Aussie university buys SGI Itanium supercomp

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 02:12:16 +1300, Io <sp.DeleteThis@m.free> wrote:

 >Yousuf Khan wrote:
 >
  >> $4.5mn for 208 I2's:
  >>
<font color=green>  >> <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13313</font" target="_blank">http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13313</font</a>>
 >
 >Heh, maybe they can use this thing to perform a cost/performance ratio
 >calculation.
 >
 >Woah $21k per CPU!!?

The 64-way Altix 3000 tops the SPECfp2000 rate charts, and measured on
a rate per CPU, it is worth about 50% more than the biggest Opteron
system (4-way) for which results are available. On a total throughput
basis, the first box on the table built with a merchant chips is the
Opteron, which is 1/24th of an Altix 3000.

You can do better with a Beowulf cluster? Almost anyone can, by some
measure at least. What a Beowulf cluster won't give you is a flat
cache-coherent memory space.

If the price per CPU is the same, is that worth $14k per CPU as
normalized to Opteron performance? Depends on what kinds of problems
you're doing.

It also depends on TCO issues that can't easily be addressed in a
usenet post: the cost of real space, the cost of maintaining the
system, and the support you get from the manufacturer.

The Altix 3000 is definitely the mercedes of HPC boxes, but, just as
with buying a car, whether it's worth it or not depends on who you are
and what you want to use it for.

RM<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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