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Cringely Wants A Supercomputer in Every Garage

Posted by timothy on from the i'd-call-mine-claire dept.

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?

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. You ediot! by Robber+Baron · · Score: 2, Troll
    You haven't been doing this for long, have you? You scavenge 'em from other cases, that's where! Case has 4 screws, you put 2 back in the case and put 2 in your bag! That way you never run out of screws!


    Sheesh...!

    --

    You're using her as bait, Master!

    1. Re:You ediot! by jedi98629 · · Score: 0, Troll

      thats a good method but i prefer to purchase things, rather than take them from other peoples case's. so does ne1 know im finding no help with google

  2. Imagining a cluster of TiBooks now... by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 1, Troll

    Of course, heat *is* an issue... but imagine a half inch between each layer, you would rack mount them at a slight angle and use heat convection to pull up air, a chimney effect...

    $1,499 for a 600MHz iBook, 20 of these would cost ~$30k, but you couldn't use the channel bonding concept, unfortunately. You'd be stuck with 100bT, which would probably get swamped with any real work in a 4 iBook per switch, 6 switch topology... without even trying to minimize latency.

    20 iBooks would also take up about
    8x9.1x11.2 per stack, so all 5 stacks would take up about 40 inches in space... You could stick these next to a desk or bed and use it as an end table! Okay, that'd be a tall end table...

    $2,999 for a 667MHz ToBook, 20 of these would cost ~$60k, but these *are* Gigabit capable! In a similar topology, or perhaps because of prices for Gigabit switches, you might as well use one switch. Who knows?

    Of course heat is even more of an issue, but give n the same space as the iBooks, there's a whole extra half inch of space available to the TiBook!

    40x9.4x13.5 inches! It would even make a good space heater!

    Okay, okay, I know, it's damn expensive. But... consider, how much is a 20 CPU machine from HP or IBM? I know, I know, they tackle different uses, like reliability, uptime, IO throughput, etc. A 4way 680 pServer from IBM is $220k, from their own website :)

    Damn... I wonder when Apple is going to release a thin rackmount slab server?

    --

    GPL Deconstructed