96 Processors Under Your Desktop

Roland Piquepaille writes "A small Santa Clara-based company, Orion Multisystems, today unveils a new concept in computing, 'cluster workstations.' In October, you'll be able to choose between a 12-processor unit for less than $10,000 or a 96-processor system for less than $100,000. These new systems are powered by Efficeon processor from Transmeta and are running Fedora Linux version 2.6.6. Apparently, this new company has friends in the industry. You already can read articles in CNET News.com ("A renaissance for the workstation?"), the New York Times ("A PC That Packs Real Power, and All Just for Me," free registration, permanent link) and the Wall Street Journal ("Orion Sees Gold in Moribund Workstations," paid registration). The company is targeting engineers, life scientists and movie animators. It's too early to know if the company can be successful, but I would certainly have to get one of these systems under my desk. In this overview, I've picked the essential details from the three stories mentioned above."

Comments

Cooling?

[justinmc]

Any ideas?

For a moment...

[jkrise]

I thought '96 processors under your desktop! That would be the Pentium at 133MHz!

Seriously, why 96? Why not 64 or 128?

-

Sounds nice, but

[grunt107]

One thing perplexes me:
Chips on the same board communicate using Gigabit Ethernet, while board-to-board communication takes place on 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Wouldn't same board communication be more frequent, hence needing the faster connection?
Better yet, why not 10GBe for both?

Re:Sounds nice, but

[volsung]

There is probably one ethernet link between boards, so you need more bandwidth on it to allow multiple nodes on the same board to communicate off-board simultaneously. Since there are 12 nodes per board, 10 Gbps is almost enough to handle theoretical worst case.

Dunno why not 10 Gbps everywhere. If you maxed out the 400 MHz Hypertransport bus on the Efficeon, you could push out 1.5 GB/sec, which is just over 10 Gbps. I wonder how much that costs...

Colin Hunter...

[mantera]

I really admire this guy; although the ventures he took part in haven't gone anywhere financially, they were pretty cool. Transmeta, OQO, and now this! Go Colin Hunter!

Re:Colin Hunter...

[Proc6]

Yea it's a pretty ingenious business philosophy.

Start a company that sells CPUs. When profits are failing, start 2 more companies that can be big customers for the first company. When all 3 fail he can start another company that is built on Transmeta clusters and OQO handhelds.

It's like floating checks around banks, but with venture capital.

Whee!

[thephotoman]

96 processors running Fedora? I want one!

Actually, I would be willing to bet that the university I'm at could use a few of these things. After all, we've got undergrads doing BLAST database work, just to teach them about it. Having been through that hell myself, it'd be a lot easier if you didn't have to have a cluster to do the work by computer. For those who don't know, BLAST is a genetic sequencing database that allows for comparison with an extracted gene (retrived through polymerase chain reaction) with a known, sequenced gene in their database.

Re:Fedora 2.6.6?

[Zocalo]

This is a problem at the Slashdot end rather than with Orion - either from the original submitter or the editos. Checking out the product descriptions on Orion Multisystems' site reveals the following (and other interesting specs):

• Based on Fedora Core 2
• Linux kernel 2.6.6 with performance optimized Orion drivers

So I think they know the difference at least... :)

Re:Seems Very steep

[timeOday]

I'm sure you're right, these aren't going to sell in huge numbers. As for the utilization issue, though, I don't think it's for programmers. Like the summary says, think animators - nothing is easier to paralellize than rendering frames in an animation.

Personally, I think most of these will still end up as servers for groups of people instead of individual "workstations." But the logistics of a normal 100-workstation cluster are pretty bad - a large server room, enormous air conditioning unit, a massive power supply, and lots of cabling to be done. This new thing can probably share an existing server room with other computers.

Granted, it's probably just a bit smaller and more power efficient than previous "blade" servers, but maybe presenting it as something brand new is a good marketing angle.

Piquepaille Ripping Off Again

[Anonymous Coward]

How many stories a week does this frigging guy get into Slashdot?

His business plan:
1) Sell Ad Space on "News" Website
2) Shovel In Content From Online Articles
3) Submit To Slashdot Daily
4) Tout "Slashdot Coverage" To Advertises
5) Profit!

And looking at his site, it works fine and dandy indeed.

Then again, is he just doing a service to us?

Pysical Size is Impressive

[theManInTheYellowHat]

Or lack there of. I was imagining one of those SGI deskside Onyx servers when I read the post but these are just wide full towers that pack 96 processors. Quite nice. I am sure the movie industry is all over these babys. The 12 unit is around the size of a Sun pizza box.

How do the Transmeta CPU's do in fp computations? That is obviously the metric to note. I wonder how long it would take to render a movie? Is the USB USB 2? No firewire though.

Re:Dual 2.5GHZ

[AKAImBatman]

While it's certainly cheaper to pickup 20 Dell PC's for $500 each, an integrated 12-way workstation may signify the beginning of a new desktop computing standard.

I'm certainly not disagreeing with you, but my point to the original poster is that he doesn't need to worry about this in the here and now.

Personally, I don't see this sort of design becoming standard in a Personal Computer any time soon. Too much horsepower for a single user who simply needs more torque. However, I *do* see such designs leading into concepts like a "house computer" where the ability to multitask is more important than raw performance. Just imagine if you could install one computer for ~$2000, and have enough system resources to provide a desktop to a small office building (not to mention your entire extended family).

Such a computer would not only provide a thin client desktop, but also handle multimedia capabilities like PVR, watching movies/TV from the internet, streaming radio stations and purchased music to anywhere in the house, interfacing with digital cameras/camcorders via Bluetooth, etc. It's even possible that such a machine could control aspects of your home via X.10, but I wouldn't count on that being a common use for quite a long time.