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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."
How many pets would I have to eat to balance out the carbon footprint of this?
I've got a six-pack of kittens at the ready.
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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 real question of course is, what the "Windows Vista experience index" of this machine is. If it's anywhere below 5.5 it's obviously not worth the bother.
Ummm isn't this just a ridiculously powerful desktop computer rather than a super computer? The current 500th super computer on the top500 list is this machine which has a Rmax of 17 Tflops and an Rpeak of just over 37.6. Now its impressive that this desktop system has 1/37th of the power of the lowest machine on the super computer list... but does that really make it a super computer? Moore's Law says that it will take around 10 years for this desktop box to evolve to the power of that current bottom top500 box. So in other words its 10 years behind the performance of the current 500th best super computer.
If its because it hits 1 Tflops then in a few years time you'll have mobile phone "super computers" as Moore's Law is still moving onwards.
This is a very very fast desktop computer suited to certain simulation elements which are GPU intensive. Nice box, fast box.... but not a real modern super computer.
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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.
While I wouldn't choose to do my scientific computing on Windows, I know some people do, and those Tesla cards (which are providing the bulk of the processing power) really don't care which OS you're running.
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The PSU is only 1100W. It's not that intensive - three teslas are like three big graphics cards. 2 or 3 kittens would be sufficient, so you've got enough to share.
1100W? Can I eat my vacuum cleaner instead? Yummy.
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Pepper sauce? Pepper sauce?!? Do you have any idea what the carbon footprint of pepper sauce is? My brother ate pepper sauce once. He had to eat a whole zoo full of animals to make up for it! Stay away from the sauce!
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And you're saying this...why? Are you somehow convinced that these processors show up as general purpose CPUs? They don't. There is no conceivable reason something like this "needs" Windows. You're going to have specialized compilers generating specialized code that gets handed off to the GPUs. OS is mostly a non-issue.
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.
Nah - with such processing power, one might actually see a Windows machine perform properly! From boot to blue screen of death in mere milliseconds! Run your malware faster than ever! See clippy dance furiously across the screen in smooth 250 fps animation!
San somebody who has actually worked with such machines enlighten me about its performance on tasks that are not floating point intensive? Our simulations mainly push many,many objects around, with relatively little, or no floating point math in them.
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 ?
Complexity is a measure of our ignorance...
Yes indeed. Who in their right mind would run anything GPU-intensive on Windows? The platform is well known for having absolutely terrible video drivers. I hear that most manufacturers don't even support the platform, and just expect the community to write drivers!
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I was expecting it to be called the Eee-1. But EEE-niac would have been cool too.