[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 01:32:50PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>
>I don't think that the SC machines are single system image.  I think
>they run an image for every 6 processors.  I don't know that for
>certain, but for their biggest system, they have more processors than
>the kernel trunk supports.  Also, they repeatedly refer to the machines
>as a cluster.

That makes it less impressive to me. As a deskside computer, it's interesting,
but isn't it just like the SGI machine we just poo-poo'ed with non standard
processors. 

As much as Intel processors are un-interesting at least they are standard
and which makes them well tested and easy to find skilled programmers for.

>
>Last I heard they had passed 75 machines shipped.  75 of the little ones
>is not at all impressive.  75 of the medium and big ones seems like a
>reasonable volume, but obviously it wasn't good enough.

My guess is that they had a batch of boards made up and stuffed them in as 
many machines as they could make. When it came time to find funding for another
batch, no one was interested. :-(

Personally, I'd love to see a quad core ATOM (which I assume is in the
pipeline, but that's pure speculation) on a little board that plugs into
a backplane. Then you could do the same thing with processors that 
everyone knows and loves. 

You could even start out now with single or double core ones and replace
them as needed/available.

My expectation of the price point of a board with an ATOM dual core processor, 
1G RAM and a small solid state disk would be about $500 in the quantites
a company making small amounts of systems would have to pay. Since a dual
core ATOM processor uses 8 watts, figure the board would draw 20w, so a
500 watt power supply would work with 25 boards or 50 cores. Not quite
the power miser and core rich system they had, but except for the board,
it's all standard off the shelf technology. 

Of course, you could just buy a bunch of ASUS EEE motherboards, with a 
rack type power supply and a 1000BASE-T hub in a cabinet to make a proof of
concept unit. :-)


Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM