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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."
It's UGLY !!! And GRAY !!!
That's no SGI.
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Isn't this basically the failed business model that put them under the first time?
You forget service and support! Sun will make sure that for the serviceable life of your machine they will have replacement parts on hand and technical support for your machine. Imagine a commodity system looses a motherboard, will you be able to get the exact one three years down the line? And with pretty much every board maker located in Taiwan will they give you proper tech support in a timely manor? Will they ensure you get matching memory and CPU's? That's the other strong point of server class hard ware that is thoroughly supported by the vendor.
Adding to the PP: The overhead and redundant hardware involved in dozens of networked machines would also mean that, to achieve equivalent performance, you'd likely be using twice the power if not more (you might save a little if you rack them with a single PSU for the whole rack, but it's still going to use a substantially greater amount of power).
My home PC (a state of the art gaming PC as of January 2007), discounting the monitor, uses around 360 kilowatts at peak load (running one CPU and one GPU copy of Folding@Home while copying between the various disks to keep them spun up). Of that, only around 60-70 watts is the CPU, call it an even 80 once you add the memory. The GPU, motherboard, hard disks, and power supply losses eat up a lot of the rest.
If you need 80 cores worth of processing power with frequent interprocess communication, you'll need an 80 core machine, or 100-200 cores split across multiple machines. If we assume eight cores per machine, and 16 machines, if they have even half the power overhead of my machine that's going to run an additional 140 watts per box, or an additional cost of 2240 watts. Over the course of one month, that's roughly 1600 kilowatt/hours of overhead, or about $250-350 dollars of power. Every month. For the entire life of the machine (assume 10 years for a corporate or research box), that's around $36000 (remember, that's on top of the cost of the single box super computer). And that's before you factor in the cost of *cooling* the additional heat produced by the additional machines.
Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to the networked supercomputer design (redundancy and failover, the cheaper components mentioned, etc.). But there is also a place for the all-in-one super computer.
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I've seen the term 'personal supercomputer' so many times over the past 20 years. It's just baloney marketing. What you have on your desktop RIGHT NOW is more capable than some of the original CDC machines. So what?
What you have on your desktop RIGHT NOW is most likely more powerful than the Cray Y-MP by a factor of three, if you've got a quad-core Core2 Duo; those babies push +1Gflop.
It's also 1/50th to 1/100th as capable as this supercomputer (or more- I don't know the relative performance between a current desktop processor and current Xeon.) Yes, it's relative, and relatively speaking, this is most certainly a supercomputer. In terms of memory, the maximum amount of ram you can put into a consumer-available motherboard is around 64GB, maybe 128. This has a maximum of 10 times that.
80 xeon cores, 1TB of memory, and you call it a "marketing ploy"? And you got modded up "insightful"? May the hand of metamoderation come on down from high.
Please help metamoderate.