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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."
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.
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.