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31st August 2007, 13:07 | #1 |
Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium
Posts: 79,021
| 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
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3rd September 2007, 02:47 | #2 |
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| Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! |
3rd September 2007, 10:20 | #3 |
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| I assume they have been using 4 Intel Q6600? |
3rd September 2007, 10:55 | #4 | |
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3rd September 2007, 11:15 | #5 |
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| so, essentially you could double the power easily for a little added cost, now that the CPUs are so cheap |
3rd September 2007, 11:28 | #6 |
Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium
Posts: 79,021
| "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
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3rd September 2007, 12:05 | #7 |
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| they still had 165 $ in their table and the CPUs weren't the biggest cost factor |
4th September 2007, 04:15 | #8 |
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| 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. Last edited by Kougar : 4th September 2007 at 05:07. |
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