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.
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.
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 $20K U.S. on a PC like that, hard drives would be in a separate case, RAID and connected via a SAN. They generate too much heat and vibration and need to be separate from the main electronics. Ditto for optical drives. Once you start moving up the food chain in computing, storage is usually a separate beast.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
FTA :"A further six months were spent on manufacturing a working prototype. The system was initially slated to use Intel's maligned V8 platform, but was later changed to the current Skulltrail - incorporating two quad-core CPUs natively running at 3.2GHz on a motherboard that supported four graphics cards - when the design became available.:
Since when is that a modern supercomputer?
Reminds me of the Badonkadonk land cruiser.
Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
The only thing any supercomputer has to do with that machine is that the vendor's tech director bought an old Cray:
I bet my P4/4.3GHz non-super computer is faster than that old Cray. And there's no way a single 2*4*x86+4*GPU PC is a supercomputer at all.
And that case is hella ugly.
--
make install -not war
It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) 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.
... 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]