The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity - Dorothy Parker
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Cray uses Supermicro blades for CX1
YOU MAY HAVE heard about the Cray CX1, a 'desktop cluster' in the vein of the Tyan Typhoon. They are interesting little beasts, and with the addition of Nehalems, now have the grunt to be a deskbottom supercomputer.
The front of the beastlet
The CX1 isn't a breakthrough in technology by any means, it is just a product to fill a niche. The machine itself has eight blades that will each take two Nehalem EPs, and a claimed 32G of RAM/blade. We won't bring up that Nehalems use ram in 6G increments, if you can count to 32 evenly in sixes, you are using a different base than most people.
In addition to Nehalems, you can opt for a storage blade, normally you only get two drives per blade or a GPGPU blade. Out the back, there is Infiniband or Ethernet, take your pick. That said, the cable routing could use a little cleaning up...
Back of the beastlet
Cray probably doesn't want you to know that the blades are in fact Supermicro blades, so you could probably get away with a little less cost should you shop around. That said, the version you see above, with four Harpertown x 2 blades, a GPGPU blade and active noise cancellation is available online for about $30K.
It may be a little while to Christmas, but what tot wouldn't be delighted to see one of these under the tree? µ
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xorsprite: 6x3=18, 4x3=12, 18+12=30
6G + 6G + 6G + 4G + 4G + 4G = 32G
Can you get the case on its own?
Uh, last I heard, Nehalem takes either 2-way or 3-way interleaves, which means the server instances - probably due to cost - use 2-way configuarations
A radix-22/3 numbering system (or in general, a (6 * x + 4)/3 base system) can express "32" as an integer multiple of "6". But yes, if you constrain yourself to integer numbering systems, "32" is never a multiple of "6".
Not only that. I also think there's no base in which 32 is divisible evenly by 6, because then 3(2y-x)=2 would have a solution in integer (x,y).
Seriously, I lament the decline in journalistic standards.
Let's be honest here. The only GPGPU available for the CX1 is Nvidia Tesla, your beloved one!
Come on Charlie, it's not that difficult...
N V I D I A T E S L A!