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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."

9 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. From TFA by DaveCar · · Score: 5, Funny

    At its highest price, the Blue Gene/L cost $1.3 million per rack

    Pamela Anderson eat your heart out!

    1. Re:From TFA by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Funny

      On the plus side; most supercomputers are fully hot swappable, try doing that with women.

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  2. Re:"Supercomputer" by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  3. Stanford will always have the biggest by bblboy54 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Stanford still has the the best idea.

    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.

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  4. 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.
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  5. Re:Obligatory by Tap13579 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will it blend? That is the question.

  6. JUST IN TIME!! by armodude · · Score: 5, Funny

    FOR RUNNING VISTA the way it was meant to be run!!!

  7. Re:"Supercomputer" by jcgf · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Every time there's an article on supercomputers someone brings up clusters. As has been pointed out before, a cluster only works for easily parallelizable problems where you can divide your problem into many subproblems that can be divided amongst your nodes. This is not a problem with supercomputers as you have much faster communications amongst processors (ie they're not just cheaply connected with cat5 ethernet cable like beowolf) and thus you can solve problems on a supercomputer much faster in this case.

    Supercompters aren't going anywhere fast.