A New Concept in Supercomputers

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."

Re:No thanks.

[Nitemare14]

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.

Why?

[jimktrains]

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).

Re:Bad Childish Design

[Original Replica]

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.

Concept cases

[Animats]

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.

Not entirely accurate...

[Junta]

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 rather than having expensive, relatively low volume redundant hardware designs.

One *could* implement that sort of strategy with a single system. Imagine every thing that you executed and cared about was submitted through anacron and anacron wouldn't give up until the program exited successfully. Yanking the system and restarting it would redo the application from the beginning, like supercomputing clusters. The granularity is so coarse you can't help but to notice, but at the core it wouldn't be much different from a server going down among the sea of systems that is a supercomputing cluster. Jobs on a supercomputing cluster are rarely directly interactive, so this sort of jerky behavior will go unnoticed, but if your webbrowser randomly disappeared and then reappeared, it would be jarring.

not a supercomputer

[wap911]

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]