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:$8000 for a single processor

[LoRdTAW]

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.

80 cores, 1TB of memory, and you got modded up?

[SuperBanana]

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.