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First 96-Node Desktop Cluster Ships
Panaphonix writes "The Register reports that Orion Multisystems is shipping the first 96-node desktop cluster. 'With the new, larger system, customers get pretty much the most powerful computer around that can plug into a standard electrical socket.' According to the spec sheet, the DS-96 runs Fedora Core 2 and gets 110 GFlops sustained, 230 GFlops peak."
96 Processors Under Your Desktop
finite bandwidth between processors makes it impossible to sustain anywhere near peak performance for most real-world applications.
Linpack is what is usually used to measure sustained performance on HPC systems.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
The theoretical max gives a rough estimate of the raw Floating-point power for all of the processors on the system. You pretty much add up the GFlops potental for each node (not exactly, but pretty much). The sustained and demonstrated GFlops of the cluster is based on the Linpack benchmark. The reason there is such a huge difference between the two numbers can be a result of a few factors. 1) The interconnect is GigE and Linpack tends to make use of Message passing comms which are affected adversely by the latencies produced by the GigE connections (myrinet would have been a good choice, but I suppose it was probably impossible to squeeze that into that case) 2) Memory speeds also are a factor as pushing floating point numbers around involves memory. This cluster isn't using anything fancy when it comes to the memory and I suspect this may be another cause for this.
When they say that this line of clusters can "make or break" Orion, I am right now, leaning for broke. For the cost of this machine, one can get a real cluster with a lot more performance. I know this thing is nice because of the power requirements and the fact that you don't need a dedicated server room to store it, but for $100,000, you can get Microway to build you a pimptacular cluster with Dual-Opteron nodes, high-speed memory and a phat interconnect with either myrinet or infiniband. You will get a lot more work done for the same price.
Because they started development before FC3 came out maybe?
Will this make or break Transmeta? It uses their processors (Transmeta Tinside as the Register calls it). Slashdot already pronounced the death of Transmeta though (it has no more niches!), maybe this could revive interest?
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
You might want go through this
hilarious
picture here
Not to shoot you down or anything, but it makes me giggle a bit that you say "I know what a GFlop is and all that", heh. As you then know, the basic abbreviation means "floating point operations per second". So, the last 's' is not to make it plural, it's part of the acronym. You can't say "a GFLOP", it's "a GFLOPS". The difference between 1 GFLOPS and 2 GFLOPS is 1 GFLOPS, not 1 GFLOP. And so on. This is one of my big zoo of pet peeves, not meant as a personal attack at all. :)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
The loudest sounds possible (at 1 bar ambient air pressure) are about 180 dB. At that level, the pressure minimum of the sound wave is 0 bar (ie vacuum).
Parent poster messed up on their calcs. Current XServes are 18.4 GFlops peak, not 35 eg Virginia Tech currently at #7/500 is 20240 GFlops peak for 1100 XServes. So 7 would only be ~129 GFlops peak, and 33 would be 607 GFlops peak. But not exactly fitting in a single tower case - though 8 would fit nicely one of those mini sound-padded racks which would be almost as good. And at least the last time I saw a price comparison made, the G5s were far cheaper than comparable rack P4s. (The G5 has 2x the FP hardware).
From the site itself:
They're fully scalable so you can add performance as your needs expand. It can be used on site: in the office, the laboratory, on a boat, or even aloft in a plane.
Ain't that sumpin.
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Sound pressure level 50dBA at operator position
Sound power 55 bels
There is a difference.
Look for GPGPU. They are trying to use the graphics processor for general purpose operations. It runs as any CG script would run. Just realize that it is focused more on parallel math operations then procedural. Please note that I have nothing to do with this project and haven't tried it yet.
you could try Brook
An airplane cabin is pressurized so you could as they say us this machine on a flight test or atmospheric research machine. Most data acquisition experiments would likely gather data with more modest equipment and do the analysis in a tera-ferma environment.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I've attended a workshop on using graphics hardware for accelerating other computation and it's mostly hype IMHO. It amounts to rendering images of your problem, then doing feature extraction on the image. So the *effective* FLOPs, i.e. the amount dedicated to *your* task rather than the overhead of reducing from a rendering task, aren't all that impressive.
A more serious challenger to this transmeta-based system, IMHO, is the cell processor.
Hard drive heads are tiny air-foils. They depend on a certain barometric pressure to keep from crashing into the platter. I had a device that measured weather characteristics in the mountains of antarctica. We had to use magneto-optical drives, because the heads on a disk drive kept crashing. This was many years ago though. I'd think it has improved since then. Maybe not.