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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 this is good design, then I do *not* want to see bad.
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.
..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.
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.
If I was spending $20K U.S. on a PC like that, hard drives would be in a separate case, RAID and connected via a SAN. They generate too much heat and vibration and need to be separate from the main electronics. Ditto for optical drives. Once you start moving up the food chain in computing, storage is usually a separate beast.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
FTA :"A further six months were spent on manufacturing a working prototype. The system was initially slated to use Intel's maligned V8 platform, but was later changed to the current Skulltrail - incorporating two quad-core CPUs natively running at 3.2GHz on a motherboard that supported four graphics cards - when the design became available.:
Since when is that a modern supercomputer?
Reminds me of the Badonkadonk land cruiser.
Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.
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The only thing any supercomputer has to do with that machine is that the vendor's tech director bought an old Cray:
I bet my P4/4.3GHz non-super computer is faster than that old Cray. And there's no way a single 2*4*x86+4*GPU PC is a supercomputer at all.
And that case is hella ugly.
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make install -not war
Why do supercomputers need to look sexy? XT3's look good, but, I mean that might be more of me loving what's inside, but that's another story for another post. Most supercomputers are kept in machine/server rooms, no? People don't normally see these things, so why does it matter if they look sexy? Decent is enough.
BTW, it's fugly:) (Ok, maybe not that bad, but I still don't like it).
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) 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.
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.
I took the editors' title of this story too literally.
Now this is a new concept in supercomputers.
... not until they invent the gigantic desk!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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]
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