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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."
Wouldn't most people who would NEED a supercomputer be able to build one much more cheaply using a dozen workstations? It's hard to see how this SGI system might be sold (except perhaps as a replacement for an overburdened business-office server).
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
We'll I think there may very well be a downside to that. As this stuff gets cheaper, the ability for just anybody to figure out problems increases, and that problem could be how to make bad stuff like nukes, or worse a virus writers dream. Hey, five more years and this will be under $2,000 in the sweet spot possibly. Anyhow, I want one, but maybe they need to only let people run them that have passed a basic test on driving a computer.
forgot the source : http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1024278/linux-petitioners-sony-ps3-graphical-innards/ sry
I can't call that English
nah. What put the boot into SGI systems was their premature jump to Intel Itanium processors. We (the CG industry) had been quite happy spending lots of cash for these pretty blue machines with Mips processors, and then one day Sgi declared they were dropping mips for Intel Itanium CPU's. The Itanium then had problems, and so SGi hastily crapped out a new mips CPU on their Fuel workstations. We didn't buy them, because we were waiting for the Itanium ones. So they switched to Intel Xeon CPU's running NT, and we didn't buy them, because as we know, the Itanium hit problems, and a dell workstation running linux was a cheaper option. Over the course of a couple of years Sgi machines literally vanished from the Cg industry.
Then to make matters worse, most of the engineers from the graphics dept of Sgi jumped ship, and all went to join Nvidia (Mark Kilgard et al). The comsumer grade Geforce cards had better OpenGL support + features than an Sgi unit at a fraction of the cost.
This is probably the only realistic comparison you can make between SGI and Apple. Apple (having seen a computer company crash and burn due to a switch to Intel) must have studied what went wrong with Sgi, and made damn sure they didn't repeat the same mistakes.... If Sgi had managed the transition as well as Apple, it would still be a powerhouse in the industry.
This just in: Dual-socket workstations are cheaper than high-end desktop blade enclosures with up to 960GB RAM. Who knew?
As someone who has a whole Sun Enterprise 5500 rack in his room, There is indeed a great difference between server class hardware and commodity gear, where shall we start.
Multiple power supplies, varied in number depending on your load out but hot swappable and configured as such that 1-2 of them can die before your system goes down. Along with diagnostic interface and usually visible indicators going 'part failure, replace asap'.
Same with cpus, hot swappable cpu/memory boards are a must, so long as a single cpu remains functioning the system should still run albeit at a lower capacity.
While I've already mentioned psu redundancy, the AC power outlets it uses would usually have redundancy also, with two separate connections to different circuits or ups etc.
Anyway, no commodity hardware does this, only high end, high availability stuff has this, and you will pay through the nose for it. If this octane has these features, it is very cheap for what it is.
Then again, I'm buying up Marvel SheevePlugs as fast as I can afford 'em. With built-in 1000TX networking and a Kingston SOC chip delivering approximately the same performance as a 1GHz Intel CPU, I figure I can network 'em together and have a scalable (Beowulf) supercomputer for a lot less money and only a modest investment in elbow-grease. The uBoot environment is already smart enough for TFTP boot and root over NFS (which is how IBM does the magic, IIRC). All I need is a monotasking kernel to serve to my nodes and I'm in business. For now, I'll settle for the standard Linux 2.6 kernel and take the modest performance hit.
that was known, internally as the WBT (wintel box thing).
I kid you not.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Or an IBM Bladecenter , where you have a choice between Intel, P6 and Cell (PS3's processor) Processor Blades (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/index.html) Not a lot cheaper than the SGI solution but more value for money in my opinion.
Just curious (I'm honestly not trolling!): you mention that using Linux workstations was cheaper than SGIs. But were they capable of replacing the SGIs? As far as I remember, it was hard to find and configure a decent 2D card for use in Linux back then (1998-1999), and OpenGL support wasn't mature enough for professional use (at least in my opinion). And software support... well, don't know much about SGI's software, but given the current state of Linux software support, I doubt that Linux had anything comparable to (presumably) mature SGI offerings. Could you please elaborate on those topics?
Coding etudes
I read TFA, apologies if I missed it, but, what operating system does it run? Please, for the love of all that is good, let the answer NOT be IRIX.
An Nvidia Tesla has 240 cores at 1.3GHz for about $1300. You can put four of these in a system, lets say the base system would cost $1000. You could get eight systems loaded with 4 Tesla cards each for $49600 and possibly have enough left over to get a 10gbE switch. It would total 7680 cores, pretty close to your 8000 core idea. Except this one would actually work, where as there would be a tremendous amount of additional components necessary to get 8000 Z80s to communicate with one another, cheapest being a very long and slow token ring.
(yes, I get your point, number of cores is a poor metric)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
As has been said before, both on this site and elsewhere, for the first few thousand years of human existence, the extermination of humanity was well out of reach of everyone. As technology advanced it became possible for a group of people, working together, to develop a technology for mass destruction (the specific tech often referenced is nukes). Eventually, the group of people became smaller and smaller (theoretically, larger groups of people won't let each other actually use such weapons.
The first European explorers to come to the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries killed 90% of all humans in Central Amercia, and 95% of all humans in North America, without even trying. Modern technologies for mass destruction can't compete with the wooden boat.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.