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SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers"

Posted by Soulskill on from the hope-they-aren't-flops dept.

CWmike writes "They aren't selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn't too far off, as the costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use. Silicon Graphics International on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory. This new supercomputer's peak performance of about 726 GFLOPS won't put it on the Top 500 supercomputer list, but that's not the point of the machine, SGI says. A key feature instead is the system's ease of use."

13 of 303 comments (clear)

  1. Man... by muckracer · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those? :-)

    1. Re:Man... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of those? :-)

      Yes yes, but does it run Crysis?

    2. Re:Man... by cashman73 · · Score: 2, Funny

      One of these ought to be just enough to be able to run Windows Vista! ;-)

    3. Re:Man... by Amiralul · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes, but... does it runs Linux? Because it's official now, Linux is bloated, as Linus stated.

    4. Re:Man... by acsinc · · Score: 2, Funny

      Only on slashdot are computer viruses worse than nukes.

    5. Re:Man... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Funny

      how to make bad stuff like nukes, or worse a virus writers dream

      We geeks sure do have our priorities straight.

    6. Re:Man... by kimvette · · Score: 3, Funny

      It not only can run Crysis, but it can run Crysis-on-Vista pretty well. with this supercomputer, maybe now 2009 can be the year Windows Vista will be ready for the desktop!

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  2. Re:one swallow does not make a summer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    You need to get out more; one swallow sure makes a weekend.

  3. Re:Windows? by CarpetShark · · Score: 2, Funny

    Soooo, can you put Windows on it? *ducks*

    What do you think it's for?

  4. Re:PS3s by Sique · · Score: 4, Funny

    You could even go and buy Z80 compatible cores for US$ 0,95 each. That would get you more than 8000 cores for under 8K.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  5. they can keep up by Tim4444 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Aw crepe, if these become commonplace M$ might rewrite Windows using dot net, and of course Sun would write a knockoff in Java. By then Linux will have 8 different windowing toolkits necessary for the basic apps and 29 sound systems. Oh well, I guess it's back to 0x7C00...

  6. Re:one swallow does not make a summer... by oldspewey · · Score: 3, Funny

    African or European?

    --
    If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
  7. Re:Why? by malevolentjelly · · Score: 4, Funny

    What will a home user do with an 80 core, 1TB RAM sysetm? Ray tracing?

    Sometimes I need a giant mirrored ball as a pick me up when I'm down, or a photo-realistic digital recreation of a bowl of fruit. What's wrong with that?

    Protein folding?

    They're not going to fold themselves.

    Local weather prediction?

    I don't trust the NWS, though. I generally try to run my own weather models at home every morning before leaving for work. I have to do something with these petabytes of NASA satellite data.