• Virginia Tech Parallels For Mac

Link 1,100 Power Mac G5s together and it will make the news. Link 1,100 Power Mac G5s together to create the third most powerful academic computing facility in the world, and it will make headlines worldwide and earn project director Dr. Srindhi Varadarajan adulation from Macintosh enthusiasts.

To close the first night of the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, Varadarajan gave a presentation on how his team settled on the G5 for their system and what they had to do to get it running. To begin, Varadarajan told the audience why they wanted to build a Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Tech.

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'To use one of the Department of Energy computers, you have to write a grant to get time,' Varadarajan said. 'You use it, usually in about a month, and then you have to start again, essentially retarding the process of research.'

Since Virginia Tech has a world-class computational sciences and engineering program, Varadarajan said that he wanted to build world-class computational facilities to compliment that program. The problem is that, while he wanted a world-class system, academia generally doesn't have a budget to match. So, Varadarajan envisioned a system based on off-the-shelf processors bound together with an extremely fast off-the-shelf backbone.

To build the system, Varadarajan said that he and his team began by working with Dell to supply 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors. The key for Varadarajan was price versus performance. After going back and forth with Dell, Varadarajan said that the negotiations fell through. He then evaluated 64-bit processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP). But IBM said that the PowerPC 970 would be months away, and AMD and HP gave Varadarajan quotes in the $9 million to $11 million range, well over his budget. Before Apple announced the G5, Varadarajan was in a tough spot.

On June 23, Apple unveiled the G5. Varadarajan said he contacted Apple on June 26 about the possibility of using the G5 for the Terascale Computing Facility. While talking with Apple, representatives from the company asked Varadarajan how long he had been a Mac user.

'I had to tell them I'd never used the Mac,' Varadarajan said. 'I'm probably one of the few people who came to the platform by reading the kernel manual.'

Nevertheless, the G5 had exactly what Varadarajan was looking for. In addition to being a 64-bit processor, the PowerPC 970 processor has two floating point units allowing the processor to complete two double precision floating point calculations per clock cycle. Floating point performance is the most critical factor in scientific computing performance, and the PowerMac G5 -- equipped with two PowerPC 970s running at 2GHz -- can complete 8 billion floating point operations per second.

Within weeks, Varadarajan had ordered 1,100 dual processor PowerMac G5s from the Apple Store and Apple employees where helping his team out providing vast amounts of technical advise. The computers arrived at Virginia Tech between September 5 and 11. The Terascale Computing Facility made its first calculations on Sept. 23, and by Oct.1 Varadarajan said that his team was making performance optimizations to the system. He expects the facility to be available for full use by January.

Why so fast? Varadarajan said that designing and building quickly actually helps system designers on a budget. If a designer waits a year and a half to build a system after it's designed, then all of the technology inside is a year and a half old and the university has lost a year and a half of potential productivity. Rapid deployment was one of Varadarajan's primary goals in building the Terascale Computing Facility.

While the G5 had much of what Varadarajan wanted in a system, it didn't have everything. In order for that many G5s to work together efficiently, Varadarajan needed a super high bandwidth network to link all of the systems together. The Gigabit Ethernet that ships standard on the G5 was far too slow for Varadarajan's needs. The Gigabit Ethernet on the G5s in the Terascale Computing Facility work as a secondary communications network between the G5s in the system.

The primary communications between the 1,100 G5s in the system comes from modified Inifiniband cards in the first PCI-X slot of each G5. These cards, specially designed by Mellanox, feature extremely low latency of less than 10 microseconds and an individual bandwidth that approaches the theoretical bandwidth of the PCI-X bus of 1,250 Mbits per second. The whole network is set up in a fat tree topology with a total switching capacity of 46.02 Terabits per second, allowing all of the processors in the system to communicate and distribute computational loads efficiently.

The facility uses off the shelf G5s complete with their hard drives and Radeon graphics cards. The aluminum cases are housed in specially designed racks. Over 100 student volunteers installed the Mellanox Infiniband PCI cards, connected the copper Infiniband cables and connected the Gigabit Ethernet cables.

Where do you put 1,100 G5s? The answer is not anywhere you want. The facility is housed in 3,000 square feet of Virginia Tech's 9,000-square-foot data center. Varadarajan said that they also had to build a new cooling system to cool all of the G5s as the existing AC system would have to move air in the floor at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour to meet the cooling demand. The new cooling system works like a distributed refrigerator that uses cooled liquid fed to smaller air driven air conditioning units housed all throughout the facility. Without the cooling system, Varadarajan said that the temperature in the facility would increase to over 100 degrees within two minutes and components would be damaged within several minutes. Virginia Tech also constructed a UPS and 1.5 Megawatt backup diesel generator for the facility.

The system costs $5.2 million for the G5s, racks, cables, and Infiniband cards. Virginia Tech spent and addition $2 million on facilities, $1 million for the air conditioning system and $1 million for the UPS and generator.

If you have already installed Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, or Windows 7 on your Mac using Boot Camp, you can set Parallels Desktop to run Windows from the Boot Camp Partition or import Windows and your data from Boot Camp into Parallels Desktop as a new virtual machine. Parallels Toolbox for Mac and Windows 30+ tools in a lightweight, powerful, all-in-one application for Mac ® and PC. Easy to use and economical—a whole suite of tools for a fraction of the cost of individual apps, packaged in one simple interface. In this example, I’ll be using the following environment: macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra. Parallels Desktop for Mac version 13. Parallels Desktop (PD) for Mac is now at version 13. How do you use parallels for mac?. Sure, you could set up your Mac to run Windows with Boot Camp, but that means restarting your computer every time you need to use Windows. Parallels runs Windows within macOS, using what’s called a Virtual Machine. This allows you to quickly switch between the Mac and Windows desktops. You can even combine the two desktops, if you want, and run Windows software right on your Mac.

In addition to all of the hardware, Varadarajan and his team had to develop and optimize software to run the Terascale Computing Facility. Varadarajan ported a Unix system, MVAPICH, to Mac OS X to run the system and made specific optimizations to the cache memory management of the G5. Varadarajan and his team also ported several other Unix applications to manage and benchmark the system. Using experts from all over the world Varadarajan and his team are optimizing the system for scientific calculations.

The Terascale Computing Facility can solve equations with 500,000 variables, which involves creating a matrix with 500,000 values on a side. Such operations require several Terabytes of memory just to store. Performing these types of calculations, the facility's latest benchmark is 9.555 teraflops and Varadarajan hopes to pass the 10-teraflop mark with further optimization.

The only drawback to using off the shelf components for the Terascale Facility is reliability. Varadarajan said that even a reliable server, say one that failed for a few minutes every two years, would cause failures daily when 1,100 of such computers were acting in concert. To deal with the reliability problem, Varadarajan said that his team added the ability for component failures to not bring down the entire system or even threaten ongoing calculations by moving calculations from failed components or blocks of components to working parts of the system.

Varadarajan said that many in the academic and other communities have expressed an interest in creating their own G5 superclusters or even cloning the Terascale system. Once Virginia Tech's facility is up and running, Varadarajan said that he will place all of the documentation on how his team created their system online for others to review and implement.

'We hope a lot more of these will come up,' Varadarajan said. 'We already have several contacts who basically want clones of the system, so expect to see a lot more G5 clusters from now on.'

This story, 'Virginia Tech talks up the G5' was originally published by MacCentral.

Boot Camp is the easy way to run Windows on a Mac, but it has one major drawback: it requires you to reboot. And that can be a rather big disruption of your work, depending on how much time you spend in either Mac OS X or Windows.

Virtualization software like Parallels Desktop 7 avoids this glaring issue altogether, as it lets you run a full copy of Windows from within Mac OS X. But is it actually the best of both worlds or just a bag of compromises?

[ VDI shoot-out: VMware View 5 and Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 ]

Virtualization for serious work?

In part 1 of my Running Windows on a Mac series, I made it very clear that virtualization solutions such as Parallels or VMware Fusion are merely a compromise for anyone who needs to get serious work done or has to spend several hours in full-screen Windows.

And I didn't just base that on my past experience with virtualization, but also one some benchmarks Ed Bott performed this summer.

It was only a couple of days after that article went live that Parallels came out with version 7 of their 'Parallels Desktop'. And they didn't exactly play small: Parallels promised not just the full-blown Lion support (Launchpad, full screen mode, Mission Control) and the ability to run Mac OS X Lion as a guest machine. They also made a big promise of running Windows 'without compromising performance'. The company also claims that Parallels Desktop 7 runs 45% faster using Windows 7 and 60% faster on 3D-accelerated applications (games, rendering, etc.) than before. These claims, coupled with enhanced support for USB, networking and sound cards (7.1 surround sound in a virtual machine), made me curious.

Can I run my Windows applications under Lion on Parallels Desktop 7 with no compromise? Can I run it all day?

For this shootout, I took the plunge and used Parallels Desktop 7 for over four weeks. After having some severe performance issues with running Windows 8 Developer Preview under Parallels, I decided to use Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 under Mac OS X Lion for my test. Here's what I found:

Pricing and installation

Boot Camp is free and pre-installed on every Mac (post 2006). Parallels, on the other hand, charges you $79.99 ($49.99 for upgrade) for its Mac virtualization product. In both cases, that also excludes the price of a Windows 7 license, which you'll need! So, if you're adding Windows 7 Home Premium to the mix, think at least $99 (for the system builder DVD) of additional charges for the privilege of running Windows on your Mac.

Boot Camp doesn't support Windows XP or Vista, so if you're going the Boot Camp route on OS X Lion, you're basically stuck with Windows 7. I can imagine this being a deal breaker for some companies.

Parallels Desktop 7, however, fully supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. And it doesn't stop there. Parallels supports Chrome OS, Linux and even the Windows 8 Developer Preview, which makes it a full-blown virtual PC solution and not just a way of running Windows on your Mac. In fact, a built-in downloader allows you to grab the respective ISOs and install them automatically. I think that's quite a killer feature for IT pros: Getting all of these OSes to run on a Mac is torture, so in terms of OS support and pure simplicity, Parallels just blows Boot Camp away. Period.

Virginia Tech Parallels For Mac

The Windows 7 installation procedure is fairly straightforward in both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop 7. You insert the DVD or the ISO, perform some initial configuration and run the Windows installer. However, I went a slightly different route. I actually used Parallels to virtualize my Boot Camp partition. Yes, Parallels Desktop 7 allows you to select your pre-existing Windows 7 partition on your Mac and just run it as it if were an actual virtual machine. This is actually the only way to compare performance of Boot Camp versus Parallels, since I'm testing both solutions on the exact same configuration with the exact same number of programs installed and identical settings. Neat.