RSSCray CX1: the supercomputer you can buy online
By Tim Conneally | Published September 16, 2008, 4:38 PM
Cray debuted its smallest and most consumer-oriented "supercomputer" today, the CX1, which will sport Intel Xeon chips and Windows HPC Server 2008. Available immediately, this low end unit embodies the changing state of power computing.
The CX1 chassis has enough room for eight blades of single- or dual-socket Intel Xeon processors. In today's presentation, Cray said the current peak configuration for the chassis is 64 cores with 3.4 GHz bus working at 786 gigaflops. Each chassis can be connected to up to 4 TB of storage.
Designed for in-office use, the system is equipped with an active noise cancellation system comparable to those found in isolating headphones, a built-in visualization node, and pre-configured power supply. Cray rationialized that "three quarters of the market prefers pre-assembled systems from traditional computer vendors to assembling their own."
While seven of the top 500 supercomputer clusters are built upon Cray's XT4, including the 30,976-core Jaguar at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (the fifth largest in the world), the company's systems and performance share has diminished consistently since 1993 as HP's has grown. IBM has also shown tremendous growth in the same period.
This CX1 machine is distinctly different from Cray's prior offerings: It is the company's first attempt at a "personal supercomputer," what is sometimes referred to as a "mini-supercomputer." It will be immediately available online for as low as $25,000, and though it has the consumer-friendly Microsoft brand associated with it, it can also run Red Hat Linux Enterprise v5.
Can I install Windows Vista Ultimate on it!?!
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|Most of your comments are lacking interest. Do you simply ignore what a supercomputer is, or are just joking at the idea of having a small one?
A consumer for a supercomputer is not a game player, nor a word document writer and, in general, not a single person.
A Small business may be a target client, but the smallest ones won't either.
A supercomputer has always been a machine able to do calculations much faster than comodity hardware. Nowadays, this is more generally reffered as multiple parallel jobs that run one or multiple tasks.
In other words: Using a supercomputer for one single task is underutilizing it (except if that task isn't requiring a lot of CPU power like SETI@home, nuclear simulations...).
I find this article interesting, but at the same time, lacks some information. $25k for the low end, and only giving details of the highest configuration. So, what do I get with $25k? and what will cost the highest configuration anyway?
There's also one detail: "Each chassis can be connected to up to 4 TB of storage".
Do i read this correctly that it is the whole box? I.e 64 cores.. and "just" a max of 4TB of data?
About the price itself... Count that the windows license may eat $1k or $2k for itself, if not more. (I remember the Windows SMB 2003 costed 800+€ in 2005 and that only allowed 4 cores).
And just for the sake of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC#Concept
The first Personal computer costed up to $20k (and surely that was alot more than what it is nowadays), and precisely was meant for what this Cray supercomputer aims for.
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|_jaz_, thanks for your comment.
Cray's reps said the max price will be around $88k fully loaded.
And actually, they did say storage is limited to "only" 4TB, since
it's got 2 storage blade slots and Cray offers two options*. But if you check that, you see the ceiling is actually 5.76TB.
* The CS5404 (Maximum Storage: 1.6TB [4+1 x 320GB]) and the CS5408 (Maximum Storage: 2.88TB [8+1 x 320GB])
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|"personal" for somebody who pulls in half a million
per year, maybe.
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|$25,000 is a consumer price? No I think not even if it is more affordable than their major systems. It's the "small business price" if anything.
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|64 x Xeon MP X7460 (hexa core 2.66GHz) would be another interesting option :)
tho i think these are 3.4GHz X5492
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|OK, gamer's can rejoice - if the games are sufficiently optimized for multi-threaded massively parallel operation.
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|Ahhhh, I was gonna say that! "Lolz"!
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|AH ha super fast browsing with Chrome, since it uses separate processes for each tab and plugin.
This also might help with video editing... :-D 25,000 hmm I wonder if I can spend my ghastly depleting retirement funds on it... they are depreciating as fast as a computer does anyway...
hmm, I wonder what kind of power brick this thing needs...
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