From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Mon Dec 05 2005 - 12:49:58 MST
On Dec 5, 2005, at 9:33 AM, BillK wrote:
> <http://www.orionmulti.com/products/specs_ds96>
> 96 processor deskside workstation, peak performance of 230 gigaflops,
> running off a single electric plug.
>
> Cost around 100,000 USD.
> But big savings on data centre costs, power, space, rackmounts, air
> conditioning, management, etc.
Unfortunately, this product emphasizes power efficiency above all
else, including price performance and absolute performance. You
could put a low-power Opteron cluster in a single rack for similar
amounts of money and get far better performance for maybe twice the
power budget. That difference in peak power consumption (retail)
including cooling etc, is on the order of $1000-2000 per year. In
other words, negligible.
But since the Opteron cluster will be so much more performant for
many (most?) workloads, you'll likely get the same amount of work
done per watt, plus the implied time savings. For codes that heavily
exercise the memory rather than spinning in cache, and many AI codes
seem to be of this nature, Orion would be a poor match.
J. Andrew Rogers
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