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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."
I am not familiar with the architecture of clusters, so I am a little surprised by the more than 100% difference between sustained and peak GFlops. I know what a GFlop is and all that, I just don't immediately see why there is such a huge difference.
Can someone summarize why there is such a huge difference?
bash: rtfm: command not found
This will be great for researchers with CPU-hungry simulations to run. A small box with a lot of grunt is exactly what you want when you're simulating the PHY layer for your 802.11n proposal.
From TA "Sound power 55 bels"
:)
...and/or put the box in another room.
550 dBel noise? Perhaps the producers should look into Metal cooling ?
All the current Orion systems, including this one, use Transmeta Efficeon CPUs. Not surprising since Orion was founded by a Transmeta co-founder.
Actually, Efficeon performance is quite good on the type of repetitive loop-based code this system is intended for. It may not surpass an equivalent Athlon 64 or P4 based system, but in terms of bang per watt, it's not bad.
Although having 96 nodes in a single box makes it quite cute, from what I can interpret from the specs, you would get more bang for your $100K by getting what the beowulf crowd like to call MMCOTS (Mass-Market-Common-Off-The-Shelf, i.e. mass produced computers from Dell or the like), hooked toghether with a specialty high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect like Infiniband, Myrinet or SCI. Running a free beowulf cluster OS like for instance ROCKS would mean that a normal linux admin could maintain it quite effectively.
I expect this thing to be marketed towards scientists in small or medium businesses that aren't employing many/any IT staff, who use commercial computer models to do things like theoretical chemistry (Gaussian, ADF etc), bioinformatics (Phase, BLAS, Paralign etc), fluid dynamics, statistics, crypto, you name it. I don't expect to see any of these types of systems used in normal supercomputing sites, where people write their own (parallel) code and skilled staff maintain the cluster.
-- Buzh
I've never seen that before.
So you cann't use it on a plane.
Who cares? Modern graphics cards are capable of (sorry it's a PDF, it was all I could find) 40 GFLOPS. That's not even in SLI mode, which actually does push you to about a 98% over a single card (in terms of raw processing power).
Why would you buy a 96-CPU setup when you could buy a 6-GPU setup and match the same theoretical performance? (All jokes aside about the costs being roughly equivalent, they're nowhere near the same.) 6 top of the line 6800s would run you about $3600. Even if you added top of the line parts for the rest of the system, you'd be looking at about $1600 per system. Add $0 for the linux distribution to drive the whole thing, and you're at a grand total of $10K.
I'm not impressed.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Yea, I agree that Fedora was definitely an odd choice.. Well, I can trust that the kind of person whom can build a 96 node super computer, makes very educated decisions.. I'm glad to hear that company's are still involved in making these clusters. Its a great way to build something powerful for a cheap price, and not having to lean towards Crays etc.. I worked for a company called Patmos International for the longest time, and we never shipped a single cluster.. We had tons of investors that seemed interested of course, but after 2 years of contiuous development, and no sales, the investors simply stopped investing, therefore my job was done for.. We advertised the "$99,000" super computer that would supposedly be in "everyones" garage one day.. Of course that was just a saying because of how cheap we could offer a 32 node system with all of our custom applications and linux operating system. Pretty sweet setup.. it sucks to see the big guys go down sometimes.. to this day, it was the best job I've ever had.. You can still read about Patmos if you search for James Gatzka on google.. They tried their hardest to bring some damn technology and culture to the podunk town of the Eastern Shore of Maryland..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
One of my best friends just bought a tiny little house in downtown Toronto for $377,000. I left Toronto last November and moved to Santiago, Chile and live downtwon where my rent is $260/month, for quite a nice, though small place, in an excellent area.
So, if I spend $100K on the Orion DS-96, that leaves me more than enough for a 250 channel geodesic EEG system which would allow me to compute self-organizing maps of the human mind based on flashing the 1.6 million mindpixels I have collected over the past five years to various volunteers [english teachers], AND still have 56.73 years worth of rent left!
Too bad no bank will loan me $377,000 for a computer and an EEG system and the time to play with it...