Actually, I have spoken to Cray sales people and they would sell T3E's even larger than 2048 PE's but no one (that will own up to it...nsa may have one) has asked for them.
The T3E architecture scaling limits have not yet been met (spoke with a Cray tech that mentioned a 4096 PE order once).
One other thing that I would add is that all of the benchmarks that they used only used up to 8 processors... not exactly a fair comparison. The whole point of a T3E is to be scalable. I would like to see them try to scale a beowulf cluster up to 1024+ processors (it is not going to happen without some VERY specialized networking which would sort of defeat the purpose).
for a better comparison, one of the new SV1's (like Cris said) or even an older J90 series would be better.
Slashdot Mirror
take a look at the latest top500 list:
9 99&M=11
http://www.top500.org/lists/TOP500List.php3?Y=1
Cray is not dead just yet....
Comparing a beowulf cluster to a cray is just silly.
-nacks
Actually, I have spoken to Cray sales people and
they would sell T3E's even larger than 2048 PE's
but no one (that will own up to it...nsa may have
one) has asked for them.
The T3E architecture scaling limits have not yet
been met (spoke with a Cray tech that mentioned
a 4096 PE order once).
-nacks
One other thing that I would add is that all of
the benchmarks that they used only used up to
8 processors... not exactly a fair comparison.
The whole point of a T3E is to be scalable. I
would like to see them try to scale a beowulf
cluster up to 1024+ processors (it is not going
to happen without some VERY specialized networking
which would sort of defeat the purpose).
for a better comparison, one of the new SV1's
(like Cris said) or even an older J90 series would
be better.
-nacks
I was wondering the same thing. I found
the following site:
http://www.blacklablinux.com/
It deffinitly looks as though they will sell you
a cluster, but I was not able to find anything
on research.
I am betting that the cost/performance ratio for
PPC based machines is not low enough for groups to
really take a look just yet.
It would be nifty to see the appleseed project try
it out.
-nacks