Cringely Wants A Supercomputer in Every Garage

Nate LaCourse writes: "Real good one from Cringely this month. It's on building his own supercomputer, but with some twists." You'll probably also want to check out the KLAT2 homepage to learn more about their Flat Neighborhood Network. And since KLAT2 has been around for nearly a year (check out the poster on this page!), perhaps a 3rd generation is in the works?

Comments

Re:easy cowboy

[Maditude]

well, that was an easy search...

If you wanna check out a sizable collection of .PDF's on the subject of Ultra Wide Band, uwb.org has some links here.

Re:What is 10base-100?

[SuzanneA]

As I understood it, 10base-100 was the original name for what most people call 100base-TX these days. Some people still seem to refer to it as 10base-100.

Btw, a little nitpick, the TX would refer to 4 pair (all 8 conductors), 10base-T uses 2 pair, 10base-TX and 100base-TX use all 4 pairs.

Re:Am I the only one?

[dangermouse]

"Klaatu barata nikto."

I think it translates to "Klaatu says not", but I'm basing that off of a half-assed knowledge of German ("nikto" -> "nicht"), the similarity between "barata" and "berate", and context. Maybe there's some kinda Latin thing in there somewhere, idunno. It's the instruction Klaatu tells Love Interest to give to Gort the robot, so he won't destroy the entire planet.

And since someone asked, yeah, that's the same line whatsisface has to use in "Army of Darkness", and it was the only part of that lame movie I can remember laughing at.

Now, the question is: Will I get modded down because this is actually offtopic as hell, or because I insulted "Army of Darkness"? %-)

The Ultra Wide Band Working Group (UWBWG)

[Harumuka]

Through Google I found the UWBWG, and there's lots of detailed papers at Aetherwire. Interesting reading.

Talk about power!

[alouts]

Literally.

The costs of a clustering setup go well beyond the initial hardware. At the level that Cringely is building (with only 6 machines), it may not be a huge problem, but running KLAT2 will cost you some dough just for the power.

A couple years ago I made a dumb mistake and bought a saltwater reef tank without realizing that it would end up costing me $150/mo. in electricity bills (it ain't cheap running 4000+ watts in lights and pumps 18 hours a day). I'm sure running 66 machines 24 hours a day ain't cheap either.

Re:Talk about power!

[Newtonian_p]

Ok, let's see how much this would cost. Let us assume these computers are using 300W power suplies and as a worst case senario, let us assume that all 300W that the PS is capable of supplying is being used in each machine.

I live in Quebec where electricity is the cheapest in the world costing about 6 to 7 cents (CAN) per kWh. I don't know how much it is in the US.

so I have .300 kW/machines x 66 machines x 24 h/day x 0.06 dollars/kWh = 28.50 dollars/day.

28.50$ a day in the worst case might be a bit pricy for a household but it is cheap for a university. Of course, electricitry is much more expensive in the us, I have seen prices of 0.14$/kWh in New-York many years ago but the 300W power supply is probably not being fully used making it cheaper.

Sorry had to point this out.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the PBS article:
"The solution was to put more cheap Ethernet cards in each PC, and then use "channel bonding" to make them all look like a single faster card"

From KLAT2 FAQ
"Every NIC in every PC has a unique MAC address (and potentially unique IP address) -- i.e., this is not channel bonding."

FNN is totally different and in many cases more suited for this app than simple channel bonding.

One thing I did wonder about was. Why the floppy drive? You can get netboot cards very cheap... And you'd only need one per system. Just one less mechanical thing to fail. Plus the node would come up much faster. PXE or even BOOTP/DHCP boot would be fine.

Also I kind of wonder about commodity Realtek cards. I'm sure Realtek makes a fine chipset, but most vendors who use Realtek chipsets really skimp on the rest of the card. You can get 3com or Intel Pro/100 multipacks almost for the same price as the realtek cards sell for off of the shelf.

Ok rant over... Flame away.

only fastest one percent is supercomputer

[peter303]

By definition only the fastest devices are supercomputers. These days that is about a teraflop. Thta includes the US DOE ASCI series and the announced installation of the Blue Storm and Blue Gene IBM computers. Ten gigaflop computers a dime a dozen and a hundred gigaflops not so rare.

Why spend $40,000 when you only need $13,000?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why this guy's so excited about 64 gigaflops for $40,000. Consider the following

6 Dual 800Mhz G4 PowerMacs (running your choice of Darwin or Linux)
Processing Power: 70.8 gigaflops (11.8 each machine)
RAM included: 1.5 GB (heck, I already have 1GB in my PowerBook G4)
Hard Disk Space: 480 GB
Extras: Each machine has one 4x AGP slot, four 64-bit PCI slots, an NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX card (64MB), Gigabit Ethernet and a 56K modem you can just take out and hang on your Christmas Tree or something

Cost: $21,000 ($3,500 from store.apple.com)
Ebay off the CD-R/DVD-R Drivers for $350 each to save $2,100
Total cost: $18,900

Tip: If you wait until after MacWorld in January (where Apple will most likely introduce a line of faster PowerMacs) you can either get more gigaflops for the same price or lower the price of 64 gigaflops to around $13,000.

What kind of an idiot goes out and spends over $40,000 on something less powerful than he could get for $13,000? And people complain that Apple hardware is expensive... morons...