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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?
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.
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.
No, but at least it can run Vista with most of the bells and whistles turned on.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
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.
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..
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
Power Cord (kit of 2) $110.00 Keyboard and Mouse $188.00 Yep...
SIG: HUP
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...
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.
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