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Affordable Supercomputers

Posted by emmett on from the k'ching dept.

Brian writes "CNN Online has a story on a company that has introduced supercomputers for under $100,000 and they hope to have four-layer supercomputers for under $4,000 before long. The computers use AMD processors and according to the company's Web site, they come running Linux. I can't wait to add one of these to my collection!" As always, we've heard about Patmos before. Check out an older story here.

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Not really a supercomputer, IMHO... by Troy+Baer · · Score: 4

    (Disclaimer: I work for Ohio Supercomputer Center but don't speak for them, yada yada yada...)

    This seems to be aimed more at the high availability (HA) market than the high performance computing (HPC) market. Comparing with a Compaq Himilaya is *not* a way to win points with HPC centers, because HPC centers don't buy Himilayas -- they buy mostly various breeds of Crays, SGI Origins, and IBM SPs, with a smattering of Beowulf clusters and large Sun configurations as well. The Patmos site also doesn't talk about floating point performance, which the HPC centers consider critical.

    The Patmos site never really describes their systems as "supercomputers" (although the phrase "super system is used once or twice), so this seems like bad reporting and/or a misunderstanding of what a supercomputer really is on CNN's part.

    (In case you're wondering what I consider a supercomputer, I personally think a super is anything capable of multiple GFLOPS that is used for scientific computations.)

    --Troy
    --
    "My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
  2. Skeptical by The+Dodger · · Score: 4

    I did a bit of looking into using Linux and new technologies like fibre channel, etc., to create high performance, high availability load-balanced, infinitely-scalable systems, as an idea for a company. Unfortunately, the venture capitalists I approached didn't seem to like the idea that there was no Intellectual Property involved. Perhaps it's something unique to British and Irish VCs...

    Anyway, my point is I'm not a virgin when it comes to using this sort of technology for these sort of purposes. I've had a quick look at the Patmos website, but detailed information seems to be in pretty sort supply. They should definitely have some form of benchmarks available for viewing if they're describing this thing as a supercomputer, but they don't appear to have any.

    In fact, I'm trying to figure out why they're describing this as a supercomputer, because it seems to me that, the way they've set it up is more like a HA cluster.

    I've got to admit that, when I see a company selling what they're describing as supercomputers, but which are really just Linux clusters, with little or no technical details forthcmoing, I get skeptical.

    YMMV. Any HPC/HA/Clustering experts care to give an informed opinion?

    The Dodger

  3. Supercomputer??? by Durinia · · Score: 4
    I have a lot of trouble with this being called a "supercomputer". This term is thrown around a lot these days, and most of the time, it's not deserved.

    A "supercomputer", by a more professional definition is a computer that runs at least 100 times faster than your "average" computer. Often, its more like 1000. Mainstream news agencies like CNN, CNET, etc. seem to like to use this word for just about anything more than 8 processors. SGI doesn't even consider its Origin line to be a supercomputer until it passes at least 32 processors.

    As far as this product goes, I think it's got a good place in the dedicated server business, and possibly some low end batch computation. I do have to admit, using AI concepts for system monitoring was a pretty neat trick!