Linxe's eye

My good friend Charlie ask me my opinion about some server/high-end computers, one of the options was the historically important Cray. Cray isn't producing their amazing systems that dominate the supercomputer field for years. Now they're producing high-performance desktop computers like the CX1-iWS . Well, it's a nice computer with cool hardware but with Windows 7 as OS (maybe to reach some 3D modeling tools, because all the HPC software I know run on Linux/OSX). This model in particular is being sold by Dell , I see the page to get more details and I found one of the reviews highly interesting: Date: October 8, 2010 Title: Helping our country's defense Review: We have been using a few of these units for a while and they scream! I work for a defense contractor (Cyberdyne Systems) and part of the reason we were able to get the contract was by leveraging these units rather than a dedicated supercomputer. We've been developing new microprocessors for ...

There are 3 big problems when you want a supercomputer (besides the cost, of course), the first one is the space, a cheap and common approximation is to use a cluster design which you wire, as many as you can, independent computers. So you need to reserve an adequate space for the equipment, if you're not using servers racks, the space is a problem. The second problem is the calorific power generated by the computers, a single desktop computer can be really hot in intensive use, so imagine when you put many machines in a same room together. I remember the first cluster of the bioinformatic lab, the provider installed the hardware one day before they installed the software, but when the guy turned-on the systems, all the RAMs were burned. The provider changed all the RAMs for a more heat resistant brand. After some time and after some expansions in the cluster, the cooling systems also was required to be changed for an industrial equipment, in summer it feels like an oven. The thir...

IBM announced the new big project to build the next #1 supercomputer of the world, codename Sequoia, it's impressive the limit of 20 petaflops ... that's more than the combined power of all top 500 supercomputers (#1 is only 1 petaflops). The Sequoia will be powered by 1.6 million cores (specific 45-nanometer chips in development) and 1.6 petabytes of memory. It will be housed in 96 refrigerators spanning roughly 280 square meters. Of course the owner will be the USA gov, who's else? From: Gizmodo Image from: xkcd