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Dell $38m Supercomputer [not] More Costly than VT's G5s
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Austin Business Journal, Dell's 3-teraflop, 600 server supercomputer cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As The Apple Turns has pointed out that this is 7 times the cost (and a quarter of the power) of Apple's cluster at Virginia Tech! " Update: 10/14 17:56 GMT by M : worm eater writes "The Register has posted a correction to the widely-reported story that a 3.7 terraflop Dell cluster cost the University of Texas $38 million. As it turns out, the computer cost $3 million, vs. $5.2 million for the 17.6 terraflop Mac G5 cluster at Virginia Tech."
Of course Apple gave them a little bit of a deal on these systems, but on the whole, the bid process was made based upon who gave them the best deal. Apple won out in the free market making this supercomputer cluster one of the most inexpensive supercomputers in the world. Imagine it, we have ASCII blue, ASCII red and ASCII white guarded by guys with guns, and here we have a tech school that appears like they are going to enter the 500 list at potentially number 2. Cool.
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$38e6 / 300 servers = 1.2667e+05 $/server
Methinks the price tag includes a lot more than the hardware costs.
The comparison with the VT supercomputer is almost certainly not apples to apples (so to speak)
You can never equivocate too much.
Austin has its nose so far up Dell's butt that they would make a supercomputer of their PocketPC's if they were asked to. You think there was even a QUESTION of who would build their supercomputer?
And don't try to tell me that the Company-Formerly-Known-as-Compaq had a shot even though they're based in Houston...well not really anymore anyway.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer By Leander Kahney
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60791, 00.html
02:00 AM Oct. 14, 2003 PT
A small chip-design firm will unveil a new processor Tuesday it says will transform ordinary desktop PCs and laptops into supercomputers.
At the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, startup ClearSpeed Technologies will detail its CS301, a new high-performance, low-power floating-point processor.
The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.
According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.
An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).
At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.
"That's a supercomputer on the desktop," said Simon McIntosh-Smith, ClearSpeed's director of architecture.
The souped-up PC would cost about $25,000, ClearSpeed said. By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world, Japan's Earth Simulator, operates at about 10 teraflops, consumes a warehouse-size space and cost $35 million.
Soon to be in prototype, the chip may be on the market within a year, ClearSpeed said. The company, which is based in Los Gatos, California, and Bristol, United Kingdom, said it will be providing prototypes to computer manufacturers by the end of the year.
When it comes to market, the chip will likely be sold to consumers as a co-processor -- an add-on PCI card that works in parallel with a PC's main processor, just like an add-on graphics card. But instead of boosting graphics performance, the chip will help compute intensive math calculations.
Similar capabilities are already built into Apple's G4 and G5 Macs, which have a floating-point co-processor called AltiVec, which handles complex, data-intensive calculations for the main processor. But whereas AltiVec is four-way parallel, ClearSpeed's chip is 64-way, the company said.
"You might class it as a big evolutionary step of AltiVec," said Mike Calise, ClearSpeed's president.
The second generation of the chip will be 128-way parallel, and then 256, and so on, Calise said.
He said server manufacturers are looking at the chip with a view to building petaflop machines -- monster supercomputers capable of a quadrillion floating-point operations a second -- or the equivalent of 25 Earth Simulators.
A petaflop machine based on the second generation of the ClearSpeed chip would take up about 20 server racks, the company said.
Calise said computer manufacturers are very excited about the new chip.
"Right now it's awe, shock and when can I get my hands on it?" Calise said.
ClearSpeed said the new chip is also very low-power, operating at about 2 watts, which would allow it to run off a laptop battery and wouldn't require special cooling.
"At 3 watts, you could put it in a PCMCIA card," said McIntosh-Smith. "With two chips on a PC Card, you can have 50 gigaflops on a laptop, running off a battery. That's equivalent to a small Linux cluster on your notebook."
McIntosh-Smith said that down the line, a PC Card with a pair of second-generation chips would perform at about 200 gigaflops, which is equivalent to a big Linux cluster and would nearly qualify the laptop for today's Top 500 supercomputers list.
Appropriately, the chip will be described at the Microprocessor Forum during a discussion of extreme processors.
Though supercomputer performance on a desktop machine may seem like overkill, Calise said there is ever-growing demand in science, government and industry, especially Hollywo
Stupid question: Are these really supercomputers or superclusters? I always think of a computer as one unit not a collection of units.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
besides the people that pointed out the obvious apples to orange comparison in this post...
it just seems to me that people here love to dump on dell. you repeatedly hear how they are under the thumb of MS on slashdot, but totally ignore their huge linux efforts as pointed out with these clusters
To the parent, the focus in high performance computing nowdays is on "portable perforamnce"; for the most part, libraries are written so that the performance critical components are either very small, or self-optimizing (or both). For most applications, the most you might need to do is optimize some of the kernels (eg BLAS) for the architecure.
Putting a computer in a rack does not make it server-class. Nor does standing a computer on a desk make it a desktop. Further, even if the price is wrong for the Dell cluster, which it is, then you end up with a different calculation for value. The real cost of the cluster was $3 million or so. So, for 60% of the price of the VT cluster you get 25% of the processing capability. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you still paid too much for that Dell cluster.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet