Desktop Supercomputer CX1 From Cray

Supercomputers are coming to the desktop. I guess, it was bound to happen someday. This one from the makers of supercomputer CRAY uses Wintel technology for the first time. The horse power comes from 8 nodes of 2 Xeons each and each these could be dual or quad core. That's 32 to 64 processor cores to slice up your workload and work parallely on them. What else is there in the hardware configuration! 4 TB of secondary storage. I ma tempted to make a comment- are you ever going to need more? But the history of computing is full of stories how applications always catch up with whatever capacities are made available for them. Each of the processing nodes have 64 GB memory. Looks like that's a loosely coupled parallelism. 

The whole thing is going to be managed by MS Windows HPC Server 2008. That's a lot of firepower!

Play with Playstations, Create a Supercomputer

Sony, IBM and Toshiba developed the Cel chip jointly and Sony went on to use them on the Playstation PS3. With a co-ordinating processor and eight execution units in each chip, the are actually well suited to churn things up a lot. Sony needed to process highspeed processing of hi-resolution of graphics. While doing so fortunately they left it as a open platform.

Now comes news that Gaurav Khanna, Professor of Astorphysics at the University of Mass. at Dartmouth put together eight of these machines and milking it for supercomputer performance; all for an investment of $4000 and some testing time. That really is good news for people looking for performance at a reasonable price!!

teragrid the superpowered supercomputing grid

National center for supercomputing associations announced a super powered computing grid. While 280 teraflops of computing power and 20 petabytes of storage is impressive, it is the user interface that is supposed to be the crucial element for users.

Is anyone going to need more computing power! Well, it is always an application coming along that needs more resources than is available and thus catching up with all the available resources. It has happened always in computing history and I'm sure it is going to happen soon on this "teragrid" too. Until then it'll make the life of researchers in advanced areas easier quite a bit.