Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own. http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/.../microwulf.htm |
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! |
I assume they have been using 4 Intel Q6600? |
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so, essentially you could double the power easily for a little added cost, now that the CPUs are so cheap |
"little added cost" hmmm.. not quite "little". 3800+ X2 : €59 Q6600: €249 100 Core cluster system 3800+ based: €2950 100 Core cluster system Q6600 based: €6225 ... you can have 200 Core 3800+ cluster for the price of the Q6600 100 one;) not sure if it will be faster, but the goal was "budget", Q6600 is not :) |
they still had 165 $ in their table and the CPUs weren't the biggest cost factor |
As stated in their article, the linchpin to having a Beowulf cluster is having equal parts bandwidth per core per RAM. They did 2-core+2Gb+2Gbit ethernet for each of the 4 "clusters". Now imagine what 4-core, 4GB, 4Gbit ethernet per cluster would cost... Q6600 is not a viable option without major costs in networking hardware. Interesting that they did not choose dual 1Gbit boards over buying 1GBit Ethernet cards though, would have saved some cash there. Edit: Cost of their exact Beowulf cluster costs $1,281 today, with a DDR2-800Mhz mem upgrade at that. Didn't mess with the networking but total cost could probably be dropped further to about the $1,000 mark. :) |
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