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Cray's CX1 Desktop Supercomputer, Now For Sale
ocularb0b writes "Cray has announced the CX1 desktop supercomputer. Cray teamed with Microsoft and Intel to build the new machine that supports up to 8 nodes, a total of 64 cores and 64Gb of memory per node. CX1 can be ordered online with starting prices of $25K, and a choice of Linux or Windows HPC. This should be a pretty big deal for smaller schools and scientists waiting in line for time on the world's big computing centers, as well as 3D and VFX shops."
Will it get Crysis up over 15 fps?
It still can't play Crysis Maxed!
35 inches deep and weighing in at 136 lbs. fully loaded. My desktop would not be able to sustain that!
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
will it run Vista?
The question is, is it more "oxy" or "moron"?
I am officially gone from
Once the viruses get in, game over.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's my dick hitting the ceiling
Just wondering if this piece of machinery could really be used for gaming and therefore be the ultimate hardware for modern 3D shooters (for now)?
IANAGT - I am not a gamer though.
Those boxes are just blade systems with up to 8 blades with up to 2 quad core CPUs each, so a total of 64 cores per blade system. Certainly not not "64 cores per node" where Cray calls a blade a "node".
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
When they package this as a notebook or netbook (at an attractive price), I'll be interested.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Well, Microsoft had to do something to create demand for the next version of Windows. Not much of a market for an OS where people need to book time at their neighborhood super collider when they need to edit a document.
Probably makes one hell of a spam node too!
For $25k you could build a machine from 8 U1 servers with 10Gb ethernet or even Infiniband as the interconnect. And that includes the price of the rack and the switch.
Also worth noting is that even Microsoft can't get away from reality: HPC users want Linux.
Can I disable 63 cores and seriously downgrade one so I can use ZSnes to play FF6?
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Is there a reason microsoft would be the prefered OS for this type of machine? I would think the type of people requiring such hardware would be quite capable of running some kind of *nix OS to perform their operations and see the advantages in doing so, like a familiar OS. I imagine MS has invested a decent amount of cash to be the logo broadcasted on the cray site, is there a reason why they want this market? This seems like it would be a very niche market for them.
Perhaps to enhance their marketing, they can offer the computer in CrayOn colors (like Apple's iMac colors). Cray Gray, Big Iron Gray, Super Computing Gray, Gray, Gray Passion, etc..
Remember, you can order any color - as long as it is gray.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Just curious to see, you know, if it's ready for Vista yet.
Why do I get a 404 error when trying to configure my CX1? I'll just wait until Psystar comes out with a knockoff anyway.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Are 64 cores enough for a lot of complex biology and physics simulations? Seriously, if the protein folding experiments are any indication, wouldn't this just be a drop in the bucket of the power needed to crunch those simulations?
"I did a painstaking spec-by-spec comparison versus three roughly comparably-configured Mac machines, and came to the conclusion that the value it offers for price paid is not out of whack with the Mac world."
Yes, I'm making fun of this article: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/21/0132232
I suspect Flash player will still kick it's ass.
Now my SpamNation(tm) equipment can break CAPTCHAs faster than ever! Cray: dear friend I've been waiting for you
For example Blender's renderer's scale on a system like this? Of course something like MentalRay might scale easily but has anyone any hands on experience?
One might argue if you are throwing away $25,000 on a system like that you might use software that costs, but then again, Blender has made tremendous progress these last years..
Just a company that bought the name.
I guess the MS execs want to avoid another "suitable for Vista" debacle :-)
I bet it will still take a bloody week to boot..
Insert
I suppose this is good news for those that don't want to get their hands dirty building their own cluster. You could just network several servers together and simply install Rocks or UniCluster or any number of other cluster packages.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yawn. Lame. This isn't even close to the high density, high performance machines from my friends at SiCortex. If you're a serious player in HPC-land, the SiCortex machines have you salivating. I'm not trying to sound like an advertisement but they're simply awesome machines. Up to 5832 64-bit MIPS processors running Linux in a relatively small footprint. I don't have a direct connection to the company but I've worked closely with them in the past and it's the real deal. Check it out - SiCortex.com
XP was Windows 2000 with a new theme and some bundled software. Even now about the only software I run into that has trouble on Windows 2000 is software that specifically checks for the OS it's running on and refuses to run on anything less than XP.
It was NT4.0 where Microsoft really worked over NT, culling subsystems and doing things like putting GDI in the kernel to let it run games at the cost of stability.
Cray Research merged with SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) in February 1996. In August 1999, SGI created a separate Cray Research business unit to focus exclusively on the unique requirements of high-end supercomputing customers. Assets of this business unit were sold to Tera Computer Company in March 2000.
Tera Computer Company was founded in 1987 in Washington, DC, and moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1988. Tera began software development for the Multithreaded Architecture (MTA) systems that year and hardware design commenced in 1991. The Cray MTA-2â system provides scalable shared memory, in which every processor has equal access to every memory location, greatly simplifying programming because it eliminates concerns about the layout of memory.
The company completed its initial public offering in 1995 (TERA on the NASDAQ stock exchange), and soon after received its first order for the MTA from the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The multiprocessor system was accepted by the center in 1998, and has since been upgraded to eight processors.
Upon the merger with the Cray Research division of SGI in 2000, the company was renamed Cray Inc. and the ticker symbol was changed to CRAY.
I worked for one of the bigger pharmas for awhile in R&D, and I think something like this could find its way onto the desk of every top scientist in the division. I know some of the divas would ask for two... and they would get it without ${EMPLOYER} even blinking.
Seriously, for a tech/geek site, not understanding the difference between "b" and "B" is disappointing. Who runs this place?
There's two relevant ways to parse that fragment. There's one where the "and" in "64 cores and 64G of memory per node" creates a single coordinated constituent, such that it can be paraphrased as "there are 64 cores per node and there are 64 Gb per node." There's a second, the one that I think you favor and that seems correct pragmatically, which may be paraphrased as "there are 64 total cores, and each node in the machine can have 64 Gb."
Structural ambiguity happens all the time in natural language.
Since my "Visualization" system priced out at $13,000+, I'll need to wait for that lottery win before buying.
On a more serious note, I can see a system like this being a huge boon with regards to 3D and video production... makes me salivate. And at such a low five-figure price, it's nice to see something that's within the reach of most professional studios and artists. If this is the 2008 model and price, where could we be by 2010? 2015?
Now, where did I leave those garbage bags full of returnable bottles....?
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
that is 62 kg
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
And you can play Crysis on it too.
No, it's not Top 500-class HPC, but Skulltrail (or a roomful of Skulltrails) seems a better use of teaching dollars than a Cray.
Power Cord (kit of 2) $110.00 Keyboard and Mouse $188.00 Yep...
SIG: HUP
With this new computer, you can:
Send email if you are not John McCain.
Calculate the value of Pi farther than anyone cares really.
Run Vista and Crysis - but not at the same time.
Set up a self aware VM cluster....
Create your own spam botnet
Heat your computer room
Be the coolest guy at the next flashmob computing meet
or... you could .... Watch pr0n
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Sixty replies, and still no wonder has speculated on the possibility of a Beowulf cluster? Changed days...
Seriously - is this a slow news day or what? It's a blade server-in-a-box. BT,DT, nothing new(and actually quite overpriced for what it is). The OP obviously didn't understand what they were looking at, and neither did the person who okayed this as being newsworthy.
Not interested. If I want x86, I'll build it myself, or buy it from Steve Jobs.
That's 9 stone 8 lbs
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As a side note, Cray has always had a flair for designing machines that are not only powerful but also have design the conveys this power.
I wouldn't mind having a box like that. I'd wait 'til it runs something else than MS though.
But the real question is, can it run Vista with Aero Glass on?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
But... does it come oil cooled? The most expenstive one that I was able to configure was $135,812.00. That seems quite cheap.
That thing looks mean! I'd pay 25k to be the only person in the office with one of those.
No sig today...
According to the cray website, each CX1 node can have at most 8GB of RAM, not 64GB as stated in the original slashdot post. You can have at most 8 nodes/blades, so the CX1 can have a total of 64GB of RAM across all nodes, which is pretty thin on memory for a supercomputer.
There's no need to buy a Ferrari if you use it twice a year, just rent it. Most of the supercomputing locations where I worked at are very shy about their occupation rates. I think it is probably very low except at very active universities. All other places are wating their money buying hardware which will become useless while is not used. See Powua http://www.powua.com/ as a general implementation or PurePowua http://www.purepowua.com/ as a more specialized one, in this case XSI rendering.
When you mentioned this, I started Googling around but couldn't find any sources for them. Got any favorites?
Not interested. If I want one of Intel's car-wreck processor designs I'll get an iApx432. At least that one's historically interesting.
Is it really true that there are scientists waiting on supercomputer time? Especially for machines of this size, I thought there were spare supercomputer cycles out the wazooo looking for use....and that shared resource machines were taking on pretty lousy proposals for use of their time just to keep their utilization stats up...
This may not be true of the really big machines...but this is not one of them...
Doesn't having Vista on it automatically take it out of the "supercomputer" category?
They charge $188 for the keyboard and mouse. I think we're seeing the "Cray Tax" (TM).
;)
Apple has so much to learn
887321 = 337*2633
Their current line of datacenter supercomputers is still based on Opteron rather than Xeon.
I wonder if they will move all their new products to Intel processors.
So if you buy a CX1, you can install Linux on it yourself, but you do need to pay the Microsoft tax. You cannot buy it with Linux preinstalled. The Computer World article merely mentions that Windows HPC "interoperates with Linux", whatever that means. I did not have the time to read all those other linked articles.
http://hackaday.com/2008/04/23/24-core-ikea-cluster/
A pretty "vanilla" small cluster, in a desk-side box, for about double the market price.
So what?
There are at least 3 other companies making a similar product for quite a while.
Sure, they do not have "Cray" logos on them.
Nor do they cost as much.
Better look at those power requirements too.
When fully populated, 4 x 1600W PSUs.
Assuming 65% efficiency ( redundant PSUs never get close the the "80+" efficiency)
this will draw about 9800 watts.
Assuming 120V typical outlets, this is 82 amps of current.
I doubt many office will have the needed current
and wall outlets.
You will need 4 x 20 amp circuits!
I Hope that same office has really good air conditioning too..
"Computers are devices that consume electricity so to generate heat. As a side effect they perform some calculations"
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Note that this is $25K for chassis. To get a machine with 8 nodes is over $80K.
The good news is that you CAN make a Beowulf cluster of these. Microsoft played its usual game of requiring that other OS options not be mentioned at the introduction, and Cray was only too happy to take advantage of the press coverage. But this is really "man-bites-dog" oddity story: Cray expects that most customers will run actually Linux.
There is nothing magic about the machine, so main-stream Linux distributions work. To put it another way, this is like the Ferrari laptop: It's a famous exotic brand attached a higher-end mainstream machine with a nice case, carrying a premium (super-premium!) price. Some sites will buy one to say that they "have a Cray". But I don't see the existing HPC market, notorious for squeezing vendors for the last few points of margin, buying them by the room full.
Just because it's expensive generally and for good reason with loads of top of the range, top spec components, doesn't justify charging an equally high cost for mouse, keyboard and power cables!
They've just upped the price based on a general PC:Cray ratio.
Power Cord (kit of 2) £62.00
Keyboard and Mouse £106.00
this thing was posted on 9/16 to slashdot. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/16/1624235
In Korea, only old people use desktop supercomputers.
Very interesting. I think its good for schools who need small super computers affordably. I imagine the fact that it uses the Data Center edition of Windows Server 2008 is an advantage in some ways but also a huge disadvantage. I mean most people who have need for a supercomputer are probably not going to want to be using windows. LOL, thats like Having a brand new high performance BMW M5 but having it fitted with a clown car body with polka dots and neon lights. :)
I'm just wondering... what is the price to license Windows HPC on 64 cores? Is the Linux version cheaper?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I just wonder if a collection of PS3's with its very good Cell processor running YD Linux or a bunch of cheap quad core PC's could not be configured more affordably. It would not have the management features of a cray which obviously will have "cadillac" level features for managability and redundancy not to mention internal bandwidth and buses that are far more efficient than a linux cluster. Still, in terms of bang for the buck I wonder if the two ideas I propose wouldn't be a better idea for a small supercomputer system. For that matter, especially considering that this cray ships with lipstick on a pig (ie Windows).
I'll say, I'd never heard of "Britian" and their quaint measurements (like Imperial but minus two pounds).
Slashdot covered this last month
I just configured a few at their site and I got:
Cheapest: $12K for
- 1x 2.5Ghz quad-core
- 2G memory
- 80G 7200RPM SATA
Most Expensive: $82k for
- 16x 3.0GHz quad-core (64 cores)
- 256G memory (4G/core)
- 80G 7200RPM SATA (I do CPU-bound HPC, so I don't care about the HD)
The cheap one is obviously a joke, but the expensive one is twice the memory/core that the latest stable machines I've been building have. Of course, $82K is about twice what I'm paying for a 64 core/128G ram COTS cluster, so I could still just buy myself a 128 core/256G ram COTS cluster for that price and just use half the CPUs when I needed more memory/core.
The do, of course, have a advantage on physical space (my 64/128 cluster is 16 8"x8"x12" boxes), but our real bottleneck is power, not physical space. It looks like they have a 1600W power supply and you need 2 for the non-redundant configuration. They're rated at 92% efficiency, so that 1600*2/.92/64cores = about 54 watts per core. My cluster has a measured power draw of 38W/core when all cores are running at full throttle. I'm guessing their box probably doesn't draw the full 3200W at full load, so we're about the same. My solution still wins.
Boxx computers are selling machines with 4 cpu slots. Every server chip has 4 cores. Thats 16 cores in a machine that isn't event worthy of mention of Slashdot. This Cray sounds like a half decent render farm, so what ? Write back when Intel has finally manufactured 128 cores on one chip. Now that would be newsworthy.
That power cable is probably OEMd from Monster.
But seriously, big power cables are expensive just due the price of copper. I just bought components for custom cables that I'll have built inhouse and 100ft of 30A cable are well over $200.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I don't see any reason to go with something like this over HP blades, for instance. The price point is average at best and apparently no room for the quad core cpu. Does it support more than 32 Gb RAM per blade? Just get a nice blade system (HP/IBM) and a nice workstation for your visualization. What tool wants to run Windows on something like that, anyway? It's like putting a four banger in a Corvette.
Buy a mess of PS3's, cluster them and you will have a cheap number crunching data center. I recall reading an article here about some scientist that did this and it worked very well.
fortune -m Cray
%% (fortunes)
Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks?
"Is it PC compatible?"
Stick Men
In the end, its really just yet another x86 blade chassis.
This is a bit expensive, but pretty much on par, cost-wise, to solutions from Sun and Dell. I don't see many small businesses choosing these, but I don't see many small businesses going with a blade chassis anyway. Personally, I just don't see the business sense in chassis servers, since they don't save that much power, don't save that much space, require specialty parts which are hard to obtain and expensive to replace, offer little to no advantage for management, and cost a lot more money. For me, this chassis (fully loaded) would cost $25k more than my current configuration (equally configured).
Do people still think you have to wait in line for a time slice on a computer anymore?
I'm sorry, but if you "scientists" can't find compute time somewhere, you've got bigger problems.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
This is just a blade server with a big expensive name like Nike slapped on the side. Dress it up in a fancy deskside chassis you still get a noisemonster(as blade servers are NORTORIOUSLY loud). They remark it as quiet, but I'd have to hear that to believe.
The only good thing I guess is that they offer a video blade with up to a quadro 5600, but that's just a G80 90nm based 8800GTX ultra class card.
For the money I spend on that $25k setup, I could spend it on Supermicro blades and get ~5 very well loaded dual Xeon blade servers in 7U, get good power supply redundancy, and get it in a rolling cage.
These days every big company has some sort of blade offering, some with a small 'desktop' versions. HP even has one that compares to this. But this is HARDLY a "Cray supercomputer" at your desk. Just a mini Blade chassis. You would have to create the beowulf cluster yourself, and buy the big expensive IB switch setup to get some high end throughput.
By all means, if you have an extra $50k or $75k burning a hole in your pocket, buy one to get that big "cray" name. Just know you could be a lot more frugal with your money if you were looking for a lot of processing power in a small form factor.
What the hell ? What's wrong with a kettle lead from Tandy ? ;-)
By definiton a supercomputer is a computer within order of magnitude of the world's fastest computer. Last year's model dont count.
Not obligatory, MANDATORY!
-
Yeah, but it's a wireless keyboard and mouse. But even then at that price I expect them to work without batteries and just use the electromagnetic radiation of the box for power and communication.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Anybody got the specs on ray traced quake? I imagine it would be fully playable!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
decade after decade. Eventually that we can afford one (well, almost) its specs looks pretty much like those of the IT equipment of Mom and Pop's Grocery Store - Intel something running Windows something.
Oh well... ;-)
Anybody knows if the same disappointment will likely occur with an Antonov?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-124
Is there a One Cray per Child Program?
Achille Talon
Hop!
if we make a beowulf cluster out of these!
I add it to my collection of oxymorons.
This is several years older then that and seems to be more advanced considering it was designed before the core and core 2 chips came out. http://boxxtech.com/Products/APEXX/apexx8_overview.asp Why didn't it get all the hype that is going for this Cray?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
it says it runs windows.
TFA unlike the TFS says it only comes with Microsoft Windows and only "interoperates" with Linux.
As for me, I welcome our new CX1 botnet member overlords!
Will it play World of Warcraft?
I can only assume there was a point behind the repost of the same cx1 article (some time ago as well), but i fail to see it.
However, back then I had a good long look at it, and I fail to really see the benefit over any other blade system really, be it a dell, hp, IBM or the absolutely spanking egenera.
That point aside, anyone who's worked in the industry with infiniband knows why alot of the silicon makers aligned with it have abandoned it. It really is a painful tech, that works in some very very select corner cases (tds ramsan for example uses it to good advantage). Infiniband really is one of the big un-kept promises in the IT realm.
/me cries.
Oh man, That thing would run SWEET with BOINC.
Would get my boinc points up!