Truly Off-The -Shelf PCs Make A Top-500 Cluster

SLiDERPiMP writes: "Yahoo! News is reporting that HP created an 'off-the-shelf' supercomputer, using 256 e-pc's (blech!). What they ended up with is the 'I-Cluster,' a Mandrake Linux-powered [Mandrake, baby ;) ] cluster of 225 PCs that has benchmarked its way into the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world. Go over there to check out the full article. It's a good read. Should I worry that practically anyone can now build a supercomputer? Speaking of which, anyone wanna loan me $210,000?" Clusters may be old hat nowadays, but the interesting thing about this one is the degreee of customization that HP and France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science did to each machine to make this cluster -- namely, none.

Comments

Re:amd for less

[Jaeger-]

the point was simply that it could be done with just as much/more stuff in each box for much less...

i did put (needed??) next to floppy and cdrom, which obviously means "only if deemed necessary for whatever reason"... but apparently you can't read. personally i don't see them as necessary in a cluster, but in the spirit of matching (and beating) the other cluster in terms of components/power vs cost, i figured i'd include them in the calculations.

same thing goes for snd/vid... i'd rather have more than i need in a box, esp when it comes to debugging a box that won't boot but i can't get a terminal on it since i have no vid card...

but gee thanks for the comment.
--w