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Yes but the issue is all the performance doesn't matter if your researchers aren't using it to solve problems. See http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/hpcs/ for more info on this. This is the big HPC push that IBM, Cray, and SUN are participating in. Also a company that I think is kinda cool http://www.orionmulti.com/ is working on a very common use of HPC tools by non-computer people. They are very focused on providing easy to use ultra low maintainance computational tools primarially for the bio-informatics community. One of the founders of the company worked an LANL on green-desitiny (or something like that) which was designed to be a low power low maintainance super computing resource at LANL. After all that, the short answer is yes performance is important but there is a lot of work and interest in making sure that this performance can actually be used by the people that are actually solving problems. Mark

Anyone remember Transmeta? Well check out what they do now!

http://orionmulti.com/

Dunno about server, but I was wondering about a new desktop...
http://www.orionmulti.com/products/specs_ds96
- Performance 230 GFlop peak, 110 GFlop sustained (Linpack) -

What else ??? ah, yes, an ugly as hell server I wouldn't mind this winter : http://www.iwill.net/product_2.asp?p_id=90
Dunno if many people are into rack server modding, but you cannot make it more ugly than it is on the outside....

The inside can host 16 Opteron 800 cores and 128Gig of Ram, which make it pretty hot - both senses.....

For the Network War room, what about a nice visual representation of network attacks/activity, using "The Spinning Cube of Imminent Doom" which is both impressive and easy to explain...:
http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/security/TheSpinningCu be.php
(maintenance of servers going on, use the cache, luke...

Personnaly I like people that forego LCDs and such and directly use a nice and silencious video projector for general informations (say a Sanyo Z3).
Even more if you show your skills at system management using "Doom, the Aftermath"http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom /after.html

Yeah, follow my words, I can garantee your customers will be impressed 8)

What about octal dual-core opteron servers?

opteron? really?

well anyhow... that's NOTHING.

check out these babies
http://www.orionmulti.com/products/specs_ds96?sid= 2590f4ae3b19ec9b4f50c694fd6c7331

with 96 CPUs (yes that's a nine followed by a six)
192 gigz of ram
and a petabyte of disk space...

all fitting under your desk..

I think that might need quite a bit of power :)

all for a nice $20k. pretty good bang for your buck wouldn't you say?

The Orion Multisystem (96 processors under your desk) and the OQO are recent examples. They are in some Sharp notebooks ... browse the list here.

However, if I were doing this seriously, I would be shopping here.

DS-96
96 CPU's (Efficeon)
230 GFlops
1500W Max Power

Is the hardware cheaper? No. But once you factor in the power and cooling infrastructure and costs, it's definitely the way to go. Especially when you consider that 22 of the above machines will give you 2112 CPU's cranking away with a max power draw of 33,000 Watts, instead of 750,000 Watts.

Granted, with WTSI's setup, there's still the consideration of power and cooling requirements for the storage arrays. Not an insignificant issue.

will need another chip. Now, their personal clusters uses transmeta chips. Bad news for keep-it-cool team. http://www.orionmulti.com/

I guess you don't pay the power bills. Low heat and low power chips like Tm reduce cooling and electricity costs enormously. This is why it was chosen for Orion Multisystems' cluster hardware: 12 CPUs that dissipate only 220W peak - not to mention 96 CPUs in a deskside cabinet. Do that with Pentium 4s...

How about Orion 's Desktop and Deskside clusters? Where else can you get a cluster or 12 or 48-96 CPU's in one machine that you can plug into a normal power socket?

Or do you not know much about parallel computing?

They describe it here

They mention the version of message passing they use (message passing implies a distributed memory system). They mention what proc they are using. And nobody said this was SMP, they said it was a cluster (which as mentioned by another poster means that it isn't SMP).

From the site itself:

They're fully scalable so you can add performance as your needs expand. It can be used on site: in the office, the laboratory, on a boat, or even aloft in a plane.

Ain't that sumpin.

picture here

Actually low power chips are gaining popularity in super computer environments

Nobody ever seems to mention Orion Multisystems in this context, so I am going to. Visionary product.

Already done: http://www.orionmulti.com/ 12-node cluster built on Transmeta chips, feeds on only 200 Watts altogether. A little larger than a desktop case in size.

Imagine a Beo-- oh wait...

Products

Surely someone is going to set the PC world on its ear with a massive performance leap that doesn't require 1000 watt power supplies

Surely someone is going to set the PC world on its ear with a massive performance leap that doesn't require 1000 watt power supplies

That's nifty to know, although IIRC, the xw8200 uses Prescott cores, meaning they still consume a lot of electrical power even at no load.

No, I don't have dual G5 (my main computer is this IBM T40), but I'm laying plans to build an extremely powerful workstation, e.g. Quad dual-core Opterons (hopefully available soon?) or a little stack of Apple XServes. But I'd like it to all fit in one case and be quiet (except perhaps when heavily loaded). Orion Multisystems looks interesting, but the CPUs are Transmetas, and I'm afraid 12 of those might be slower than 4 single core Opterons.

Alpha based workstation with OpenVMS or Tru64

Sparc based one with Solaris9

Dual G5 Mac with OSX. say no more.

SGI ws with IRIX

HP (parisc)with HPUX

and last but not least an x86 compatible possibility:

Orion DS-96 Deskside Cluster Workstation. Yes, thats the number of CPUs in it.

FYKI

ps: no, I cannot afford them either. Yes, you could run Linux/BSD on all of them.

I know it's not a multicore device, but this is an example of what's possible. 36 Gflops @ 220 Watts. (24 Gigs RAM, 1TB storage, $10,000) I want one.

Nice little subliminal message.

~lake

You should probably check out the product description anyway though; there are some quite interesting hardware design decisions in there!

• Based on Fedora Core 2
• Linux kernel 2.6.6 with performance optimized Orion drivers