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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 $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory. This new supercomputer's peak performance of about 726 GFLOPS won't put it on the Top 500 supercomputer list, but that's not the point of the machine, SGI says. A key feature instead is the system's ease of use."
You could even go and buy Z80 compatible cores for US$ 0,95 each. That would get you more than 8000 cores for under 8K.
Can't use it for graphics... because all Linux versions running on the PS3 have no access to RSX, the Nvidia-sourced GPU.
I can't call that English
Picture here: http://www.ubergizmo.com/tags/octane-3
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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.
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Isn't this basically the failed business model that put them under the first time?
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.
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.
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:
So my suspicion was right, this isn't SGI, it's a server company banking on SGI's name.
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African or European?
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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.
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.
What will a home user do with an 80 core, 1TB RAM sysetm? Ray tracing?
Sometimes I need a giant mirrored ball as a pick me up when I'm down, or a photo-realistic digital recreation of a bowl of fruit. What's wrong with that?
Protein folding?
They're not going to fold themselves.
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I don't trust the NWS, though. I generally try to run my own weather models at home every morning before leaving for work. I have to do something with these petabytes of NASA satellite data.
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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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?
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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.
It not only can run Crysis, but it can run Crysis-on-Vista pretty well. with this supercomputer, maybe now 2009 can be the year Windows Vista will be ready for the desktop!
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