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Transmeta Meets Blades
The Griller writes "Gordon Bell, one of the creators of VAX, and Linus Torvalds were at the launch of a new supercomputing platform at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on Crusoe processors from Transmeta and running a version of linux, it is aimed at being cheaper than conventional supercomputers by requiring no cooling and lower maintenance.
" Basically, it's blade clustering, using Beowulf.
Oh well, here's a list of mirrors...
Dude, imagine a beowulf cluster of...*KRONK* [hercynium is clubbed with a shotgun and dragged away by the moderators...]
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Imagine if these weren't clustered...
Heh you know what's funny? I damn near posted almost the exact same thing, except like 5 other people did.
It kind of reminds me of a Star Trek convention I went to (the ONLY one I ever went to...) where they had a costume contest. 249 out of 250 people the day before said 'I bet Ill be the only Klingon there!'
"Derp de derp."
Wow, so it is true... Linus is a robot.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
> Feng also proposed that a new technique is needed for measuring the performance of supercomputers. Instead of looking primarily at how many calculations a system can run in a given amount of time, researchers should also consider factors such as downtime, size, price and maintenance requirements, he said.
Following Feng's lead, the whole supercomputing industry has reacted to this new paradigm shift. Industry leader Cray has ceased development of its upcoming SV2 and has designed a system based on the reliable commodore 64. Explained lead scientist Joel Grey, "We managed to get a C64 computer out of the dump, and bought 1,000 surplus 'Barney' solar calculators off of ebay for $30".
The new system, dubbed the SV64, is not quite as fast as the SV2, but exceeds at new metrics: Converted to run on solar power, and having spent the last 15 years in an uncooled closet continously generating the "experiencing technical dificulties" logo for a local community access TV station, the new computer shatters existing power and reliability records. "With an expected retail price of less than $1M USD, we expect this computer to eclipse [Japanese rival] NEC's lead and become the platform that will be used to perform most of the world's weather, biological, and nuclear simulations well into the next decade", said Grey.
Wall Street analysts pointed out the the system has never needed maintence, nor suffered downtime, nor needed the services of an UNIX system administrater, and as a result, the total cost of ownership should remain low. Shares of component manufacturer Commodore rose 10 points to 10 1/64 in heavy trading today.
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