SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers" 303
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."
PS3s (Score:1, Insightful)
Or you can save a good chunk of change and buy PS3s at $300 for 8 cores. That's 200 cores for under $8K. And open source too.
one swallow does not make a summer... (Score:1, Insightful)
and one Xeon does not make a super-computer.
Shifting Standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Holy Bad Marketing Batman (Score:4, Insightful)
It's UGLY !!! And GRAY !!!
That's no SGI.
Guess lightning can strike twice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Picture (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugly :( Gone are the beautiful SGIs we knew. :(
Re:$8000 for a single processor (Score:3, Insightful)
Ouch! I never understood the need for all of this specialized "server-class" hardware when cheap-o commodity hardware and a little elbow grease works just as well. Maybe most people don't want to put the work into it, considering the huge jump in price between retail consumer and server pricing, I've never been able to justify shelling out those kind of bucks.
I can't decide if you're a troll or an amateur. If you're the latter, I meant that in the nicest possible way.
If you don't understand that there's a difference between "cheap-o commodity hardware" and server hardware, you don't understand nearly as well as you think you do.
Re:$8000 for a single processor (Score:5, Insightful)
You forget service and support! Sun will make sure that for the serviceable life of your machine they will have replacement parts on hand and technical support for your machine. Imagine a commodity system looses a motherboard, will you be able to get the exact one three years down the line? And with pretty much every board maker located in Taiwan will they give you proper tech support in a timely manor? Will they ensure you get matching memory and CPU's? That's the other strong point of server class hard ware that is thoroughly supported by the vendor.
Re:Man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on, you can't be serious.
Your average desktop pc is a Super-computer compared to a desktop of say 10 years ago.
Take 10 more years and every pc will be a HPC by today's standards.
Surely having access to a HPC is not the biggest problem in creating your own nuke, or figuring out any problem.
It's not like these fast computers automagicly program themselves to solve difficult problems.
Re:If you *need* one, why not build one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Adding to the PP: The overhead and redundant hardware involved in dozens of networked machines would also mean that, to achieve equivalent performance, you'd likely be using twice the power if not more (you might save a little if you rack them with a single PSU for the whole rack, but it's still going to use a substantially greater amount of power).
My home PC (a state of the art gaming PC as of January 2007), discounting the monitor, uses around 360 kilowatts at peak load (running one CPU and one GPU copy of Folding@Home while copying between the various disks to keep them spun up). Of that, only around 60-70 watts is the CPU, call it an even 80 once you add the memory. The GPU, motherboard, hard disks, and power supply losses eat up a lot of the rest.
If you need 80 cores worth of processing power with frequent interprocess communication, you'll need an 80 core machine, or 100-200 cores split across multiple machines. If we assume eight cores per machine, and 16 machines, if they have even half the power overhead of my machine that's going to run an additional 140 watts per box, or an additional cost of 2240 watts. Over the course of one month, that's roughly 1600 kilowatt/hours of overhead, or about $250-350 dollars of power. Every month. For the entire life of the machine (assume 10 years for a corporate or research box), that's around $36000 (remember, that's on top of the cost of the single box super computer). And that's before you factor in the cost of *cooling* the additional heat produced by the additional machines.
Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to the networked supercomputer design (redundancy and failover, the cheaper components mentioned, etc.). But there is also a place for the all-in-one super computer.
Re:Man... (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to wonder the same thing about personal super-computers to be honest, but I think you'd end up frustrated and disappointed when trying to run games on these things.
Notice how it stated "80 core system". Most games are only designed to use up to two cores while maybe some use four (same thing goes for folding @ home). That leaves at least 95% of the super computer's total CPU capacity completely idle (and even if it could technically use all 80 cores, Crysis (or any other modern game) is not THAT demanding or else nobody could run it). Not only that, but you'd still have to factor in the GPU. It was never mentioned in the description of this machine about having some untold super GPU with the power of dozens of high end graphics cards that work together as one unit. If you had that, then Crysis would probably run like never before.
The only game (or rather games) I can think of which might benefit from one of these machines are anything that runs on M.A.M.E. This arcade emulator seems to be almost purely CPU based and multi-threads like crazy due to all the separate components from the original hardware.
Re:Man... (Score:2, Insightful)
Because only on Slashdot is it commonly understood that computer viruses can give access to more nukes.
Re:Man... (Score:1, Insightful)
and that problem could be how to make bad stuff like nukes, or worse a virus writers dream.
First of all, writing a virus doesn't take any computer power to speak of.
Perhaps you meant a medical, biological virus? The term you are looking for is "sequencing" and it takes a hell of a lot more than knowing the info to actually make one. Besides, a few PS3's in a cluster would do just fine. It's the lab to try and make the stuff that's hard to get.
Nukes? You can buy a textbook on physics and know how to make a nuke. Knowing how to make one is no big deal. Actually getting the nuke material is going to be a very large problem right off the bat. Getting access to machining equipment that can actually manufacture the detonator to the very precise tolerances needed to go critical is even more difficult.
You can set the hat down for a while, let that tinfoil rest and cool off a little.
80 cores, 1TB of memory, and you got modded up? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen the term 'personal supercomputer' so many times over the past 20 years. It's just baloney marketing. What you have on your desktop RIGHT NOW is more capable than some of the original CDC machines. So what?
What you have on your desktop RIGHT NOW is most likely more powerful than the Cray Y-MP by a factor of three, if you've got a quad-core Core2 Duo; those babies push +1Gflop.
It's also 1/50th to 1/100th as capable as this supercomputer (or more- I don't know the relative performance between a current desktop processor and current Xeon.) Yes, it's relative, and relatively speaking, this is most certainly a supercomputer. In terms of memory, the maximum amount of ram you can put into a consumer-available motherboard is around 64GB, maybe 128. This has a maximum of 10 times that.
80 xeon cores, 1TB of memory, and you call it a "marketing ploy"? And you got modded up "insightful"? May the hand of metamoderation come on down from high.