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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."
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.
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)
it says it runs windows. that's just what the herders need, a few crays in their herd.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
Vista's MINIMUM memory requirement is 512 megs.
Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.
Personally, I don't find Vista any more useful than Win2k. More stable, yes, but I don't see how upping the RAM req by an order of magnitude was required to make Win2k more stable. All it needed was better programming and better testing.
I think what we have going now is the kind of thing that happened when gas was cheap: SUVs. When gas is expensive (viz Europe and Japan) the average car gets Really Small and Efficient. When RAM was really expensive, programming was tight and efficient. Now that RAM is measured in gigs and drives in terabytes, there is no incentive to do efficient programming or wrangle in feature creep and bloatware.
Eventually we will hit some physical / cost limit on RAM, and then good programming will become a requirement. OF course, by then, there won't be anyone left who knows how to do that...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack. And I bought it cheap.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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
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.
I know you're being facetious, but the limiting factor in the output of a bot on a botnet is its connection speed, not its processing power. A '486 can saturate a 10mbit connection without taking a severe performance hit. Seeing as most of us don't quite have gigabit internet connections at home, this thing wouldn't be any more valuable to a herder than your neighbour's $500 laptop.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Feature bloat for sure, but how do you know it's sloppily and inefficiently programmed? Have you seen the source? From what I recall of people commenting on leaked Microsoft code the quality was generally considered pretty good.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
He could use it to crack passwords or something.. lots of processors and memory is pretty handy for that
which is totally what she said
Have you tried running windows vista with 512MB RAM?
Yes, it's a shame that this time-honored tradition of good programming will be lost to humanity. Back in the days, when people still knew how to program ...
That's called "progress". When was the last time any large program was written in assembly language for a modern processor?
Even though I'm old, I'm still too young to have really experienced the kind of memory budgets that required people to fit BASIC interpreters in 4k of memory, with enough space left over so programmers could actually program something with it. My first substantial programming experience was on an Apple ][ with 32k of memory.
It's definitely a mixed blessing, but given that the smallest component of development cost is writing new code and the largest is maintenance, it is easy to see why things have gone the way they have.