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Welcome to The Limulus Project! ™

What is the Limulus Project?

Limulus is an acronym for LInux MULti-core Unified Supercomputer. The Limulus project goal is to create and maintain an open specification and software stack for a personal workstation cluster. As "edge of cloud" computing becomes more important, these systems are designed to offer HPC, Big Data (Hadoop-Spark), and Deep Learning in almost any location. Ideally, a user should be able to build or purchase a small personal workstation cluster using the Limulus reference design and low cost hardware. In addition, a freely available turn-key Linux based software stack will be created and maintained for use on the Limulus design. A Limulus is intended to be a local workstation cluster platform where users can develop software, test ideas, run edge applications, and teach HPC methods. Consult the following draft of a Linux Magazine  Limulus Article (pdf) for more information. The Limulus idea actually came from the 2005  AMD Value Cluster Project.

Pre-built, tested and supported commercial Limulus systems are available from  Basement Supercomputing

More Information (and commercial availability): Submit  Questions or join the  Limulus Announce List. Or, join the Twitter feed above.

Wiki Contents

Project Status

August 22, 2019: A new white paper posted on  Cluster Monkey (simple reg required). In the paper the cost of a commercial Limulus (both HPC and Hadoop version) is carefully compared to similar EC2 instances. Striking results.

February 03, 2019: More commercial news. First, tested systems with six-core/six-thread Xeon E-2176G (these chips run at 80W vs 65 W for i5,i7, Limulus cooling works) Check out more news about Xeon/ECC Limulus, rack-mount options and more at  Basement Supercomputing.

November 12, 2018: We are getting ready to release the STL files for 3D printing brackets for the tower Limulus machines (delayed until fall 2019). However, you can get the SC19 slides describing our 3D printed Limulus case at  Cluster Monkey (reg required) Check out  Basement Supercomputing, systems with new six-core i5-8600 and 6-core/6-thread i7-8700.

November 11, 2016: After a long silence, we have news. First, benchmarks for Coffee Lake (Intel) and Raven Ridge (AMD) will be available real soon. Second,  Basement Supercomputing, who sponsors this project, has converted all the metal brackets needed to place a Limulus system in a commercial case to 3D-Printed parts. They will also be releasing the files needed to print the parts to the community.

March 21, 2016: Limulus with Skylake (i7-6700, 256GB total system memory) hits 640.4 double precision CPU GFLOPS using HPL and 1 GbE (592.5 GFLOPS using 128GB total system memory). You can see the Latest Results for details. Pre-built machines delivering a new record setting $10.62/GFLOP can be purchased from  Basement Supercomputing

February 3, 2016: Limulus with Skylake (i5-6500, 64 GB total system memory) hits 480.2 double precision CPU GFLOPS using HPL and 1 GbE (658.3 GFLOPS with 10 GbE!) . You can see the Latest Results for details. Pre-built machines delivering a new record setting $11.44/GFLOP can be purchased from  Basement Supercomputing

May 19, 2014: Limulus does Hadoop! A 100 GB Terasort in 886 seconds (113 MB/sec). You can see the Latest Results for details. Pre-built machines running  Hortonworks HDP with full  Ambari install are available at  Basement Supercomputing

April 9, 2014: New lighter, sleeker, cases with wheels. Check them out  Basement Supercomputing.

November 27, 2013: Limulus with Haswell (i5-4570S) hits 385.5 double precision CPU GFLOPS (HPL). You can see the Latest Results for details. Pre-built machines delivering a record setting $15.55/GFLOP can be purchased from  Basement Supercomputing

Older News

Contacting The Limulus Project

Once we have the project site completed, we will be posting more information on how to participate. The main contact is:

The project is hosted by  Basement Supercomputing.

Limulus Trademarks and Licensing

The Limulus Logo and the Limulus Project are trademarks of  Basement Supercomputing. For commercial use of project trademarks or sponsorships, contact  Basement Supercomputing.

Software used by the project is subject to license terms and copyrights as per the authors. Please consult individual packages for more information.

Trac is brought to you by  Edgewall Software, providing professional Linux and software development services to clients worldwide. Visit  http://www.edgewall.com/ for more information.

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