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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 I was spending $20K U.S. on a PC like that, hard drives would be in a separate case, RAID and connected via a SAN. They generate too much heat and vibration and need to be separate from the main electronics. Ditto for optical drives. Once you start moving up the food chain in computing, storage is usually a separate beast.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
SiCortex was at Supercomputing this last year and they also have a desktop supercomputer.
In my opinion, it also looks a heck of a lot better than the cylone: http://sicortex.com/
It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) 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.
I took the editors' title of this story too literally.
Now this is a new concept in supercomputers.
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.
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make install -not war