Supercomputer

[rmccoy]

If only I could talk my bosses into getting this as a render farm

 

 

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/supercomputers.html

[Horhe]

Processors: 182,000 AMD quad-core Opterons, running at 2.3 gigahertz.

 

A petaflop computer can process one quadrillion floating-point calculations per second. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations every second.

 

 

:eek:

[AJLynn]

But you still couldn't run Maxwell at a reasonable speed.

[rmccoy]

But you still couldn't run Maxwell at a reasonable speed.

 

So true!

[schmoron13]

But you still couldn't run Maxwell at a reasonable speed.

 

though the fine folks at maxon would tell you it's just that your system isn't up to snuff

[AJLynn]

Nextlimit, baldy. Maxon is Cinema4D.

[Devin Johnston]

Just think of how many licenses you'd need to by to run Maxwell on that puppy, I think you still only get 4 cores per license.

[AJLynn]

I think it's one license per motherboard now. But with the number of licenses you must have by now (whatever you originally bought, times 8) you must have 200 by now.

 

Actually I bet it wouldn't work. Imagine how slow putting together the unCooperative MXS files would be, and that's not multithreadable.

 

Sorry if I just gave you any flashbacks.

[Devin Johnston]

My stomach just dropped thinking about it. Actually I haven't used Maxwell in over a year, it just became too much of a headache. I think at last count we had something like 230 licenses, what a waste.

[schnitz]

Is there a laptop option? God I hope Vista runs on it!

[AJLynn]

No. There are laptop video cards that can run CUDA but putting a bunch of workstation class GPUs in a portable is no more practical than putting dual Opterons and RAID in a portable.

 

Which means Alienware will try it.

 

As for Vista, that's missing the point. A CUDA "supercomputer" is an Intel box with a bunch of nVidia cards in it. The GPUs are not compatible with the Intel instruction set, so they don't run Windows software - that's what the CPU does. Software can run on the GPUs if it's been written to run on the GPUs, which is a non-trivial task. It's a different development platform. Which is why nothing runs on it. Maybe mental ray in the next version, but that's unconfirmed and so far, there is no useful software at all.

[tecton3d]

Which means Alienware will try it.

Me chuckles:D

[schnitz]

I should have put a smiley at the end of my last post. I wasnt being serious. Looking at the pics on the link of a computer the size of a warehouse I didnt really think there would be a laptop. :-)