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."

Comments

Bad Childish Design

[Iskender]

If this is good design, then I do *not* want to see bad.

Not by any means a 'supercomputer'

[Junta]

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.

That's Just a Casemodded PC, Not a Supercomputer

[Doc Ruby]

That's not a supercomputer at all. It's just a casemodded,liquid cooled, 2-x86 CPU PC with 4 graphics cards:

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.

The only thing any supercomputer has to do with that machine is that the vendor's tech director bought an old Cray:

A little-known fact is that Armari's technical director, Dan Goldsmith, being the eccentric chap he is, bought a decommissioned Cray supercomputer - used in the Cold War - a while back. Cray's extra-large computers (by today's standards) required some serious cooling, as you would expect, and Cray engineered some class-leading liquid cooling to keep the voluminous beast operating within tolerances.

Dan has used the inspiration from Cray's research, and indeed the coolant itself, which works in a temperature-range of -110C through to 90C, as a base for the XCP (eXtreme Concept Prototype) - the total immersion model.

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.

Piece of shit

[Aaron Isotton]

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.