Re: State of the Art - Gflops/m^3

From: Dani Eder (danielravennest@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jul 02 2001 - 10:35:39 MDT


--- Brian Atkins <brian@posthuman.com> wrote:
 
> P.S. there is an article on Blue Gene in the July
> Wired.. they talk about
> the spinoffs which will likely be multi-teraop
> supercomputers that will
> take up only perhaps a single rack of floorspace,
> require less than 1/20th
> the electrical power of existing supercomputers, and
> cost less than one
> million bucks... perhaps closer to $100k. Oh yeah
> this is all scheduled
> to be around 2004.

This year's state of the art would be a rack full of
Dual Athlon systems. By this fall they will be
available in a 1U form factor at 1.4Ghz. Each
CPU produces 2 Gflops. A dual-CPU system is then
4 Gflops, and you can pack about 32 1U systems in
a rack, for 128 Gflops in a 1 rack space. Initially
these systems will go for around $3K each, so you
can figure about $100K for a rack full.

If you are going for maximum processing capacity
per dollar rather than per cubic meter, you can
already build a cluster out of desktop PC parts
for around $500-1000 per node, giving you $250-500/
Gflop, or $250K-500K/Teraflop. The major variable
is how much RAM and hard disk per node you buy.

Dani

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