SGI to sell personal supercomputers

[Modelworks]

I think I am in love. The new SGI system with the option for 80 cores, I might could almost render 3d in real time.

http://www.computerworld.com/s...at_s_cheap_easy_to_use

They aren't selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn't too far off, as costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use.

Silicon Graphics International Corp. on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory.

SGI said the multiple configurations available can include use of an Nvidia graphics processing unit card as well as an Intel low-powered Atom chip. SGI says that Atom chips are being used for application development and testing scale-out application code .

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.

This new supercomputer's peak performance of about 726 GFLOPS won't put it on the Top500 supercomputer list, but that's not the point of the machine, SGI says. Rather, a key feature is the system's ease of use.

 

[alyarb]

lol, 726 gflop for $53,000? what year is it?

 

[Idontcare]

Ugh, neither a supercomputer in performance nor at a pricepoint that enables anything about it to be construed as a personal computing device.

$8k for single cpu, 4 core.

$53k for the actual 80 core rig? Yeah I see lots of people buying these for personal use.

Not even making it on the Top500 list? OK :roll:

I could call my current desktop a personal supercomputer if I am willing to stoop to the point of comparing it to the supercomputing power of supercomputers of say 1985.

For distributed computing rigs, course-grained with low IPC requirements (render farms, beowulf class supercomputing) the pricepoint is right around $150-$200 per core with OTS hardware.

Gonna have to be pretty impressive network fabric and rather challenging IPC issues for the application of interest to make a $660 per core solution make sense to whoever is stepping up to pay that $53k pricetag.

 

[alyarb]

there's nothing exclusive about the design either. i could make my own rack system of low-voltage nehalems for a lot less money, but that's not the idea. nehalem is the worst choice for supercomputing. almost the entire CPU is cache and I/O and branch prediction hooked up to a not-that-fast memory bus. if you absolutely had to go x86, just wait a year for larrabee. i'm sure the d3d performance will suck, but the x86 flops are going to be pretty dirty, plus you can squeeze four or five of them into an atx machine for less than $4k and make 726 gflop appear like a drop in the ocean. but yeah i just don't understand the obsession with x86 in this regard.

 

[waffleironhead]

Blast from the past. A company I used to be associated with had many sgi pc's from the pentium 3 era. Lets just hope they have improved their quality since then, because they ran super hot and had high failure rates. Anytime we had a return/replacement from a customer it was 100% certain that it was a sgi channel coming back.(we did use multiple vendors for the systems)

nice of sgi to jump on the bandwagon, hasnt cray offered a personal supercomputer for a few years now?

 

[bobsmith1492]

Originally posted by: alyarb
lol, 726 gflop for $53,000? what year is it?

My $100 video card can do more than that. Seriously, I think my 4850 does >1000gflops...

Ed. - per Wiki, the going price (in bulk) is $0.42 per gflop, so that computer (in bulk) should cost $305.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: alyarb
lol, 726 gflop for $53,000? what year is it?

My $100 video card can do more than that. Seriously, I think my 4850 does >1000gflops...

Ed. - per Wiki, the going price (in bulk) is $0.42 per gflop, so that computer (in bulk) should cost $305.

But what if you want to encode your porn at double precision? i7 920 does about 70gflops, let's say about $250 per processor, so that would be about $2600 for the processors then a few thousand for all the other stuff like power, motherboard, memory etc. $10,000 might sound a bit more reasonable.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: bobsmith1492

Originally posted by: alyarb
lol, 726 gflop for $53,000? what year is it?

My $100 video card can do more than that. Seriously, I think my 4850 does >1000gflops...

Ed. - per Wiki, the going price (in bulk) is $0.42 per gflop, so that computer (in bulk) should cost $305.

But what if you want to encode your porn at double precision? i7 920 does about 70gflops, let's say about $250 per processor, so that would be about $2600 for the processors then a few thousand for all the other stuff like power, motherboard, memory etc. $10,000 might sound a bit more reasonable.

Obviously you are undervaluing the prestige that comes with having that SGI sticker on the front of your rig, plus that world-class sales support :thumbsup:

That's gotta be worth another $40k, right?

 

[Modelworks]

The point you guys are missing is they also can include use of an Nvidia graphics processing unit card as well as an Intel low-powered Atom chip.

I know i want an atom cpu in my $53,000 pc. !

 

[drizek]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
The point you guys are missing is they also can include use of an Nvidia graphics processing unit card as well as an Intel low-powered Atom chip.

I know i want an atom cpu in my $53,000 pc. !

I know I want to spend $53,000 on a gaming machine that is slower than a $600 one with a 5870.

 

[palladium]

So, can we finally play crysis 19x12 4xAA very high at 60fps with this new supercomputer?

 

[bryanW1995]

no

 

[Cheesetogo]

Originally posted by: palladium
So, can we finally play crysis 19x12 4xAA very high at 60fps with this new supercomputer?

Nope. (Really)

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Cheesetogo

Originally posted by: palladium
So, can we finally play crysis 19x12 4xAA very high at 60fps with this new supercomputer?

Nope. (Really)

But you are for damned sure guaranteed you are aren't cpu limited at that point :laugh:

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
The point you guys are missing is they also can include use of an Nvidia graphics processing unit card as well as an Intel low-powered Atom chip.

I know i want an atom cpu in my $53,000 pc. !

Of course you would. Why use a single i7 when you could use 40 Atom processors to get the same performance?

 

[IlllI]

sgi went bankrupt and was recently sold to some other company for like 20 million or something

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: IlllI
sgi went bankrupt and was recently sold to some other company for like 20 million or something

My how the mighty have fallen. During the day they were smokin with their own Unix distro, OpenGL, etc.

 

[Griswold]

Originally posted by: IlllI
sgi went bankrupt and was recently sold to some other company for like 20 million or something

Rackable Systems bought them indeed and then changed its name to SGI. But I think it was for ~40 million.

What people here do miss though, as mentioned in the original post, you can stuff a bunch of nvidia tesla cards in that thing - will be good for alot more than the 726 CPU GFlops.

Though, the price will be adjusted upwards accordingly...

 

[IlllI]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...ckable-for-25-million/

thats a far fall from a company that used to make billions a year