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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."

3 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Too expensive by Buzh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Re:And? by sjwaste · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Serious question here. Does production software exist to drive arbitrary computation across a GPU? I've seen articles about software on its way, etc. Does it exist, either as an application or integrated into some OS? Man, if I could push some of my statistical computing off to the GPU...

  3. Multichannel EEG processing in Canada vs Chile by mindpixel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...