[extropy-chat] 70 teraflops

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 03:13:08PM +0000, BillK wrote:

> Their 'big idea' is to put 12 processors on each board.
> Up to 36 Gflops on a desktop Linux cluster for 10,000 USD. Not too bad?

They're using Transmeta Efficeon CPUs. While energy efficient, they're not
suitable for most numerics work. Look at the very bottom of
http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/2004-August/thread.html#10617
to see an exhaustive thread on why this is a very minor beer.

This is something like beefed up http://www.slipperyskip.com/page10.html
preconfigured with standard cluster stuff, from a commercial source.
 
> The up-to-300 Gflops floor-standing box costs about 100,000 USD and is
> getting more towards the small super-computer range.
> 
> Some progress?

Not really.

The most interesting (caveat: lots of vapor) current development is the Cell processor.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~zimmons/CELL.ppt
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~zimmons/Zimmons__CellGFX.ppt

It would be a nice to see affordable consumer hardware not locked by DRM one
could hook up into a cluster (a la http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/index.php
). Something like a poor man's Blue Gene.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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