Slashdot Mirror
A New Concept in Supercomputers
Steve Kerrison writes "With the power of CPUs ever-increasing and the number of cores in a system increasing too, having a supercomputer sit under your desk is no longer a pipe dream. But generally speaking, the extreme high end of modern computing consists of a big ugly box housing that generates a lot of noise. A UK system integrator has developed a concept PC that blows that all away. The eXtreme Concept PC (XCP) has quite a romantic design story, with inspiration coming from concept cars and the sarcophagus-like Cray T90. The end result is a system that resembles a Cylon — computing power never looked so ominous. Although just a concept, the company behind the design reckons there could be a (small) market for the systems, with varying levels of compute power accompanied by appropriate (say, LN2) cooling."
If this is good design, then I do *not* want to see bad.
Surely the definition of a 'supercomputer' changes constantly? Everything else is measured relative to the most powerful one of the day. there can be no such thing as a 'supercomputer under your desk' because relative to the most powerful, it's actually pretty weak.
I don't need the very best computer, but if I needed/wanted the best, cost be damned...
That's hardly something that would fit under my desk. And there's no discussion of performance specs, just a bunch of hype. Besides, with serviceability taking a back seat, you won't be able to upgrade the thing readily, probably making it at the top of its game only for a few months.
Looks like something that will run around the room yelling "Exterminate!" In a high squeaky voice. £10,000 for a custom cooled Skulltrail? Uhhh... No.
...welcome our new overlord, CmdrTacky.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It looks like there's no space left in the case at all. How many hard drives can it hold? How many CD-ROM drives. If I went all out on a computer with quad SLI, and dual quad core CPUs I'm not going to cheap out on hard drives.
I currently have a Lian Li PC-V2000 full tower. Holds something like 12 hard drives and 6 CD-ROMs, I had 8 drives (2.2TB) and 1 CD-ROM. Plus it gives me more than enough room to work with. The only time it's massive size became an issue is when I moved and had to bring the computer into the car and into the office for a few days. The case is under my desk so prettiness isn't much of a factor but when people see it they're impressed (not often you see a case you can sit on while rolling down the street.) I rarely understand these designer PCs, they never look that good, and the designs are almost always dated and old looking in a couple years anyway.
Full Tilt
it looks like an effed up futuristic robotic pet that was vomited up by a mad scientist or something
id rather get punched in the junk and given a 486 than have that thing sit under my desk where friends could potentially see it
And then there was E
If someone designs a 'supercomputer' that is faster than a home PC and is affordable to a home user..... wouldn't that just become the new computer? A supercomputer is by definition a computer that is better than one that a normal home user could afford.
Oh, yeah, it looks like the 70's version. I was hoping for this. Maybe that's not a good thing because the last thing you want is you IT staff in the computer room all the time with their pants down and, well, you get the idea.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
..if there were some performance figures. I don't give that much of a damn how it looks if it runs like a son of a gun.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
I'll stick with my simple and basic looking P180. It can be just as super as this toy with the same hardware, and it doesn't look like a crazy plastic turd.
Certain lazy tacos don't seem to feel the need to include a dept. name for certain posts. This will not go unpunished.
This is a high-end dual socket box that incorporates cooling that is probably quieter than equivalent air cooling. It has nothing to do with the visions of 'supercomputer' and the word supercomputer itself is always a relative term. In 1993, the top supercomputer had 60 gigaflops, with a theoretical of 131 gigaflops. This system has a theoretical of 102 gigaflops and probably can get 80-85 gigaflops measured, so it would manage to beat the number 1 supercomputer of 15 years ago.
Nowadays, the most recent list has the #500 supercomputer at nearly 6 teraflops (rpeak of 10 teraflops). Or, to quantify, the lowest of the top 500 is still 100 times more powerful than one of these boxes.
Supercomputer in your palm, supercomputer in the desk, as long as you get to pick the year by which you declare what a 'supercomputer' is, you can declare whatever you want.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
FTA :"A further six months were spent on manufacturing a working prototype. The system was initially slated to use Intel's maligned V8 platform, but was later changed to the current Skulltrail - incorporating two quad-core CPUs natively running at 3.2GHz on a motherboard that supported four graphics cards - when the design became available.:
Since when is that a modern supercomputer?
Reminds me of the Badonkadonk land cruiser.
Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
For those old enough to remember ;)
WARNING direct links to wikipedia and jpg image (nothing "shocking")
http://www.blakes-7.co.uk/conventions/b7reunion/liberator/Orac.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orac_Blake's_7
Jesus was an invention of the Romans - watch "The Pharmacractic Inquisition" for something more credible...
Are you sure about that?
The only thing any supercomputer has to do with that machine is that the vendor's tech director bought an old Cray:
I bet my P4/4.3GHz non-super computer is faster than that old Cray. And there's no way a single 2*4*x86+4*GPU PC is a supercomputer at all.
And that case is hella ugly.
--
make install -not war
Why do supercomputers need to look sexy? XT3's look good, but, I mean that might be more of me loving what's inside, but that's another story for another post. Most supercomputers are kept in machine/server rooms, no? People don't normally see these things, so why does it matter if they look sexy? Decent is enough.
BTW, it's fugly:) (Ok, maybe not that bad, but I still don't like it).
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
It would appear to me to be much more cost effective to just buy some network cable and put the computer in another room. I bet out of this £10,000 PC, about £8000 at least is the liquid cooling and fancy case mods.
If I have a computer for work, I don't feel any particular need to be able to see the box on my desk.
SiCortex was at Supercomputing this last year and they also have a desktop supercomputer.
In my opinion, it also looks a heck of a lot better than the cylone: http://sicortex.com/
It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) for a dual quad core running at 3.2 GHz in an ugly case? Come on. You can get a Mac Pro with the same speed for a *fourth* of the price. And it looks better.
When a computer is four times more expensive than the equivalent from *Apple*, then you know that something is seriously wrong.
"A New Concept in PC Case Mods"
I see no new concept, and definitely not in supercomputer design. All I see an elaborate casemod with cooling. Not much system design went into that, I don't think. It's just a PC, a very normal one at that.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This is a supercomputer?
A few years ago, I was visiting a small PC manufacturer. They were trying for product differentiation from Dell, HP, etc., and had a row of "concept cases" on display. There was one with Viking horns. One like a Darth Vader mask. One something like this one. One that looked like a 1940s Telefunken radio. Some of these went into production. If you really want a PC that looks like a yellow Samurai mask in plastic, they have some in stock.
I saw one of the Viking horn models in a surplus store recently.
Availability in many of the supercomputer deployments is measured in percentage of the participating servers that stay up, not by continuous uptime. Applications may be killed off, but the job scheduler restarts them either from the beggining or a checkpoint. In the end, an application has executed a clean run, but instances of that application might have died a horrible death along the way. For the sake of cost, supercomputing has been in the business of migrating redundancy up toward tolerant software rather than having expensive, relatively low volume redundant hardware designs.
One *could* implement that sort of strategy with a single system. Imagine every thing that you executed and cared about was submitted through anacron and anacron wouldn't give up until the program exited successfully. Yanking the system and restarting it would redo the application from the beginning, like supercomputing clusters. The granularity is so coarse you can't help but to notice, but at the core it wouldn't be much different from a server going down among the sea of systems that is a supercomputing cluster. Jobs on a supercomputing cluster are rarely directly interactive, so this sort of jerky behavior will go unnoticed, but if your webbrowser randomly disappeared and then reappeared, it would be jarring.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You could shell out ~10k for a Tesla that computes using CUDA, or maybe you could build your own dual quad core, tri-SLI using a Tyan boads?
Perhaps the word "concept" design has been lost on you.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No, but its probably 'Vista Capable'.
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/rsc.bluegene_2004.html
Besides, how energy efficient is this design? The next gen supercomputers will likely not just be measured in flops but, flops/watt.
...but even with all that power can it run Vista?
So tag the story "justafancycase"
I took the editors' title of this story too literally.
Now this is a new concept in supercomputers.
I don't get it.. where's the strap to tie it under my chin?
this is much better [reported prior on /.]
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html
16 PS3 cell processors for approximately 400 nodes
and not a bad price 16 * $500us or $8000 [less if you can stand ebay]
Actually, it kinda looks like K9, without the head.
Yes...mahster!
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
It seems to be more about torturing a developer to force them to know how to write scalable/portable applications than being an actual practical platform. Sure, 72 cores sounds cool, but being a merely respectible 72 gigaflops (each core is simply a gigaflop) it's bested by a dual-socket Core 2 based workstation with quad core 2.33 in each socket. Practically speaking, many cores is helpful, but the same amount of performance in fewer cores is more flexible. It is a bicycle with training wheels for developers to know the scaling weaknesses of their algorithms without having to piss away time on an expensive scale-out cluster.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My notebook is WAY more powerful than the original Cray XMP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP
This is my sig.
This is by far a "supercomputer". State of the art (art notwithstanding) bleeding edge desktop? Perhaps. Unconventional? Not today. Overly expensive? For sure...
If you get any reputable PC mag I'm sure they have a modder section with some pretty far out PCs.
You're such a fanboy.
There's no programming model to get 4 TFLOPS in any usable program. Those supercomputers are built to support highly efficient programming exploiting their HW. Which get at least 5.99TFLOPS out of a theoretical 10TFLOPS. There's not going to be any SW getting even 2TFLOPS out of this jazzed-up PC. Especially since most of the GFLOPS are on the GPUs, which won't run general purpose apps. GPGPU is very limited, and not getting full efficiency out of parallel HW, either.
FWIW, the PS3 could actually get more of its HW potential, since its SPEs are much more programmable with generic DSP than are GPUs - though it's got only 150GFLOPS in HW, and delivers about 100GFLOPS on Linpack 4Kx4K. The PS3 RSX does 1.8TFLOPS theoretical max, but it's not available without a Sony developer license, and therefore not under Linux - and again, it's a GPU, not a CPU or even a DSP.
So this computer is just a casemodded PC. Not a supercomputer.
--
make install -not war
Tankor CRUSH other super computers!
You can put that noisy hot computer in a special ACed room which we would call, "The Computer Room" and have the monitor keyboard and mouses in the office, much like this picture
How is a few racks each packed with 80 1U servers, louder than a jet engine, requiring 500 MW of cooling, 30 miles of cable and a million LED's not sexy?
perhaps that just me...
Do you have a Citroen Saxo with blacked out windows, full bodykit and a wide exhaust? Yokohama shocks? Safe and sorted kicking ICE? Do you go larging it up down town on a Friday night? Hoping to get noticed by the orange birds in high heels, short skirts, silver handbags and hair extensions?
Stick Men
...Does it have enough juice to run Vista with all the bells and whistles turned on?
stuff |
How exactly does a more-or-less desktop PC with more-or-less mundane parts qualify as a supercomputer?
Is it about the transparent parts?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Put some extra egyptian hieroglyphs on the box and it will blend in
nicely with any Stargate film set. I wouldn't be surprised if some
marketing droid at Cray came up with the idea of transferring the
bad-ass high-powered alien technology meme onto the product.
What is a supercomputer these days anyway? I'd say it has to be something that meets a special need, because applications that bottleneck on CPU speed alone these days are few and far between. Sure, you can probably find a lot of algorithms that use 100% of a few dozen processors, but try running it on a cluster of hundreds or thousands and the problem size for an individual node becomes so small that the process becomes I/O bound.
I vote that to be classified as a supercomputer, a system needs to have something like a really fast network, disks that are both large and fast, and/or 64GB+ of memory for each CPU core. Putting all that together and actually making it work would be both expensive and difficult. If you just need lots of cores with a few GB of memory each, connected by GigE, and with a few dozen TB of 7200RPM disks, that's pretty much dirt-cheap COTS hardware that anyone can put together.