Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cray's CX1 Desktop Supercomputer, Now For Sale

Posted by timothy on from the was-promised-is-here dept.

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."

8 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, so? by LibertineR · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I suspect Flash player will still kick it's ass.

  2. How well would for example... by rzei · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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..

    1. Re:How well would for example... by ducomputergeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Blender has made a lot of progress, but it is still way behind Maya and even Lightwave. I've not been using Blender in the past couple releases, but it used to have some issues on my Quad Core Power Mac and using more than 4GB of Ram. I think this has been addressed now though. But I've never run into the problem of RAM or processor speed being the problem, but video ram when modeling an object. I have created scenes that will even grind a decent 256MB video card into the ground. Sure, it would be nice to render a bit faster, but for $20 - $60 a month, I do as much rendering as I want at Respower.

      But let's look at cost. For $25k I can buy about 75 commodity boxes that are dual core, 2GB of Ram each & networking gear. That's about 150 Cores and 150GB of Ram. Put Linux on there and you can run ScreamerNet (you get to put the LW rendering engine on 999 machines per license) or one of a number of Maya distributed rendering programs. End result are going to be more frames being processed at one time. (for animation)

      If I went the Mac Mini route, that's about 40 Mac Minis, which is still 80 Cores, 80GB of Ram total and with ScreamerNet or Xgrid....

      Now the downsides are, 40 - 80 computers take up a lot of space and probably would eat up more power/cooling costs. But then again, if a couple boxes kick the bucket or hiccup, the other 35 - 75 are still processing. You only loose a percentage of total output.

      Where it maybe nice is for folks who are rendering a single frame, like for a large poster. The 64 cores would make quick work of most jobs, but for animation, you're better off going with with a farm.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    2. Re:How well would for example... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Well, this guy made a render farm with 6 core 2 quads (24 cores) for around $3.5k. It supposedly goes 186Gflops. It's a lot cheaper -- assuming you know what you're doing.

      Homemade render farm: http://helmer.sfe.se/

  3. Re:Desktop? Where's the notebook? by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    Even in the mid 90's, GHz processors, and gigs of RAM/hard disk were still largely uncommon. I think you're talking late 90's before that started to become relatively common.

    I continue to be stunned at what you can buy as an entry level box nowadays for a really cheap dollar amount. My local "white box" PC store will sell you a dual-core 5GHz (or whatever) 64-bit AMD machine for under $300 -- add a little RAM and disk space and you've got a helluva system for not very much money.

    How many home PCs nowadays have TB's of storage? I know several people who do -- I remember when home users didn't have gigabytes, terabytes would have been unimaginable.

    Cheers

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. Supercomputing is on demand, in the cloud by escherian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:You'll need one hell of a desk by mikael · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I remember seeing an HP server like that. On the left side was the large hard disk drive - on the right were the server processors - both kept off the floor but mounted into the frame where drawers would have been. On top of the desk was the monitor.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  6. Re:Gaming? by Glonoinha · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Raytracing is also very cluster friendly. One of my favorite cluster benchmarks / demos is showing how the Persistence of Vision Raytracer runs on a single node, two nodes, three, four ... (my cluster is only four nodes, so I don't know how well it scales after that.)

    For what it's worth, based on that benchmark my current cluster would have placed in the Top 100 in 1993.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer