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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.
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
"supports up to 8 nodes, a total of 64 cores and 64Gb of memory per node"
8 [nodes] x (2 [cpu] * 4 [cores]) = 64 total cores.
I do not see where it says 64 cores per node.
Not even close. The heavy lifting for 3D games is done on the GPU, and I'm not aware of any games (except perhaps games that utilize multiple monitors, like flight simulators) that can make use of more than one GPU.
So a single game could potentially drive many monitors, but not do more visually on a single display.
However, this thing could do some amazing real-time raytracing, but again, no games have been designed for such hardware yet.
Better known as 318230.
Or you could just buy the Cray for the same price and forget about the extra overhead of 8 separate boxes.
BTW, you can also order these from the factory with RHEL.
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.
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.
I suspect Flash player will still kick it's ass.
Yes, but it's easier if just you hit the "Turbo" button.
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.
A number of modern games can make use of 2+ cores, but 8 isn't going to happen with any efficiency. Note also that this is a cluster in a single box -- those 8 nodes are each different computers on a very fast local network. That means a different OS image per node, and each process on its own node. For lots of supercomputing applications, this is the norm -- each node does its share of the work and they talk over the network. But no games support this; they all expect to run on a single computer.
Also, for gaming performance, I imagine you'd want dual graphics cards -- which this box doesn't support. (It does include "visualization node" options, which have a single Quadro FX card each.)
Still, for something like a desktop render farm, this might make sense -- except I imagine the customers for such would be more interested in options with better price/performance.
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.
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.
A modification to an engine (this has already been done to quake 3 and 4) to use raytracing, would lend itself well to this hardware. Raytracing is very SMP-friendly.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
that is 62 kg
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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
Actually, you can configure the Cray CX-1 with "visualization nodes" that contain GPUs, not just CPUs.
Power Cord (kit of 2) $110.00 Keyboard and Mouse $188.00 Yep...
SIG: HUP
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
That's 9 stone 8 lbs
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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
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.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
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
Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.
.
The real-world hardware requirements for a Windows OS have always been those of a mid-priced system at the time of its release.
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
I have never understood the Geek's obsession with RAM.
You would think he had been raised under the warm glow of a vacuum tube and threaded core for his Mom as a child.
The 8 GB 64 Bit Vista Premium Quad Core PC at Walmart.com starts at $1000.
For $1500 you can have it all: 64-Bit Vista, 8 GB RAM, the quad core CPU, Blu-Ray, HDTV, the 1 GB NVIDIA DX10 card, 1 TB of storage, etc, etc, etc.
Tech that was no more available in W2k's prime than a flying car - except perhaps to the Dot.com billionaire who sold out before the bust.
with all the sloppy inefficient programming, feature bloat, and generally craptastic work that goes into the ongoing, illogical, disuseful, nightmare that is MS Word
Current versions of MS Office and Office components hold 8 of the top 25 Business Software slots at Amazon.com.
Office Home & Student for Windows and the Mac are 1 & 2 overall.
It has become a geek mob sport to flood Amazon.com with negative reviews - to no effect whatever on sales.
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
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.