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First 96-Node Desktop Cluster Ships

Posted by timothy on from the yes-please dept.

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."

4 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Re:$100,000 by raehl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    $100,000/96 = ~$1,000.

    Not a bad deal.

    --
    paintball
  2. Re:Question by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    You forgot a couple of things:

    * HVAC costs
    * Realestate costs

    Remember, this is a deskside cluster. Try that with your dual-opteron cluster. And try adding up all the costs.

    --
    Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
  3. Re:Question by glesga_kiss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He's also forgotten about hiring an extra 2 guys at least to maintain the extra machines. A selling point of this box will be that "it just works". Pay for a support contract and wammo, you've got a cheap low maintainence cluster. For people working on top-secret stuff (who else needs clusters? ;-), hiring people is a risk and the vetting process is expensive.

  4. Re:$100,000 by Grayputer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How about "plugs into a single 110 volt US outlet". This thing draws 1500 watts PEAK. That's about 14 amps for the math challenged or well under the recommended max for a 20-amp circuit from your household panel (think coffee maker on steroids). Let's try your barebones system approach and let's say you tweak it to use 50 watts per system (good luck). That's 50 watts per system multiplied by roughly 100 systems => 5Kwatts or 3+ times the power consumption. PLUS as an added bonus you get 96 cases, external cabling, at least 96 fans, a dozen power strips, and assorted other toys to trip over. Oh yeah and a few weeks of setup, integration, burn in, and testing.