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Cray SX-6 Installed in Alaska
Dhrakar writes: "Now, I know that normally press releases are imediately round-filed, however, as this is the first NEC^H^H^HCray SX-6 to be installed in the U.S. it is newsworthy. The 8cpu, 64Gb system has been installed at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for benchmarking and other testing. See either ARSC or the NY Times (sub. required. Yada, yada) article."
What I am waiting for is the Cray SV2 which can have up to 1024 Cray vector processors. Who needs a beowulf cluster?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
A system that can pump out 64 gflops only running at a measly 500Mhz? Really shows how poorly mhz is as a measure of system performance.
Beside the fact there is no 2GHz Athlon, you forget one very important thing: memory bandwidth.
A usual Athlon has a theoretical memory performance of 2.1GB/s. Now do 8 gigaops on 32 bit float numbers. That would translate to 32GB/s. So 8 gigaops is not sustainable. Just a short burst.
And don't forget that that SX-6 has 2048 memory banks. Best Athlon chipsets I know have 1 (in words: one). Best Xeon chipsets have 2.
So while the raw power of supercomputers and PCs look similar on a sheet of paper (peak performance, AKA speed you can never exceed) supercomputers are built to get most of that performance not only for a short period of time.
Another topic is price/performance. Here a plain PC cluster might be better. But if you cannot parallelize a problem that much, one fast computer solves a problem faster.
I would say that masturbation is pretty much the same thing as trolling.
Another step towards the Grand Unified Theory of Slashdot! An AC has managed to link the forces of self-abuse and the abuse of others into one, simplifying the universe.