The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity - Dorothy Parker
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SGI releases personal supercomputer
SGI HAS RELEASED Octane III, the outfit's first personal supercomputer.
For just shy of $8,000 the Octane merges the power and performance capabilities of a high-performance deskside cluster with the portability and usability of a workstation.
It is designed for workplace environments and supports a wide range of distributed technical computing applications.
The beast measures one by two feet and is fairly quiet. It can have up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly one Terabyte of memory.
Mark J. Barrenechea, president and CEO of SGI, said his customers had been begging for office environment products with large core counts.
They are being built for strategic science, research, development and visualisation work.
There are four configurations available with two based around Quad Core Intel Xeon processors and one using Dual core Intel Atoms.
Octane III ships as an out-of-the box system and supports Microsoft HPC Server 2008, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems. Linux configurations include SGI ProPack and ISLE cluster management software. µ
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I have a cray CX1, and it has 64 cores. The thing is noisy as hell (supposedly a deskside supercomputer), and that's with a "noise cancellation/suppression" system. If I had to bet, I would bet that this SGI will have the same problem...
What kind of games does it come with?
All they've done is flip a blade chassis on to its side and stuff it full of dual-socket quad-core Nehalem (or Atom) blades. Also, that $8k price is for the base chassis. If you actually want some blades in it, it shoots up real fast. Infiniband between the blades (rather than GigE, which is basically useless for clustering) is another big-ticket extra.
Also, I don't see the point of making this "deskside". You don't directly plug into it anyhow, you need another machine and you connect in remotely like any other cluster. So the best place for it is back in the server rack where it came from in the first place.
Uhm, if I'm dropping $8k on a cluster it damn better well have ECC memory. And no Atom supports ECC memory. Anyone using an Atom to do any sort of serious work or values their data is a moron.
I take it you've not seen what Atom Clusters can do?
Which exactly what 19 Dual Core Atoms in one machine is!
"There are four configurations available with two based around Quad Core Intel Xeon processors and one using Dual core Intel Atoms."
Whoa, a dual core atom "Supercomputer?" I think you misread the press release, that's a Super-crappy computer. Who in their right mind would pay anything over $500 for a dual core atom computer is beyond me. Or a Mac user
(PS: 2 + 1 != 4)
Is Z one hairsbreadth, three paperbacks, two elephants?
B-b-but I thought all you had to do was buy a Apple PowerMac G4 computer, and you'd own a (1980s) "supercomputer"?
I'll take 3 of them! but only if they are not itanium :P $8k is cheap!
Last time I priced a sgi machine was around the time of the Pentium II 233mhz chips... except the Sgi box was Dual 450mhz and about £32,000 to buy
Stop using commodity hardware, and actually invest in something more than marginally better and I'd think about it.... (I'm looking at you apple pro)
Would be nice to see workhorse workstations coming back into fashion.... cant see it lasting though :(
I for one welcome our sparc, arm, mips and power overlords!
... R.I.P Mips