Posted on 09/19/2008 8:25:20 AM PDT by zeugma
C'mon, who here doesn't want their very own supercomputer to do, um, whatever they want with? In an effort to make sure every man, woman and child has an absurdly powerful number cruncher in their home (let's go with OSPP, or One Supercomputer Per Person), Microsoft has tag-teamed with the fabled Cray in order to "drive high productivity computing into the mainstream." The Cray CX1 Supercomputer comes loaded with Windows HPC Server 2008 and incorporates up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon CPUs (dual- or quad-core); additionally, it boasts up to 4TB of internal storage, 64GB of memory per node and interoperates nicely with Linux. The CX1 is said to be the most affordable supercomputer offered by Cray (not to mention the "world's highest-performing computer that uses standard office power"), but it'll still run you anywhere between $25,000 to well over $60,000. Chump change, right?
Holy cow, that is alot of processing power — would certainly make the power company happy when you pay your bill -— :-) -— my little quad-core Intel can handle anything I can throw at it -— so far anyway :-)
I bet that BSOD comes up really, really fast on a supercomputer!
HAHAHA. You rock!
IMHO, a better response to Michelle’s “Does this dress make me look fat?”
“Why are you asking?”
they will cost 3k in a few years and Ill buy one
Cool toy ping.
I can see where this would appeal to small and mid-size businesses in certain industries.
A good rack of these plus a couple of large pipes to multiple networks ought to run FR quite well.
Tech ping!
In a few years Windows will have consumed all its processing power and memory. You’ll need a bigger machine to run Windows by then.
Only the dumb ones.
At that price, rounding up a few of these would make for some impressive stats on any one of the grid-computing networks, whether it’s SETI@home, or one of the folding grids.
Wow! Is it ever overpriced!
Only 16 cores, and it's $25K??? Well, I suppose there's one born every minute.
Oops... 16 processors, up to 64 cores.
Still seems awfully steep.
wasnt thinking about running windows on it, but you are probably right about that :o)
WOWZERS!
Every new home should have one built in as the main controller for all systems as well as internet access. I bet it would Run CITRIX Metafram sessions quite well - at whcih point all you would need is keyboard/moniotor/mouse for each home user - likely through wireless access.
Already have design ideas floating around my cranial unit...
I’ve always wanted a Cray...seriously!
I’m starting on saving $ today :)
Considering that IBM value-unit cost for cores on their pSeries frames can comes out to upward of $30K and sometimes as high as $50K per-core on their newer models, this is definitely a competitively priced option.
...unless you consider that the IBM machines aren't running Windows. IBM owners can actually use the horsepower they buy.
A better comparison would probably be with home-grown or Linux-run Beowulf cluster machines. I'm guessing those can be had for much less, and be in the same class.
You do realize that a system price is far more then the sum of it processors, with the custom / low volume hardware and software this is probably cheap.
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