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.
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.
This market is mostly “made up of people who typically don’t have HPC experience, and so the transition to these systems has to be easy,” said Conway. He said SGI has a good history of producing systems that work well out of the box.
This embiggens me to take my dusty old SGI 320 Workstation out of the attic for old times’ sake!
When I read the press release yesterday I thought they’re selling 80 cores and 1TB of ram for $-8k.
I guess was too good to be true.
I’d probably still go for a NVidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer.
I would like to see a flops comparison between this unit and a cluster of lesser machines put together for the same price. My money would be on the cluster.
SGI says,
“Supported operating systems include: Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008, SUSE Linux® Enterprise Server, or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux. All Linux-based configurations are available with pre-loaded SGI® ProPackTM system software, SGI® IsleTM Cluster Manager and Altair PBS ProTM scheduler to get you up and running quickly.”
SN,
Gee, I wonder which OS you want for xmas?
I still l will miss IRIX!
Looks like a personal shredding machine.
We had the Onyx on our desks back in the day… ran a cool flight sim demo app much better than the MS version of its day… I landed a 747 once. Also found out that if you went over 100,000 feet in your F15 it crashed. 🙂
Can it run Crysis?
You know I think it might even run Snow leopard!
Interesting!
And yet an iMac with a dual core processor can outperform it because it runs OSX.
#6 – chuck – Can it run Crysis?
Yeah… but it’s called Windows.
#7 – Yeah, because SL is such a hog…
WINDOWS on this machine is a WASTE..
I would truly love to have one but the cold hard fact is a single core running at 1.6 and sporting a gig of ram can do nearly everything I do so fast the difference just doesn’t matter and that bleeps!
I suppose it would make sim city scream.
I didn’t even know SGI was still around?
#13 – memesisai
They got bought and the parent company renamed itself to SGI.
We had a bank of four SGI O2s running Irix back in the late 90s, for scientific animations. I maintained them.
Modern SGI machines are designed for high speed graphics calculations running under Linux, but apparently they run Windows also. Well, sometimes you just gotta run Microsoft Office…
@Floyd
Running Microsoft Office is fine as long as you do it in an emulator where it is safe.
#16 – Improbus
And with this much power in the box, it might even run smoothly.
Wrong picture. That is the old Octane.
#1 Marc
At least one of the configuration accepts Tesla cards.
#4 Uncle Don
I’ve always wanted a network enabled shredder!
Looks like its time to upgrade from my PDP-11/45…
🙂
I guess everybody needs their own protein folding simulator at home.