Cray's CX1 Desktop Supercomputer, Now For Sale

ocularb0b writes "Cray has announced the CX1 desktop supercomputer. Cray teamed with Microsoft and Intel to build the new machine that supports up to 8 nodes, a total of 64 cores and 64Gb of memory per node. CX1 can be ordered online with starting prices of $25K, and a choice of Linux or Windows HPC. This should be a pretty big deal for smaller schools and scientists waiting in line for time on the world's big computing centers, as well as 3D and VFX shops."

Nice Specs

Will it get Crysis up over 15 fps?

Overpriced?

That thing looks mean! I'd pay 25k to be the only person in the office with one of those.

You'll need one hell of a desk

35 inches deep and weighing in at 136 lbs. fully loaded. My desktop would not be able to sustain that!

Re:You'll need one hell of a desk

Buy two, get a desk-on-top

for the rest of the world

that is 62 kg

for Britian

That's 9 stone 8 lbs

Re:for Britian

(12.22 in) * (17.5 in) * (35.5 in) = 0.521657047 hogsheads

Re:You'll need one hell of a desk

My girlfriend weighs that much, so I'm pretty sure my desk can handle it.

Re:You'll need one hell of a desk

And, the computer won't be on a desk in reverse cowboy. Plus, it's a static load.

Re:You'll need one hell of a desk

it's a static load.

That's what SHE said!

Re:You'll need one hell of a desk

you're not supposed to inflate her with water

Desktop? Where's the notebook?

When they package this as a notebook or netbook (at an attractive price), I'll be interested.

Re:Desktop? Where's the notebook?

Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack. And I bought it cheap.

Re:Desktop? Where's the notebook?

Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack.

Even in the mid 90's, GHz processors, and gigs of RAM/hard disk were still largely uncommon. I think you're talking late 90's before that started to become relatively common.

I continue to be stunned at what you can buy as an entry level box nowadays for a really cheap dollar amount. My local "white box" PC store will sell you a dual-core 5GHz (or whatever) 64-bit AMD machine for under $300 -- add a little RAM and disk space and you've got a helluva system for not very much money.

How many home PCs nowadays have TB's of storage? I know several people who do -- I remember when home users didn't have gigabytes, terabytes would have been unimaginable.

Cheers

More like Apple

Perhaps to enhance their marketing, they can offer the computer in CrayOn colors (like Apple's iMac colors). Cray Gray, Big Iron Gray, Super Computing Gray, Gray, Gray Passion, etc..

Remember, you can order any color - as long as it is gray.

How well would for example...

For example Blender [blender.org]'s renderer's scale on a system like this? Of course something like MentalRay might scale easily but has anyone any hands on experience?

One might argue if you are throwing away $25,000 on a system like that you might use software that costs, but then again, Blender has made tremendous progress these last years..

Re:How well would for example...

Blender has made a lot of progress, but it is still way behind Maya and even Lightwave. I've not been using Blender in the past couple releases, but it used to have some issues on my Quad Core Power Mac and using more than 4GB of Ram. I think this has been addressed now though. But I've never run into the problem of RAM or processor speed being the problem, but video ram when modeling an object. I have created scenes that will even grind a decent 256MB video card into the ground. Sure, it would be nice to render a bit faster, but for $20 - $60 a month, I do as much rendering as I want at Respower.

But let's look at cost. For $25k I can buy about 75 commodity boxes that are dual core, 2GB of Ram each & networking gear. That's about 150 Cores and 150GB of Ram. Put Linux on there and you can run ScreamerNet (you get to put the LW rendering engine on 999 machines per license) or one of a number of Maya distributed rendering programs. End result are going to be more frames being processed at one time. (for animation)

If I went the Mac Mini route, that's about 40 Mac Minis, which is still 80 Cores, 80GB of Ram total and with ScreamerNet or Xgrid....

Now the downsides are, 40 - 80 computers take up a lot of space and probably would eat up more power/cooling costs. But then again, if a couple boxes kick the bucket or hiccup, the other 35 - 75 are still processing. You only loose a percentage of total output.

Where it maybe nice is for folks who are rendering a single frame, like for a large poster. The 64 cores would make quick work of most jobs, but for animation, you're better off going with with a farm.

Must be a nice keyboard, and an amazing power cord

Power Cord (kit of 2) $110.00 Keyboard and Mouse $188.00 Yep...

Re:Yes, but only for a short time

it says it runs windows. that's just what the herders need, a few crays in their herd.

Re:Yes, but only for a short time

I know you're being facetious, but the limiting factor in the output of a bot on a botnet is its connection speed, not its processing power. A '486 can saturate a 10mbit connection without taking a severe performance hit. Seeing as most of us don't quite have gigabit internet connections at home, this thing wouldn't be any more valuable to a herder than your neighbour's $500 laptop.

Re:Yes, but only for a short time

He could use it to crack passwords or something.. lots of processors and memory is pretty handy for that

Re:Yet...

No, but at least it can run Vista with most of the bells and whistles turned on.

Re:Horsepower

Well, with all the sloppy inefficient programming, feature bloat, and generally craptastic work that goes into the ongoing, illogical, disuseful, nightmare that is MS Word, you will need one of these puppies just to run Word and Windows 7 anyway.

Vista's MINIMUM memory requirement is 512 megs.

Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.

Personally, I don't find Vista any more useful than Win2k. More stable, yes, but I don't see how upping the RAM req by an order of magnitude was required to make Win2k more stable. All it needed was better programming and better testing.

I think what we have going now is the kind of thing that happened when gas was cheap: SUVs. When gas is expensive (viz Europe and Japan) the average car gets Really Small and Efficient. When RAM was really expensive, programming was tight and efficient. Now that RAM is measured in gigs and drives in terabytes, there is no incentive to do efficient programming or wrangle in feature creep and bloatware.

Eventually we will hit some physical / cost limit on RAM, and then good programming will become a requirement. OF course, by then, there won't be anyone left who knows how to do that...

RS

Re:Horsepower

Well, with all the sloppy inefficient programming, feature bloat, and generally craptastic work that goes into the ongoing, illogical, disuseful, nightmare that is MS Word [...]

Feature bloat for sure, but how do you know it's sloppily and inefficiently programmed? Have you seen the source? From what I recall of people commenting on leaked Microsoft code the quality was generally considered pretty good.

Re:Gaming?

A number of modern games can make use of 2+ cores, but 8 isn't going to happen with any efficiency. Note also that this is a cluster in a single box -- those 8 nodes are each different computers on a very fast local network. That means a different OS image per node, and each process on its own node. For lots of supercomputing applications, this is the norm -- each node does its share of the work and they talk over the network. But no games support this; they all expect to run on a single computer.

Also, for gaming performance, I imagine you'd want dual graphics cards -- which this box doesn't support. (It does include "visualization node" options, which have a single Quadro FX card each.)

Still, for something like a desktop render farm, this might make sense -- except I imagine the customers for such would be more interested in options with better price/performance.