I need a 40 core PC

[creasia]

At last I can take on ILM and Sony with a little box under my desk.

 

What do you think of that? I wonder how much it costs if the AMD super computer version is discounted at $4250 what is it's list price??

 

"Holy Super Computers Batman!"

[AJLynn]

I think the line was "If you have to ask, you can't afford it"

 

It's not actually a 40-core PC, it's 5 8-core PCs with clustering software. I bet you could make you own cheaper using 10 4-node rackmounts and the same software (anybody can get it, it's from Microsoft). The idea isn't really anything new - Google "beowulf cluster" and you'll find university guys in the late 90s or early 2000s who came up with an architecture for a Linux cluster that could make it onto the world's-fastest-computers list for $100k. Some other guys did the same thing using G3 iMacs (setting a new benchmark for supercomputer color schemes).

 

With Beowulf, you could use n of any type of PCs, where n=(2^x)+1 (the 1 being for the control server). The key components of the system were a task manager and a network topology using 2 ethernet adapters per PC, one being a standard 100/1000 card hooked up to a standard switch and the other being a card with 4 ports going directly to 4 PCs, so the server accessed the nodes via the conventional network and the nodes communicated with each other via a mesh style network where computers could communicate very quickly with their nearest neighbor.

[Sawyer]

You make it sound so easy Andrew.

[ZFact]

couldnt agree more andrew... easy peesey