SGI Rolls Out "Personal Supercomputers"
 

[URL]http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/09/23/139205/SGI-Rolls-Out-Personal-Supercomputers[/URL]
[quote]The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. ... An Octane III with a 10 dual socket, four cores, Xeon L5520 processors, for 80 cores, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit Ethernet networking is priced at about $53,000.[/quote]I wonder how this compares to lots of normal systems in terms of upfront costs, electricity costs, and performance (in various things - Prime95 LL, TF, or P-1, or factoring, or whatever).

[QUOTE=Mini-Geek;190831][URL]http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/09/23/139205/SGI-Rolls-Out-Personal-Supercomputers[/URL]
I wonder how this compares to lots of normal systems in terms of upfront costs, electricity costs, and performance (in various things - Prime95 LL, TF, or P-1, or factoring, or whatever).[/QUOTE]

Normal systems: 1 socket
SGI-Rolls-Out-Personal-Supercomputers: up to 10 sockets

seems too obvious, it must be a trick.

I bet you 10 cents without even checking any further: GIMPS would NOT be cost effective on them.

[quote=lfm;190888]I bet you 10 cents without even checking any further: GIMPS would NOT be cost effective on them.[/quote]
Indeed. By my calculations, one could buy 20 Core 2 Quad-based machines (for 80 cores like the "supercomputer") for only about $8000, assuming the machines are configured as a bare-bones crunching boxes (small HD, cheap mobo, 2 GB RAM)--compare that to the $53000 for the "supercomputer". Of course the "supercomputer" has twice the memory per core than the Core 2 Quads would, but that could be remedied by getting 4 GB of RAM per machine, which I doubt would even add as much as $1000 to the cost. And the individual cores are probably a bit less powerful than those in the "supercomputer" (I'm guessing those are i7 Xeons, not C2Q Xeons), but adding a few more computers to the batch would well compensate for that without adding much (relatively speaking) to the cost.

Long story short, the "supercomputer" is not cost effective for *anything*, unless there's some application out there that can somehow make better use of 10 separate machines than 20, which is unlikely. Granted, the homebrew cluster I described above may be a little less "industrial grade" than the "sumpercomputer", but even if you forked over a bit more for slightly more expensive parts, it would still be far less than the "supercomputer".

One thing of note is that the linked article said that the "supercomputer" was noted for its intended ease of use; possibly this is one area where the homebrew cluster couldn't quite measure up. But, nonetheless, given the outrageous price difference between the two setups, it may well be cheaper to hire a geek to set up some sort of easy-to-use cluster management software so that even a less-geeky person could run it. :smile:

[QUOTE=mdettweiler;190892]Indeed. By my calculations, one could buy 20 Core 2 Quad-based machines (for 80 cores like the "supercomputer") for only about $8000,

Long story short, the "supercomputer" is not cost effective for *anything*, unless there's some application out there that can somehow make better use of 10 separate machines than 20,[/QUOTE]
When the cpus share memory space and all step at the same time, there are many calculations that would benefit.
Examples: gravitational interaction modeling, weather modeling (storm formation), thermonuclear reactions (bombs and stars), and other such intensive calculations that parallelization benefits.

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;190904]When the cpus share memory space and all step at the same time, there are many calculations that would benefit.
Examples: gravitational interaction modeling, weather modeling (storm formation), thermonuclear reactions (bombs and stars), and other such intensive calculations that parallelization benefits.[/QUOTE]

Because there are lots of people modeling thermonuclear reactions on 80 cores instead of [url=http://top500.org/system/9707]130,000 cores[/url].

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;190904]When the cpus share memory space and all step at the same time, there are many calculations that would benefit.[/QUOTE]

But that's not the case for the Octane III; the interconnect is gigabit ethernet, and whilst there is quite a neat implementation of shared memory over fast Infiniband (produced by scaleMP), I don't think anyone has seriously contemplated shared memory over GbE.

It's possible that these blade machines have the various refinements to keep the OSes in sync that turned out to be necessary to get >80% peak performance on thousand-node clusters, but I'm not sure they're necessary for clusters of ten machines.

Cluster-in-a-box is quite appealing if you're a maker of high-performance software and want to be able to tell people 'if you run SuperBridgeAnalyzerPro2000 on an Octane-III, we guarantee it will work out of the box and go this fast'; I'm not sure how much commercial software there is that just-works on arbitrary home-built clusters-with-MPI.

[QUOTE=fivemack;190910] I'm not sure how much commercial software there is that just-works on arbitrary home-built clusters-with-MPI.[/QUOTE]I'm fairly sure.

The amount available is somewhere between nil and negligible, and my money is on the low end of that range.

Paul

[quote=Mini-Geek;190831] I wonder how this compares to lots of normal systems in terms of upfront costs, electricity costs, and performance (in various things - Prime95 LL, TF, or P-1, or factoring, or whatever).[/quote]

Someone may have to create a special OS for something like this. Windows XP can run affinity up to 32 logical cores. I don't know about Vista or 7.

Xeon 5500 CPU: 45 nM, 2.66 GHz. Quad Core. TDP is 95 watts.

Just the CPU's alone, running full out, would require a feed of 7.6 kW. Imagine what that would do to your electric meter, and your wallet. Your meter would increment 184.2 kWH per day. In a 30 day billing cycle, you would use 5,472 kWH. The rate where I live is $0.11 per kWH. $601.92 for 1 month at that rate of consumption.

This does not take into consideration the RAM, a monster motherboard, and so on. How would one keep this cool? More $$$.

Each person's definition of "cost efficient" is different. No way could I run this, and even if I could, I wouldn't.

[quote=storm5510;191000]Someone may have to create a special OS for something like this. Windows XP can run affinity up to 32 logical cores. I don't know about Vista or 7.[/quote]
Something like Linux?
There are plenty of OSs besides Windows, many of which support far more cores than you'll need.

I thought about Linux, but I am not all that familiar with it and, you are correct, there are lots of others things to use.

While I was looking at the specs on the Xeon, I saw another model on the Intel site, 7400 series, with six cores. X7460, L7455, and E7450.

[QUOTE=storm5510;191000]
Xeon 5500 CPU: 45 nM, 2.66 GHz. Quad Core. TDP is 95 watts.

Just the CPU's alone, running full out, would require a feed of 7.6 kW.[/QUOTE]

Um, 10 sockets, 95W per socket? doesn't seem like 7.8kW.