Supercomputer On the Cheap

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."

Comments

Re:"Supercomputer"

[Ginger Unicorn]

i think my PS2 is supercomputer isnt it? Weren't the US government going to restrict exports on them as they were considered munitions or something daft like that. Same thing for old Mac G5 as i recall. Might be a stupid urban myth though.

Stanford will always have the biggest

[bblboy54]

Stanford still has the the best idea.

Re:Stanford will always have the biggest

[Nefarious Wheel]

A friend of mine once ran the massively parallel supercomputer centre at LaTrobe. He told me of how the transputer-based Connection Machine would run blindingly fast in parallel, only to have the lights slowly wink out until one small corner of the display was the only thing lit. He said it was disappointing, and rather funny, how parallel jobs tended to go linear over time.

Yep, sometimes you just need a few processors running very fast cycles.

Sigh... we miss you, Seymour Cray. Wish you hadn't taken your Jeep out that day.

Re:"Supercomputer"

[BrianHursey]

I think the super computers are a thing of the past. Now days clusters are the way to go. Much cheaper and flexible.

Re:"Supercomputer"

[solevita]

I think you mean that anybody can have an old supercomputer. The ever changing definition means staying on top requires a little more than $400,000.

For what? Supercomputers do only one job

[freedom_india]

Supercomputers and Mainframes are for totally different purposes.
A supercomp will do one and only one job parallely to finish it off much faster than any other computer.
A M/F can handle multiple jobs at the same time with lesser speed, but with considerable stability.

For many companies, one S/390 running OS/390 or even an AS/400 (not related) is more than enough for their entire Notes setup.

A supercomputer cannot be used to do that 24/7.

They are fast racecars which cannot race outside of circuit.

Re:academic and research? try finance

[locokamil]

If the price goes even lower, perhaps they will. I find it difficult to see this happening though: the financial firm I work for has swung from supercomputer to linux clusters, and is showing no signs of going back. The TCO for a bunch of linux blades is just so much lower than a supercomputer... and because banks are so conscious of their bottom lines, they usually don't improve things if they are already working.

supercomputer now 100+ teraflops?

[peter303]

This has been a marketing ploy for decades: calling a supercomputer from a few years ago a cheap supercomputer. Well, its no longer a supercomputer.

In the early 1980s a 60 megaflop Cray-1 defined "supercomputer" and the video processing in my cell phone is faster than that.

The new prize is a petaflop, with anything within a magnitude of that range a true super- at least for this year.