SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers"

CWmike writes "They aren't selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn't too far off, as the costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use. Silicon Graphics International on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory. This new supercomputer's peak performance of about 726 GFLOPS won't put it on the Top 500 supercomputer list, but that's not the point of the machine, SGI says. A key feature instead is the system's ease of use."

Re:Windows?

[afaik_ianal]

I know you're joking, but from the article:

It can be preconfigured with Windows Server or its HPC Server 2008, as well as Red Hat and SUSE Linux servers.

Re:PS3s

[Entrope]

Good luck with that -- as much as I like my PS3, the new ("slim") PS3 models come without support for Other OS installation. Sony's official statements on the subject indicate that it isn't coming back, either.

Re:PS3s

[GerardAtJob]

Can't use it for graphics... because all Linux versions running on the PS3 have no access to RSX, the Nvidia-sourced GPU.

Picture

[TechForensics]

Picture here: http://www.ubergizmo.com/tags/octane-3 [ubergizmo.com]

Holy Bad Marketing Batman

[damn_registrars]

Who was the idiot who thought that it would be a good idea to call this the "Octane III"? This has almost no resemblance to the SGI Octane systems of that past, which were graphics workstations running Irix with MIPS processors. I think the only thing that makes them similar is the price range.

This goes right up there with Honda constantly recycling their product names; passport [wikipedia.org], odyssey [wikipedia.org], pilot [wikipedia.org], and more recently insight.

Re:Obligatory

[uncle slacky]

The correct question (for a supercomputer) is of course "Does it run Fortran?".

Re:PS3s

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you only need a single dual-socket board, that is obviously a superior choice. Most of the 8k price on the base model is paying for the hardware you have the option to add, not the hardware you are getting.

Assuming you actually need one of the higher end configurations, though, the mac pro isn't going to cut it. A mac pro supports 2 quad core xeons. This SGI box supports 20 quad core xeons in a box of roughly equivalent size. Not to mention that each node on the SGI box supports 3 times as much RAM as the mac pro. Not playing the same game.

That said, the two other configurations they offer (see here [sgi.com]) seem much less useful. The "intel 2-way" configuration gives you up to 20 xeons and 960GB of RAM. That is pretty impressive power for a box of the size. The "Intel 1-way" is based on dual-core Atoms. 2GB max of RAM per node and the extremely feeble Atom seems like a very odd choice. 19 Atoms in a box of that size is pretty blah density, and for most applications you'd probably have a faster, cheaper, and easier time with a basic quad-socket board running processors that weren't designed for netbooks. The "Graphics workstation" configuration is a single dual socket workstation board. Lots of PCIe slots; but probably not worth SGI's price for a basic workstation level performance.

Re:$8000 for a single processor

[TerranFury]

Well... It's 8k, and the CPUS, according to a quick google, are ~2k apiece new (?! For one CPU?). So presumably you can get the full 80-core experience for 168k.

For comparison, a fast commodity rig might cost, I dunno, 1.5k? Times 80, and you're at 120k? So this thing, fully decked out, is possibly 40% more expensive than an equivalent commodity setup? If it's commensurately faster -- which is easy to believe as the processors are on the same mobo instead of strung across a network -- then it could be a net win to use this machine, maybe?

Anyway, it's hard to say. I'm using ballpark numbers and the results are the same order of magnitude, so it might go either way. The point is that the price doesn't seem completely absurd, at first glance at least...

Re:PS3s

[je ne sais quoi]

You make some good points, the point I was trying to make is that if you're looking for a just a few nodes, that $8k price tag for the initial node is pretty steep. I noticed in TFA though that:

An Octane III with a 10 dual socket, four cores, Xeon L5520 processors, for 80 cores, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit Ethernet networking is priced at about $53,000.

This is actually a decent price for an 80 core system that's preconfigured. You wouldn't want to make a 10 node cluster of mac pros, you could do it easily, in fact my older system is essentially that, a bunch of independent nodes strung together over ethernet and sharing the home directory. You really don't get good scaling over the gigabit ethernet though, as least for what we're doing, so it's pretty pointless to go to more than a few nodes that way. I also noticed this as well:

Silicon Graphics was an independent company until May of last year, when it was acquired for $42.5 million by Rackable Systems Inc. Rackable subsequently changed the name of the combined companies to Silicon Graphics International Corp.

So my suspicion was right, this isn't SGI, it's a server company banking on SGI's name.

Re:If you *need* one, why not build one?

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer to your question is Infiniband, which is actually what is used in the Octane III systems.

Re:If you *need* one, why not build one?

[vlm]

Wouldn't most people who would NEED a supercomputer be able to build one much more cheaply using a dozen workstations.

This is a simplification, but is more or less correct:

Xeon FSB width 128 bits by 1.333 GHz equals 170 Gigabits/sec bandwidth between processors.

Commodity ethernet between commodity workstations, 1 Gigabit/sec bandwidth between processors.

If your application runs on 1/170th the interprocessor bandwidth, agreed, it would be cheaper. If not, then it's not a relevant comparison.

Yet Another Personal Supercomputer

[DynaSoar]

Here's just a brief search for personal supercomputers of days gone (not too far) by. Most if not all are cheaper than the SGI. Being older they may not stack up spec-wise, and the definition will always be changing anyway. More than one claim to be 'first', and to SGI's credit they only claim it's 'their' first.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/068234 [slashdot.org]

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?fID=569&rID=4263 [researchchannel.org]

http://aslab.com/products/workstations/marquisk942.html [aslab.com]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/06/07/tyan_unveils_typhoon/ [reghardware.co.uk]

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Cray_Unveils_Personal_Supercomputer.html [hpcwire.com]

Re:PS3s

[Anonymous Coward]

Some rendering software lets you set up a cluster of rendering servers. They don't need a video card. They just accept data to render, and render it. The server sends the client back the data it needs. This is done in CPU. Using the GPU to do arbitrary floating point calculations is a relatively new phenomenon in industry.