I think it ran around $10,000,000 at the time.
Posted on 09/19/2008 8:25:20 AM PDT by zeugma
It’s nice to see that microsoft’s vulnerable tonka toys needs the expertise of decades to survive. Mainframe and legacy systems have always had huge processing power and were always much more secure than our home pc’s. Older computers were super fast but they weren’t bogged down with microprocessing. Instead much of the ‘drivers’ and interfaces were hard wired to roadrunner through the data.
When it's for HPC number crunching, all that probably doesn't make much difference in the value.
A home-grown Linux Beowulf cluster with Intel quad-core CPUs and AMD stream processors on each node would be cheaper and at least as fast as this, IMO.
True. If you plan to run Windows you are paying for a lot of ‘bloatware’ overhead. But this thing can also run Linux.
The Beowulf stuff is neat but it’s not something commonly found in use at major corporations. Mostly in research...where money is usually tight and more flop for your buck is a necessity.
This Cray option still looks extremely competitive from a biz standpoint.
My first thought was that any splinter terrorist group now has the ability to model a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent distribution system.
No need to by a dozen X-Boxes and wire them together. Just buy one of these and you can go to town in the confort of your own cave or bunker.
I suppose you can game on it, but I don’t know many games that could take advantage of that kind of power.
Weather modeling, fluid mechanics, virtual wind tunnels, blast modeling, advanced ballastics - these are all things requiring massive computing power.
Still ... 3 years and the price will PLUMMET. Just think how this would run serious games. Stick the ultimate video cards on it and run 9 monitors of gaming screen at once.
What it’s probably offering is an easy solution — plug it in and you’re off. I think Microsoft panicked when Linux owned the HPC market and Apple was getting big on plug and play HPC systems. Windows HPC is supposed to be as easy as OS X with XGrid, but I doubt it.
An "easy solution" HPC machine... That's part of what's wrong with the computer industry, IMO.
Computers and computing are inherently complicated and difficult things. I think the perpetual marketing mantra of "easy" only does us harm in the long run. It makes CEOs wonder why IT budgets are so big. It makes accountants wonder why they can't get the monstrously complicated report the just had you create subtotalled by a different column in about 15 minutes. After all, the stuff they just paid Microsoft scadillions of dollars for is supposed to be easy, isn't it? So go get me my report!
If an organization doesn't have, or is unwilling to pay for, people with enough expertise to put a Linux / Beowulf solution together (there's plenty of documentation for it on the web these days), then I'd argue that they probably don't have the expertise to be using the system at all.
...but that's just me.
These are the people who just need results. Apple had success marketing its HPC setups to biotech firms because all they wanted to do was run their biotech software, just run it really, really fast.
A lot of aspects of computing have come down to where a reasonably talented person in his own field can get results without having to be a computer expert. Desktop publishing is one. Now this concept has moved into clustering.
Yes, I did HPC for > 10 years.
Cheers!
I think it ran around $10,000,000 at the time.
Let’s see if it can answer the question, “What do women want?” Then I’ll be impressed.
I’ll bet I could finally get some decent FPS on BattleGround Europe WWII Online with that baby...hehe..
Well, if it’s only $25K...better pick up a few next time I’m down at Freddie Meyer’s.
Yeah, but that included the couch!
No need to by a dozen X-Boxes and wire them together. Just buy one of these and you can go to town in the confort of your own cave or bunker.
I suppose you can game on it, but I don?t know many games that could take advantage of that kind of power.
Weather modeling, fluid mechanics, virtual wind tunnels, blast modeling, advanced ballastics - these are all things requiring massive computing power.
That was my first concern as well, but it's probably easier and more in line with their mindset to buy or steal a design already verified.
I think we'll have to wait for quantum computers for that.
Or a personal conversation with God.
“Forty T.... BSOD!!!”
Mark
Does it run Linux?
If not, I’m not interested.
BTW. Those 'couches' were cold. That's where they had the internal air conditioning units to keep the computer from melting. ;~))
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