Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

A New Concept in Supercomputers

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sat Mar 15, 2008 10:33 AM
Supercomputing
Steve Kerrison writes "With the power of CPUs ever-increasing and the number of cores in a system increasing too, having a supercomputer sit under your desk is no longer a pipe dream. But generally speaking, the extreme high end of modern computing consists of a big ugly box housing that generates a lot of noise. A UK system integrator has developed a concept PC that blows that all away. The eXtreme Concept PC (XCP) has quite a romantic design story, with inspiration coming from concept cars and the sarcophagus-like Cray T90. The end result is a system that resembles a Cylon — computing power never looked so ominous. Although just a concept, the company behind the design reckons there could be a (small) market for the systems, with varying levels of compute power accompanied by appropriate (say, LN2) cooling."
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: Concept: A New Generation of Supercomputers by unts (754160)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

A New Concept in Supercomputers 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Bad Childish Design (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Iskender (1040286) on Saturday March 15 2008, @10:40AM (#22759666)
    If this is good design, then I do *not* want to see bad.
    • Why would anyone use a supercomputer anymore? Hasn't google shown us that it's cheaper to get the same power out of a cluster of servers?
      • The number of flops required for "supercomputer" status is constantly in flux, right? Yesterday's supercomputer is today's dual-core laptop. So says Gordon Moore.

        In fact, this reminds me of old Apple ads for the G4 circa 2000 -- those had some sort of tagline to the effect of "a supercomputer on your desk," an assertion they were basing on a (who knows how old at the time) definition of a supercomputer as capable of doing a certain number of flops at which the G4 happened to be benchmarking.

        Considerin
      • Supercomputers aren't about "cheap", they're about having the speed and power to do jobs that would crush ordinary computers.
    • ...welcome our new overlord, CmdrTacky.

    • Re:Bad Childish Design (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Original Replica (908688) on Saturday March 15 2008, @12:16PM (#22760092) Journal
      I do *not* want to see bad.

      Too bad here it is. [urbanretrolifestyle.com]
      Perhaps this is more to your liking? [merlinstower.com] Or this. [homotron.net]
      Any computer company that wants to have "elegant design" associated with their product needs to realize that plastic is unelegant. Notice how most high end cars try to hide all the plastic in the interior. Yes Apple has done some non-hideous things with white plastic, but outside of the modernism design genre plastic is bad. I would think that some of the engineered wood companies (mostly they make laminate wood flooring) could produce some quite attractive cases for reasonable cost.
    • You could shell out ~10k for a Tesla that computes using CUDA, or maybe you could build your own dual quad core, tri-SLI using a Tyan boads?
    • Perhaps the word "concept" design has been lost on you.
      • The concept (another pre-built 'gaming rig', as TFA goes out of its way to state many times over) is lame and the design just sucks. I'd sooner buy a full rack and just wheel it into a corner than have that glowing, plastic robot dog if I wanted a 'supercomputer'.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by kaytodaizzik (900653)
      When the state-of-the-art in aftermarket case design is neon glow and case windows, can we really expect more that this from a system integrator? I'm of the opinion (to be taken with a grain of salt) they should have made it silver and glass with smooth curves, like a circa-1960s flying saucer. At least that way having the guts exposed would be cute, instead of garish.

  • No thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jschen (1249578) on Saturday March 15 2008, @10:45AM (#22759688)

    I don't need the very best computer, but if I needed/wanted the best, cost be damned...

    That's hardly something that would fit under my desk. And there's no discussion of performance specs, just a bunch of hype. Besides, with serviceability taking a back seat, you won't be able to upgrade the thing readily, probably making it at the top of its game only for a few months.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Nitemare14 (1256834)
      From the concept mockup picture, it looks like at least the video cards are supposed to be at the top in a mostly open place. I can't really tell from the picture of the actual product, but I should hope they stuck with that.
    • It looks like a bad case mod with some overclocking and fancy cooling. That doesn't make it the ultimate computer. The overclocking crowd isn't interested in speed, they want to see how far you can push a particular chip. If they really wanted speed (and stability) at any cost, as the article claims, they'd just buy a computer speced for that performance.
  • Looks like something that will run around the room yelling "Exterminate!" In a high squeaky voice. £10,000 for a custom cooled Skulltrail? Uhhh... No.
  • It looks like there's no space left in the case at all. How many hard drives can it hold? How many CD-ROM drives. If I went all out on a computer with quad SLI, and dual quad core CPUs I'm not going to cheap out on hard drives.

    I currently have a Lian Li [newegg.com] PC-V2000 full tower. Holds something like 12 hard drives and 6 CD-ROMs, I had 8 drives (2.2TB) and 1 CD-ROM. Plus it gives me more than enough room to work with. The only time it's massive size became an issue is when I moved and had to bring the compu

    • Re:How practical is it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by chill (34294) on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:10AM (#22759792) Homepage Journal
      If I was spending $20K U.S. on a PC like that, hard drives would be in a separate case, RAID and connected via a SAN. They generate too much heat and vibration and need to be separate from the main electronics. Ditto for optical drives. Once you start moving up the food chain in computing, storage is usually a separate beast.

  • But generally speaking, the extreme high end of modern computing consists of a big ugly box housing that generates a lot of noise.
    I won't say that I'm much of an Apple fan, but in many cases they are absolutely spot on with the less is more philosophy. No matter how "cool" this thing looks, it doesn't really disprove that high-end computing is typically ugly box housing. It adds new elements of annoyance that I would not like to see in any room.
    • Plenty of cases are available that look, at least in my opinion, better than the macPro cheese grater.
      • Plenty of cases are available that look, at least in my opinion, better than the macPro cheese grater.

        But the Mac Pro isn't just about looks. In many ways, it's among the easiest to get into for drives and cards, and it's incredibly quiet. It is the quietest workstation that I've been exposed to, and it's quieter than many regular performance desktops too. There aren't any cables for the hard drives, as the hard drives just connect to the main board just like a drive module would connect to a backplane

  • It'd be nice.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by arpad1 (458649) on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:01AM (#22759758)
    ..if there were some performance figures. I don't give that much of a damn how it looks if it runs like a son of a gun.
  • I'll stick with my simple and basic looking P180. It can be just as super as this toy with the same hardware, and it doesn't look like a crazy plastic turd.

  • Not by any means a 'supercomputer' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Junta (36770) on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:09AM (#22759790)
    This is a high-end dual socket box that incorporates cooling that is probably quieter than equivalent air cooling. It has nothing to do with the visions of 'supercomputer' and the word supercomputer itself is always a relative term. In 1993, the top supercomputer had 60 gigaflops, with a theoretical of 131 gigaflops. This system has a theoretical of 102 gigaflops and probably can get 80-85 gigaflops measured, so it would manage to beat the number 1 supercomputer of 15 years ago.

    Nowadays, the most recent list has the #500 supercomputer at nearly 6 teraflops (rpeak of 10 teraflops). Or, to quantify, the lowest of the top 500 is still 100 times more powerful than one of these boxes.

    Supercomputer in your palm, supercomputer in the desk, as long as you get to pick the year by which you declare what a 'supercomputer' is, you can declare whatever you want.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dissy (172727)

      Supercomputer in your palm, supercomputer in the desk, as long as you get to pick the year by which you declare what a 'supercomputer' is, you can declare whatever you want.

      This thing isn;t even a supercomputer of 15 years ago.

      One of the staples of being a supercomputer (same with mainframes) is their high availability.

      Will this system let you swap out CPUs or RAM while running? How bout all of the rest of the hardware?
      Can you perform a two or more stage swap over and upgrade the -entire- base of hardware, so that the applications on the OS don't even realize it happened, essentially replacing the entire system live?
      Can it detect bad/failed CPUs or newly added CPUs with desi

      • Availability in many of the supercomputer deployments is measured in percentage of the participating servers that stay up, not by continuous uptime. Applications may be killed off, but the job scheduler restarts them either from the beggining or a checkpoint. In the end, an application has executed a clean run, but instances of that application might have died a horrible death along the way. For the sake of cost, supercomputing has been in the business of migrating redundancy up toward tolerant software

  • What has happened to /.? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DAldredge (2353) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:12AM (#22759804) Journal
    FTA :"A further six months were spent on manufacturing a working prototype. The system was initially slated to use Intel's maligned V8 platform, but was later changed to the current Skulltrail - incorporating two quad-core CPUs natively running at 3.2GHz on a motherboard that supported four graphics cards - when the design became available.: Since when is that a modern supercomputer?

  • wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by darkwhite (139802) on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:15AM (#22759818)
    Reminds me of the Badonkadonk land cruiser [amazon.com].

    Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.
  • That's not a supercomputer at all. It's just a casemodded,liquid cooled, 2-x86 CPU PC with 4 graphics cards:

    The system was initially slated to use Intel's maligned V8 platform, but was later changed to the current Skulltrail - incorporating two quad-core CPUs natively running at 3.2GHz on a motherboard that supported four graphics cards - when the design became available.


    The only thing any supercomputer has to do with that machine is that the vendor's tech director bought an old Cray:

    A little-known fact is that Armari's technical director, Dan Goldsmith, being the eccentric chap he is, bought a decommissioned Cray supercomputer - used in the Cold War - a while back. Cray's extra-large computers (by today's standards) required some serious cooling, as you would expect, and Cray engineered some class-leading liquid cooling to keep the voluminous beast operating within tolerances.

    Dan has used the inspiration from Cray's research, and indeed the coolant itself, which works in a temperature-range of -110C through to 90C, as a base for the XCP (eXtreme Concept Prototype) - the total immersion model.


    I bet my P4/4.3GHz non-super computer is faster than that old Cray. And there's no way a single 2*4*x86+4*GPU PC is a supercomputer [top500.org] at all.

    And that case is hella ugly.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Doc Ruby (173196)
        You're such a fanboy.

        There's no programming model to get 4 TFLOPS in any usable program. Those supercomputers are built to support highly efficient programming exploiting their HW. Which get at least 5.99TFLOPS out of a theoretical 10TFLOPS. There's not going to be any SW getting even 2TFLOPS out of this jazzed-up PC. Especially since most of the GFLOPS are on the GPUs, which won't run general purpose apps. GPGPU is very limited, and not getting full efficiency out of parallel HW, either.

        FWIW, the PS3 could

  • Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jimktrains (838227) on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:38AM (#22759920) Homepage
    Why do supercomputers need to look sexy? XT3's look good, but, I mean that might be more of me loving what's inside, but that's another story for another post. Most supercomputers are kept in machine/server rooms, no? People don't normally see these things, so why does it matter if they look sexy? Decent is enough.

    BTW, it's fugly:) (Ok, maybe not that bad, but I still don't like it).

  • Piece of shit (Score:5, Informative)

    by Aaron Isotton (958761) on Saturday March 15 2008, @11:44AM (#22759958)
    It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) for a dual quad core running at 3.2 GHz in an ugly case? Come on. You can get a Mac Pro with the same speed for a *fourth* of the price. And it looks better.

    When a computer is four times more expensive than the equivalent from *Apple*, then you know that something is seriously wrong.
  • "A New Concept in PC Case Mods"

    • Exactly. And, as TFA says, a supercomputer "under your desk" makes all that kewl looking plastic sort of pointless.

      The dust bunnies might think its neat, but I'll never see it.

  • I see no new concept, and definitely not in supercomputer design. All I see an elaborate casemod with cooling. Not much system design went into that, I don't think. It's just a PC, a very normal one at that.

  • Concept cases (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Saturday March 15 2008, @12:21PM (#22760118) Homepage

    This is a supercomputer?

    A few years ago, I was visiting a small PC manufacturer. They were trying for product differentiation from Dell, HP, etc., and had a row of "concept cases" on display. There was one with Viking horns. One like a Darth Vader mask. One something like this one. One that looked like a 1940s Telefunken radio. Some of these went into production. [polywell.com] If you really want a PC that looks like a yellow Samurai mask in plastic, they have some in stock.

    I saw one of the Viking horn models in a surplus store recently.

    • I have one of the Smilodon cases on that page (bought from a dealer). Very solid and good looking too. The fold-down motherboard tray is particularly nice. And hard-disk-clips for easy installation/removal (not the nicest clips I've seen, but certainly usable).
    • Viking horns case...wish I could find this one here :> (forgotten ;) country in central Europe)
  • I took the editors' title of this story too literally.

    Now this [sicortex.com] is a new concept in supercomputers.

    • It seems to be more about torturing a developer to force them to know how to write scalable/portable applications than being an actual practical platform. Sure, 72 cores sounds cool, but being a merely respectible 72 gigaflops (each core is simply a gigaflop) it's bested by a dual-socket Core 2 based workstation with quad core 2.33 in each socket. Practically speaking, many cores is helpful, but the same amount of performance in fewer cores is more flexible. It is a bicycle with training wheels for devel

  • not a supercomputer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wap911 (637820) on Saturday March 15 2008, @05:04PM (#22761708)
    this is much better [reported prior on /.] http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html [umassd.edu] 16 PS3 cell processors for approximately 400 nodes and not a bad price 16 * $500us or $8000 [less if you can stand ebay]

  • Actually, it kinda looks like K9, without the head.

    Yes...mahster!

    --Rob

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.