SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers"

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."

Comments

Re:PS3s

[GerardAtJob]

Can't use it for graphics... because all Linux versions running on the PS3 have no access to RSX, the Nvidia-sourced GPU.

Picture

[TechForensics]

Picture here: http://www.ubergizmo.com/tags/octane-3

Holy Bad Marketing Batman

[damn_registrars]

Who was the idiot who thought that it would be a good idea to call this the "Octane III"? This has almost no resemblance to the SGI Octane systems of that past, which were graphics workstations running Irix with MIPS processors. I think the only thing that makes them similar is the price range.

This goes right up there with Honda constantly recycling their product names; passport, odyssey, pilot, and more recently insight.

Re:PS3s

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you only need a single dual-socket board, that is obviously a superior choice. Most of the 8k price on the base model is paying for the hardware you have the option to add, not the hardware you are getting.

Assuming you actually need one of the higher end configurations, though, the mac pro isn't going to cut it. A mac pro supports 2 quad core xeons. This SGI box supports 20 quad core xeons in a box of roughly equivalent size. Not to mention that each node on the SGI box supports 3 times as much RAM as the mac pro. Not playing the same game.

That said, the two other configurations they offer (see here) seem much less useful. The "intel 2-way" configuration gives you up to 20 xeons and 960GB of RAM. That is pretty impressive power for a box of the size. The "Intel 1-way" is based on dual-core Atoms. 2GB max of RAM per node and the extremely feeble Atom seems like a very odd choice. 19 Atoms in a box of that size is pretty blah density, and for most applications you'd probably have a faster, cheaper, and easier time with a basic quad-socket board running processors that weren't designed for netbooks. The "Graphics workstation" configuration is a single dual socket workstation board. Lots of PCIe slots; but probably not worth SGI's price for a basic workstation level performance.

Re:PS3s

[je ne sais quoi]

You make some good points, the point I was trying to make is that if you're looking for a just a few nodes, that $8k price tag for the initial node is pretty steep. I noticed in TFA though that:

An Octane III with a 10 dual socket, four cores, Xeon L5520 processors, for 80 cores, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit Ethernet networking is priced at about $53,000.

This is actually a decent price for an 80 core system that's preconfigured. You wouldn't want to make a 10 node cluster of mac pros, you could do it easily, in fact my older system is essentially that, a bunch of independent nodes strung together over ethernet and sharing the home directory. You really don't get good scaling over the gigabit ethernet though, as least for what we're doing, so it's pretty pointless to go to more than a few nodes that way. I also noticed this as well:

Silicon Graphics was an independent company until May of last year, when it was acquired for $42.5 million by Rackable Systems Inc. Rackable subsequently changed the name of the combined companies to Silicon Graphics International Corp.

So my suspicion was right, this isn't SGI, it's a server company banking on SGI's name.