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."
If you *need* one, why not build one? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't most people who would NEED a supercomputer be able to build one much more cheaply using a dozen workstations? It's hard to see how this SGI system might be sold (except perhaps as a replacement for an overburdened business-office server).
Re:Man... (Score:2, Interesting)
We'll I think there may very well be a downside to that. As this stuff gets cheaper, the ability for just anybody to figure out problems increases, and that problem could be how to make bad stuff like nukes, or worse a virus writers dream. Hey, five more years and this will be under $2,000 in the sweet spot possibly. Anyhow, I want one, but maybe they need to only let people run them that have passed a basic test on driving a computer.
Re:PS3s (Score:2, Interesting)
forgot the source : http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1024278/linux-petitioners-sony-ps3-graphical-innards/ [theinquirer.net] sry
Re:If you *need* one, why not build one? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wouldn't most people who would NEED a supercomputer be able to build one much more cheaply using a dozen workstations?
Is there any networked or cabled solution that's as fast as a bus on a motherboard? Having those machines communicate with one another and syncing the computations is a lot of overhead that reduces speed and adds complexity.
I see computer animation uses for this. I also see math geeks (hobbyists) buying their own to run their current hobby project. Engineering departments using one to run simulations at a faster rate and cheaper.
It's cheaper than the Apple solution so I see movie editors using this.
You just know the gamers will jump on this!
This thing will sell like hotcakes.
Re:PS3s (Score:5, Interesting)
Then to make matters worse, most of the engineers from the graphics dept of Sgi jumped ship, and all went to join Nvidia (Mark Kilgard et al). The comsumer grade Geforce cards had better OpenGL support + features than an Sgi unit at a fraction of the cost.
This is probably the only realistic comparison you can make between SGI and Apple. Apple (having seen a computer company crash and burn due to a switch to Intel) must have studied what went wrong with Sgi, and made damn sure they didn't repeat the same mistakes.... If Sgi had managed the transition as well as Apple, it would still be a powerhouse in the industry.
Re:Mac Pro Cheaper? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$8000 for a single processor (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who has a whole Sun Enterprise 5500 rack in his room, There is indeed a great difference between server class hardware and commodity gear, where shall we start.
Multiple power supplies, varied in number depending on your load out but hot swappable and configured as such that 1-2 of them can die before your system goes down. Along with diagnostic interface and usually visible indicators going 'part failure, replace asap'.
Same with cpus, hot swappable cpu/memory boards are a must, so long as a single cpu remains functioning the system should still run albeit at a lower capacity.
While I've already mentioned psu redundancy, the AC power outlets it uses would usually have redundancy also, with two separate connections to different circuits or ups etc.
Anyway, no commodity hardware does this, only high end, high availability stuff has this, and you will pay through the nose for it. If this octane has these features, it is very cheap for what it is.
Despite the prevailing skepticism here, this is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Then again, I'm buying up Marvel SheevePlugs as fast as I can afford 'em. With built-in 1000TX networking and a Kingston SOC chip delivering approximately the same performance as a 1GHz Intel CPU, I figure I can network 'em together and have a scalable (Beowulf) supercomputer for a lot less money and only a modest investment in elbow-grease. The uBoot environment is already smart enough for TFTP boot and root over NFS (which is how IBM does the magic, IIRC). All I need is a monotasking kernel to serve to my nodes and I'm in business. For now, I'll settle for the standard Linux 2.6 kernel and take the modest performance hit.
Re:Guess lightning can strike twice (Score:4, Interesting)
that was known, internally as the WBT (wintel box thing).
I kid you not.
Re:PS3s (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If you *need* one, why not build one? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, you could do it with a cluster of workstations. You would need some insane interconnects. OR, you could just buy this pre-configured system from SuperMicro [supermicro.com] with dual quad-core Nehalems and 4 Nvidia Tesla C1060 [wikipedia.org] GPU Cards. That's 960 thread processors @1.3 GHz if you don't overclock, 16GB of DDR3 @ 1.6 GHz on a 512 bit bus, 16 threads of system CPU with up to 96GB of system RAM. It pulls close to 4 TFLOPS, in a desktop machine. You probably could break into the top500 [top500.org] with ten of them with decent interconnects since the #500 spot is Rmax 17.09 TFLOPS and Rpeak 37.64 TFLOPS. If you prefer a top 3 OEM, you can get that in a Z800 [hp.com] workstation from HP.
To put that in a time scale for you, that one desktop available today by itself would have easily been one of the top 100 supercomputers in the world only five years ago [top500.org] and would still have been in the top500 3 and a half years ago [top500.org].
A little spendy for a wordprocessing and light spreadsheets, but a sweet piece of gear nonetheless.
Re:PS3s (Score:3, Interesting)
What OS does it run? (Score:1, Interesting)
I read TFA, apologies if I missed it, but, what operating system does it run? Please, for the love of all that is good, let the answer NOT be IRIX.
Re:PS3s (Score:3, Interesting)
An Nvidia Tesla has 240 cores at 1.3GHz for about $1300. You can put four of these in a system, lets say the base system would cost $1000. You could get eight systems loaded with 4 Tesla cards each for $49600 and possibly have enough left over to get a 10gbE switch. It would total 7680 cores, pretty close to your 8000 core idea. Except this one would actually work, where as there would be a tremendous amount of additional components necessary to get 8000 Z80s to communicate with one another, cheapest being a very long and slow token ring.
(yes, I get your point, number of cores is a poor metric)
Re:Man... (Score:3, Interesting)
As has been said before, both on this site and elsewhere, for the first few thousand years of human existence, the extermination of humanity was well out of reach of everyone. As technology advanced it became possible for a group of people, working together, to develop a technology for mass destruction (the specific tech often referenced is nukes). Eventually, the group of people became smaller and smaller (theoretically, larger groups of people won't let each other actually use such weapons.
The first European explorers to come to the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries killed 90% of all humans in Central Amercia, and 95% of all humans in North America, without even trying. Modern technologies for mass destruction can't compete with the wooden boat.