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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."
Its not duped, this article has been clustered.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
You want to be impressed heh? Well, it is powerfull enough to play solitaire on Longhorn!!!!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
I can't hear you, the guy two cubicles over just fired up his new Opteron cluster. I'm just trying to hold on to my desk!
You can tell you're on /. when dividing 1e5 by 1e2 to get 1e3 gets modded up to +5 insightful. :-)
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...