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Supercomputer On the Cheap

Posted by kdawson on from the mere-six-teraflops dept.

jbrodkin writes "You don't need Ivy League-type cash to get a supercomputer anymore. Organizations with limited financial resources are snatching up IBM supercomputers now that Big Blue has lowered the price of Blue Gene/L. Alabama-Birmingham and other universities that previously couldn't afford such advanced technology are using supercomputers to cure diseases at the protein level and to solve equally challenging problems. IBM dropped the price of the Blue Gene/L to $800K late last year before releasing a more powerful model, Blue Gene/P, last month. Sales of Blue Gene/L have more than doubled since then, bringing supercomputing into more corners of the academic and research worlds."

5 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stanford will always have the biggest by bunratty · · Score: 5, Informative

    Distributed processing is fine for "embarrassingly parallel" problems where the compute nodes don't need to communicate with each other. However, many problems solved by supercomputers or large clusters need communication between the compute nodes, so aren't amenable to distributed solutions.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  2. Re:"Supercomputer" by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Might be a stupid urban myth though.


    Nope, at least on the PS2 count (I don't know about Mac G5s). Back in 2000, Saddam Hussein was purchasing Sony PS2s by the thousands, which were then banned from export, due to them being classified as munitions.
    --
    My blog
  3. Re:ivy league cash? by necro81 · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you search through the whole top500 list, you'll find these Ivy Leaguers with Blue Gene computers:

    #93 Harvard
    #382 Princeton

    But, there are plenty of other US schools on the list with Blue Gene computers (and a many outside the U.S. as well):

    #5 SUNY Stony Brook
    #7 Renssellaer Polytechnic
    #63 California-San Diego #374 Boston University
    #376 Iowa State
    #379 MIT
    #383 Alabama-Birmingham

  4. Re:Stanford will always have the biggest by Beatlebum · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Connection Machine used up to 64K 1-bit processing elements configured to work lock-step with a single control unit (SIMD).

    The transputer was something completely different. It was a 32-bit processor with four high-speed connections to other transputers. This could be used to implement a MIMD processing network.

    The CM scaled well on data parallel applications, the transputer was more suited to course-grained parallelism.

  5. I remember by Solandri · · Score: 2, Informative
    Way back when I was in jr. high around 1980, my friends and I were going ga-ga over the latest issue of Byte magazine at the library. It had a chart listing various computers (processors) and their FLOPS. The 6502 (Apple II) and 8088 (IBM PC) were listed at less than 1000 FLOPS (they didn't do floating point so it had to be emulated in software). We were drooling over the Cray Supercomputer which was listed at 1 million FLOPS, or 1 MFLOPS.

    A 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo rates around 500 MFLOPS. An nVidia 8600GT which you can pick up for about $130 rates around 114 GFLOPS (114,000 MFLOPS). The upcoming 9800GTX is supposed to rate at over 1 TFLOPS.