or two just to hang it on my wall.
Same! I have a few pieces of motherboard art on my wall which i usually get compliments for
Put 'em on a gold chain and wear them Mr T style.
I mean, hell.. there's enough gold to pull it off with a straight face.
That's what I do. My wall has a Sun SPARC, SGI MIPS, Xeons, Alpha... still haven't had the heart to tear open a working HP PA RISC machine :)
The Altera MAX II is actually a CPLD, not an FPGA. Would have been a lot cheaper at the time (not like it mattered though!).
Yes, a slight mistake there! They currently sell for £38 each on Digikey, so I'm not sure how much that's changed over the last 10 years.
Why even comparing CPLDs and FPGAs? Those are, although alike, still very different devices, and the choice usually is based on the the circuit complexity, power consumption and the need in the easy reprogramming (or the fully stand-alone usage instead). Well, at least it's better then comparing FPGAs and MCUs... :)
+Mark Furneaux
That makes a lot of sense, I was watching the video and thought: a FPGA ? What ? That can't be right and... it wasn't. :-)
how does al these nodes run a single operating system together? What controls how the processes/instructions are shared between these nodes? Is there a master processor and slave processors?
looks like indium
Fennec Fox it is indium. you can chew it.
Yep, it's indium. It has a really low melting point (
Indium or more likely Gallium. I use gallium for my pc.
Gallium is in fact less likely because it melts at body temperature. It could melt off the chip and cause a short circuit.
Unless you use very little, it's way too likely to damage your components(and what they use under heat spreaders is quite a lot.)
Toast651gaming also gallium is a bit more hard than indium, and can't be cut like he cut the metal in the video
I wonder how this would do standard desktop grade programs, like video editing and such.
Nice video and incredibly interesting! Keep up the vids I just subscribed.
The stuff bonding the heat spreader to the die is Indium. you can 'solder' logs of stuff with indium, including glass and ceramics.
It's pretty crazy to think about that 1 million pounds was needed to get not even 1tflop of computing power in 2006, whilst 10 years later I'm sitting with 18 terraflops on my desktop.
Is it practical (for the point of posterity) to run just a single shelf of nodes (in other words, a few hundred watts instead of tens of kW), or does the entire rack need to be up to do anything?
those two layer honeycomb doors are awesome!
After all of that introduction, you couldn't even bother to power it up? What a tease.
SGI servers: massive hair dryers :-)
But I loved to work with this hardware. Loved the design of the workstation (Octane, O2) too.
And the anti aliasing was so beautiful...
Thank you for the video. I find it sad that we put all this technology to waste honestly I understand it's not as useful as it was in it's prime but I do hope one at least ends up in a museum or get's repurposed. So many hours of engineering and manufacturing were put into those it's sad to see tech like that go.
They did their job. If you could somehow reuse most of the waste heat then these might still be useful.
Interesting fact. The geforce 8800, also from 2007, had 384 GFLOPS of processing power!
Of course there probably was no way to interface with it for custom applications.
CUDA began in 2007 but in general, gpu's still struggle for general purpose tasks.
256 cores and 1TB of ram is such a MASSIVE perfomance even today
I "always" wanted to have a fridge made of (front of) SGI Challenge or similar..
this guy knows his stuff
Very interesting tear down. Better sound quality would be nice. Maybe a bit of development history or some other interesting facts about the system in particular. Thanks. Also the hammer and screw driver was nice touch.
3:10 - I'm going to "carefully" remove that to expose the die - smacks it with a big hammer and screwdriver, your logic is sound........NOT!
Good video, but what's up with the audio cuts still?
There is a Granite SGI monitor on eBay at the moment for only £250! These things are rare as anything and real expensive... if only I had the room for it - it's a 30kg monster! :(
I'm guessing this came from Oxford uni? Sheffield had one too, but used slower CPU's
You've just gained a subscriber! :)
are you really going to tell me you never fall in temptation of playing guild wars 2 on that beast ?
If you were to buy that one right now how much would it cost?
I love data centers,they do base load in bulk.
see if Mike wants a board for his wall?
great video
do you get to get rid of workstations too like z800 or 820 ?
Very nice video, sad to see such computing hardware go to waste.
Well the substance looks like Aluminum or a regular thermal paste that over time does harden.But i'm gonna say its most likely aluminum based substance based on its look an weight as you mentioned.
And if you don't mind me asking, how did you get hold of such a system?
"'I'm going to carefully remove this heat-spreader" grabs a hammer and screwdriver
But can it play Crysis?
Osiris4441 hey I had that comment
...and so did a million other sad fucks like you...do yourself a favour and do something unique and stop following everyone else's pathetic ways....I would put money on you having an iphone, a mac book pro...ipod...idiot
haha nope I would never buy that shit...
halcyondaystunes bro I've never played crysis and I agree with you but Linus TT sent me on this mission
halcyondaystunes can a mac book pro run Crysis?
This guy knows his stuff.
how did you get hold of such a beast?
just wondering, could you use one of those nodes to install windows and use as a regular pc?
Technically you can install windows. But it would either be a really really obsolete Windows XP/2003 for Itanium Systems or Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium Systems. Even then besides some microsoft specific business software, little will run well on it.
id quite happily take a few of those parts just to see if i could make a working computer out of it on my own... like say four of the main boards and the other ones needed to make them power up and talk and hook in a hdd and see what trouble i could cause trying to make windows and and a few others work on it
5:25 Those boards, with all the components and Au removed (or leave the Au on, and sell for the price of the Au), would make some good casemod fodder. Picture that: a homemade PC case built of supercomputer circuit boards.
The supercomputer cabinet, after it's gutted, has many uses. Technonerd's wardrobe or pantry comes to mind.
How would they used the Itanium processor?
Could these systems be used for folding@home?
So what are they doing with all the components? Scrapping it and recycle all the metals?
rAdiant Jet Yes, all of the components in the second video (Recovering Gold from the supercomputer) went up to a refinery in Scotland.
Yes I have a question you didn’t talk about in the video. Can it play crisis?
I think those capacitors on the CPU module that you showed are ceramic capacitors (MLCC - multi-layer ceramic chip) not tantalum. They are non-polar. Tantalum capacitors are a kind of electrolytic cap which is polar and uses a bead of Tantalum as one of the electrodes.
How much worth of scrape gold do you think?
I want to get the Titan supercomputer when they retire it. Supposedly some years ago they took down an IBM system called Roadrunner. I guess because of sensitive data, etc even though they could have just got rid or erased the HDDs they shredded the entire thing, seems like a waste to me.
jtech0 Yes, I remember talking to somebody about that! A small number of the boards were kept for prosperity (Museums, universities etc) but even those had to be 'demilitarised' by drilling a small hole through every chip.
The same thing happened with the national ID card database here in the UK. After spending hundreds of millions on it, the government decided to decommission it after a couple of years and the whole system was scrapped, and the hard drives were shredded at a recycling plant in Essex.
OMG! Please stop the destruction please!! Watching this induces physical pain!
what are they doing with the Fujitsu mainframe?? They're talking up the SPARC..
4:15 That is most definitely an Indium alloy, which is the standard for soldering the heatspreaders to CPUs, even today.
Point six teraflop now there's Game consoles out there that can do 6 teraflops. Computers have come a long way in the last 20 years!
that thing os SOO well-designed
I like my remaining 2nd hand workstations but proprietary hardware is an issue. I cannot get a replacement for the proprietary PSU anymore.
At work we bought 5 racks full of blade centers over 2-3 years, 3 different generations of the same stuff. After another 4 years, only one rack was still operational, a Frankensteins monster built from anything that was still working and compatible, ripped out of the other racks. Many blade centers died (mainly the proprietary PSUs) and because of 3 different generations some good blades could not be revived at all. If we had bought normal PCs, I guess 80% of them would still be running, may be with some cheap PC hardware replaced here and there ...
The iphone X has the same power in terms of Gflops, impressive!
Is that sustained though
what's the approximate value of the scrap?
The Silicon Graphics logo is one of my favorites. Hope at least those were salvaged.
Hi now a actual super computer how mutch consume in energy?
I thought the MAXII FPGA (actually a CPLD really) was too recent for this machine, then realised I left Altera behind in 2007 myself. Tempus fugit indeed.
beautiful piece of equipment. its a shame it has to be scrapped.
"...going to remove this from the board carefully..." **takes hammer to it**
Why they still using CRT monitors in the data center? (See behind the reporter.)
minecraft 32 chunks render distance how many fps would it have with this pc?
WIth that many floating point calculations, I imagine this machine can process some very impressive graphics using just the CPU power. Would probably make a very decent render farm.