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Transmeta Meets Blades

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the are-there-any-vampires dept.

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.

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  1. Post-X86 clustering by baka_boy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Personally, I'd much rather have a rack of XServe 1U boxes than Transmeta chips -- G4 processors may not be quite as power-efficent as Transmetas, but they also run at higher clock speeds, have two processors per mobo, give you fast 128-bit vector processing unit (very nice for scientific calculation), and still beat the pants off of PIII/IV and Athlon chips in the power/heat/size arena.


    The only trick would be getting the things to work properly in a headless configuration -- Apple won't ship them without a graphics card, but I'm relatively certain that you could get a LinuxPPC installation to work even without the card installed.