Journal Glonoinha's Journal: What would you do with a 30GHz+ supercomputer cluster? 2
Yes - I'm soliciting your feedback.
March 16, 1999 : IBM raises the bar on supercomputing, matching the record for rendering a POV raytracing in three seconds - previously set by a $5.5M Cray supercomputer. The record was matched using a 17 machine cluster costing roughly $150,000. Read about it here.
Today you can buy a single 3.2GHz Hyperthreaded P4 machine that can run the same POV benchpark in the same 3 seconds, cost you about $750.
Today Dell is running a sale, they are blowing out their 400sc series servers. $350 for a 2.8GHz Hyperthreaded P4 with 128M of RAM, a 48x CD, 40G IDE drive, and integrated Intel Gigabit networking. Dell Small Business, just look up the 400sc. Figure a grand total of $400 by the time you add in some aftermarket memory.
A few weeks ago /. profiled an AlienWare machine for about $5k - let us consider what kind of environment we can get for that same $5k : how about 11 of these machines with 512M of RAM each, a gigabit switch for the backbone, cables, and a nice 18" LCD monitor for the primary machine. That's 30GHz of CPU, plus the additional performance from the hyperthreaded CPUs - quite a monster of a cluster. Five years ago this system would have dominated the Top500 list. Maybe it wouldn't have taken the top spot, but surely one of the top 50 in the world.
But you can only render so many raytracings before that gets old ...
So what next?
What would you do with a 30GHz+ 'supercomputer' cluster? Now that you can put this kind of horsepower in your home or office for ~$5,000 - what do you do with it?
There are some tasks (Doom III) that don't scale at all - you are going to get whatever frames per second that your fastest machine + your best video card give you regardless of how many additional machines you throw at it. There are other tasks - I'm looking for feedback here - that scale well enough to take advantage of the kind of horsepower we only dreamed of 5 years ago ... so what are they?
What would you do with a 30GHz+ cluster comprised of 11 machines?
March 16, 1999 : IBM raises the bar on supercomputing, matching the record for rendering a POV raytracing in three seconds - previously set by a $5.5M Cray supercomputer. The record was matched using a 17 machine cluster costing roughly $150,000. Read about it here.
Today you can buy a single 3.2GHz Hyperthreaded P4 machine that can run the same POV benchpark in the same 3 seconds, cost you about $750.
Today Dell is running a sale, they are blowing out their 400sc series servers. $350 for a 2.8GHz Hyperthreaded P4 with 128M of RAM, a 48x CD, 40G IDE drive, and integrated Intel Gigabit networking. Dell Small Business, just look up the 400sc. Figure a grand total of $400 by the time you add in some aftermarket memory.
A few weeks ago
But you can only render so many raytracings before that gets old
So what next?
What would you do with a 30GHz+ 'supercomputer' cluster? Now that you can put this kind of horsepower in your home or office for ~$5,000 - what do you do with it?
There are some tasks (Doom III) that don't scale at all - you are going to get whatever frames per second that your fastest machine + your best video card give you regardless of how many additional machines you throw at it. There are other tasks - I'm looking for feedback here - that scale well enough to take advantage of the kind of horsepower we only dreamed of 5 years ago
What would you do with a 30GHz+ cluster comprised of 11 machines?
Well, there's always the obvious ... (Score:1)
Or, you could sell your computing power -- in essence, become a data center. A number of universities have already done this kind of mini-super-computer in order to run their in-house research, perhaps that's a market for you?
But, it might not be worth the trouble in terms of time required versus money earned. D
Do with a cluster? Heat the house... (Score:1)