SGI Makes Leap Into 'Personal Supercomputing'

[SazanEyes]

Interesting new hardware from SGI. It seems like a desktop-size "blade server" that supports up to 80 cores, and runs Linux or Windows. Price starts at $8K, and "a fully populated enclosure with 10 dual-socket Intel Xeon L5520 processor nodes, 240GB of memory, and integrated GigE has a list price of $53,000." Not the most cost-effective farm, but possibly the most space-efficient.

News story:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/SGI-Makes-Leap-Into-Personal-Supercomputing-60079687.html

Press release:
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/september/octaneIII.html

 

[Kendrak]

Wow that is a sexy boxen.
In for 2!
Edit:shipping kills the deal.

In all seriousness, It's a great concept, just way over priced. I'm also sure that you would have crazy heat problems running a fully populated system at 100% 24/7 like we do.

8k also buys a bunch of GTX275s.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

being xeons and much lower clocks.. i dont think temps will be that much of an issue.. now if they only sold the case and you could populate with hardware it how you wanted.. then that would be a better deal in my opinion..

 

[alan2308]

SGI's move into mini-clusters parallels Cray's entry into the market last year with the CX1.

So they sold off Cray to just go back to being a day late and a dollar short? I guess that's why my first thought on this was surprise that SGI is still around.

 

[nitrobass24]

So they sold off Cray to just go back to being a day late and a dollar short? I guess that's why my first thought on this was surprise that SGI is still around.

Yea but that will kill a CX1 in price/performance.

You can get two more blades in the SGI, and similarly specd CX1 is $80k, and it has less blades.

 

[crazjayz]

Yea but that will kill a CX1 in price/performance.

You can get two more blades in the SGI, and similarly specd CX1 is $80k, and it has less blades.

But can't you get 2 GPUs in the CX1 per blade? Or is it still 1 GPU per blade?

 

[alan2308]

But can't you get 2 GPUs in the CX1 per blade? Or is it still 1 GPU per blade?

The configurator says 1

 

[nitrobass24]

But can't you get 2 GPUs in the CX1 per blade? Or is it still 1 GPU per blade?

The configurator says 1

Yea just one....which is good I guess, but if you go with the Tesla or Quadro blade it actually uses two slots and you halve your RAM and CPUs.

So the Max GPUs you can put in a CX1 is 4....so now you have a box with worse $/performance than really even imaginable.

Cray CX1 is the biggest fucking ripoff on earth.

People that need extreme deskside power are not going to spend 80k+ on that when a Supermicro Tower with 4 teslas cost 1/3 of that.

If they need more power than that or if a bunch of users need that much power for CAD or something they build a farm of rackmount servers with a bunch of cheap CPUs to use as a preprocessor and then send the data preprocessed to 5k workstations you can buy from the likes of HP/Dell.

 

[FrEaKy]

Even though that thing would burn a whole into my house..... its smexy!

I want just the case