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Asus Releases Desktop-Sized Supercomputer
angry tapir writes "Asustek has unveiled its first supercomputer, the desktop computer-sized ESC 1000, which uses Nvidia graphics processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops. Asus's ESC 1000 comes with a 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 microprocessor designed for servers, along with 960 graphics processing cores from Nvidia inside three Tesla c1060 Computing Processors and one Quadro FX5800."
As a participant in the Milky Way and SETI projects for BOINC, I can say this development is impressive and would be a cruncher's dream come true. It would put supercomputing power in the hands of the everyman and allow applications that rely on distributed computing to take a leap forward.
The Tesla c1060 processor boards sound like a very efficient way of packing in compute power, but unless they're neglecting to mention it, the 4GB of GDDR3 RAM each has on board has no error correction. Given the rates of correctable errors observed e.g. here, I could never recommend using it for computing simulations that matter. A flipped bit in a floating point number can have a disproportionate affect on the outcome of calculations that rely upon it, and short of running the whole simulation a second or third time, one couldn't be confident that such an error did not occur.
Large compute-intensive simulations can take weeks, and are used to justify engineering and business decisions that involve the disposition of large amounts of money and other resources — it is important that the computational part of the process can be relied upon.
processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops.
So you're saying it's fast enough to run Windows 7, but forget Vista?
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This is :
http://helmer.sfe.se/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We've had over a teraflop of single precision available to consumers in graphics card form for a few years now; the newly released ATI 5870 actually has more than double that in a single chip. Soon the 5870 x2 (with double the performance again) will be out and you'll be able to have multiple of those in one PC.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
nice to have powerful machines. But what about the programming end ?
More specifically, can it run MATLAB or Octave and use all the flops for computations ?
I think its a known fact that most academia use MATLAB/Octave to do model creation/testing...
I work in military research in the UK, we've been building similar machines to this general spec (Xeon/Nehalem/Nvidia Teslas/loads of RAM) for a year of so now. This type of machine is pretty amazing for running our engineering codes; we've achieved a 30x speed up in some cases when compared to a regular high end desktop PC, running a variety of fluid dynamics codes.
Although it's not a high priority to my management, I personally think the power consumption of the Teslas when compared to regular super computers is the outstanding thing about them. It's like 110W Vs 30Kw! Not to mention they're very portable, and don't require much specialist cooling. You can literally have engineers with 2 terraflops sitting under their desks for £2000, and not have to spend >£30,000 on electricity per year.
Do such machines still make sense, or are we better off with a bunch of general purpose CPUs clustered together? How do they compare to Suns Niagara cpus that have umpteen hardware threads in them ?
They're equivalent to "a bunch of general purpose CPUs clustered together", depends on your code.
The PSU is only 1100W
Only? That's more juice than your microwave (~750 watts), toaster (~1kw), more like a space heater. This thing sucks electricity HARD. A Vaccuum cleaner is about 500-700 watts. I don't think my electric clothes dryer uses as much electricity as this thing, which is using ten times the juice a normal PC uses (or more).
I doubt you have a single appliance in your house that uses much more electricity than this, and those appliances, unlike a computer, don't run 24/7.
The pot growers use 650 watt lights. If you get one of these computers, expect to be raided by the DEA when the electric company narcs on you and the DEA sees the heat signature through your walls. They'll have a no-knock warrant, and you'll be lucky if they don't shoot you. They WILL have you face down on the ground with your hands cuffed behind your back. When they find it's a computer and not a pot growing operation, they'll just plant half a pound of dope and arrest you anyway.
That is, if you survive their entrance. Maybe this will be a good thing, when the DEA starts killing too many innocent people maybe we'll rethink our stupid, insane drug laws.
Wow. I started counting the number of low estimates in your post and lost track. 1200 Watt microwaves are a dime a dozen. Then we have the 1400 Watt toaster ovens, and 1500 Watt space heaters. And I'm NOT going out of my way to find high numbers... in fact, for every one of these, I quick found items that were considerably more power. We can keep going with your poor estimates: a 4000 Watt clothes dryer and the 180-200 Watt 3 GHz Pentium 4 computer. In fact, the only number you appear to be accurate on is the pot growing (according to Google. I don't like the smell).
So really, what everyone wants to know is: when did you start growing pot?
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
If they can call a custom desktop PC a supercomputer, because it has specs that used to be in the range of supercomputers, then my wristwatch is also a supercomputer.