who wants a supercomputer, and what would you do with it?

[smoker]

The definition of a personal supercomputer goes something like this: It's inexpensive, can sit on a desk, plugs into a wall socket and is at least within jumping distance of the Top500 supercomputing list. By that measure, Nvidia Corp.'s new computer is one of the first arrivals in this emerging product category.

Nvidia today unveiled a workstation it calls the Tesla Personal Supercomputer at the Supercomputing 08 show here. The Tesla sports 960 cores, delivers almost 4 teraflops of performance and costs less than $9,995. It achieves that speed and price by using four graphics processing units (GPU), each of which has 240 cores.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120741&source=rss_news
also:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1227008280995.html

i don't know what i'd do with it, maybe overkill for the home :)

[kpkeerthi]

Play games?

[pladam]

With 960 cores, I could cure cancer AND crack passwords at the same time!

[Johnsie]

I would install a terminal based linux with no GUI and edit html files with nano.

[brunovecchi]

I'd use it to run large scale protein homology modeling jobs and virtual library screening using protein-protein and ligand-protein docking.

[hessiess]

I would install a terminal based linux with no GUI and edit html files with nano.

:lolflag:

[K.Mandla]

I would install a terminal based linux with no GUI and edit html files with nano.
You'd probably have to, because knowing Nvidia's drivers, they probably haven't really got anything that will mesh with that graphics hardware and Linux.

#-o

[mips]

You'd probably have to, because knowing Nvidia's drivers, they probably haven't really got anything that will mesh with that graphics hardware and Linux.

#-o


32 & 64 bit Linux runs just fine on the Tesla from what I gather. The CUDA programming env is also available for linux. Linux & Windows are the only supported environments from nVidia.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_supercomputer_tech_specs.html


Supported Platforms


Microsoft® Windows® XP 64-bit and 32-bit (64-bit recommended)
Linux® 64-bit and 32-bit (64-bit recommended)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5
SUSE 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3

[perlluver]

Nice, I could run Folding At Home, to my hearts content, and come up with a result in a day. Very nice, now to find 9 thousand dollars. Hmm...

[elmer_42]

I'd fold for the Arch Linux team (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=41283). Talk about a PPD boost.

[stmiller]

I'd be doing everything I'm doing now except much faster.

[favadi]

Convert 250GB HD films into normal divx.

[Polygon]

I would install a terminal based linux with no GUI and edit html files with nano.

this made me laugh out loud.

anyway, converting movies is always a good thing. I pretty much have a super computer right now by a lot of people's standards, and i just use it normally, play games at nice fps and stuff =)

[Tomatz]

I would use it as an expensive rabbit hutch :confused:

[Daggo]

Id ask it "What is the meaning of the Universe?"
and try to get a decent answer out of it this time

[zmjjmz]

I would play Urban Terror while looking for extraterrestrial intelligent life.

[grazed]

These wouldn't be very good for gaming at all. The GPU's in there aren't even able to put out a display, they're there for processing power. To achieve an actual display with these computers, you need a normal graphics card. On top of that, from the configurations I have seen, you can only use ONE dedicated graphics card. The only cards that are compatible as far as I know are nvidia's workstation series. (not built to game)

So any half decent gaming machine running SLI will out perform this while playing a game.

As far as running SETI@home, Folding, and the such... you would be limited to your ISP's bandwidth. Those computers would finish tasks WAY faster than you would ever be able to download them/ write and read from HDD.

These are more for universities and corporations that have the hardware to support such a machine.

[nynoah]

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120741

I know this may not be the place to post this. But I figured some of you would be as stoked as I am about this.

All I have to say is the world of computers just had a paradigm shift.

[overdrank]

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9120741

I know this may not be the place to post this. But I figured some of you would be as stoked as I am about this.

All I have to say is the world of computers just had a paradigm shift.
There is a thread about this
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=988069&highlight=supercomputer
I will move your post there :)

[jespdj]

I would use it for computer graphics, ray tracing. I've been interested in this for a long time and sometimes I have periods that I start writing my own ray tracing programs.

Ray tracing is one of those things which is very well suited for massively parallel computing, so a personal supercomputer would be great for it.

Maybe in 5 to 10 years, everybody has a computer with hundreds of cores on their desk and they'll cost $1,000 instead of $10,000.

[Phreaker]

Cosmology@home

[I-75]

Maybe this will be the one computer that Vista could run really fast on.

[cmay]

WOW i want that. i could dualboot Freedos and minix then , very cool.

[toupeiro]

we have a few tesla systems running in my company... I hear they are not easy to code for... I think its funny that the definition of desktop super-computing would qualify the Tesla to be perfectly honest, since it is more of an add-on component. It cannot function without a host (http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_compatible_platforms.html). By itself, it is not capable of being a desktop device. Don't get me wrong, its very powerful.

Personally, I don't think HPC class hardware belongs at the desktop... If you run a business that truly has HPC needs, surely you have a rack in a datacenter, or at least a temperature and power controlled room... Trust me, NO facilities planner for a building floorplan prepares for HPC at the desk, and just due to the nature of HPC, if you stay current, you will likely overload it within a year or two.

Now this (http://us.fixstars.com/store/index.php?submit=software&submitimg[hardware][solutions]=1) is more like desktop supercomputing to me:

With a tesla, you have to buy that 9K xw9400 or equivalent host, so you are talking at minimum 20K to have a tesla system that could really start doing HPC. I'm more of a fan of the 1U rack tesla's for obvious reasons, like I stated above.

with a 32 node PS3 doing greater than 5 teraflops. Of course their markup is a bit much, but there are docs on the web on how to build this using open source software. You can get a PS3 at consumerdeopt.com for $349, but for the sake of example, lets say they are 500 a piece, and you build your own 32 node cluster of them for around 16K on the high side if you built it yourself. PS3's don't put off as much heat as standard HPC equipment, they don't draw as much power, and they are a self sufficient processing unit. You can put linux directly on a PS3. You don't HAVE to have a head node, or at least not one that is so expensive. Also, since linux will run natively on a PS3, they are MUCH easier and cheaper to code for.

[handy]

I don't want a supercomputer, as I have no use for it.

So if someone gave me one I would make it available for solving problems that would benefit our combined future.

[rakan_dr]

i'd use it to play music! Maybe as an mp3 player, powerful mp3 player ;)

[-grubby]

i don't want a supercomputer, as i have no use for it.

So if someone gave me one i would make it available for solving problems that would benefit our combined future.

+1

[nothingspecial]

The Tesla sports 960 cores, delivers almost 4 teraflops of performance and costs less than $9,995. It achieves that speed and price by using four graphics processing units (GPU), each of which has 240 cores.

I have absolutely no idea what you`re talking about. :confused:

[grazed]

we have a few tesla systems running in my company... I hear they are not easy to code for... I think its funny that the definition of desktop super-computing would qualify the Tesla to be perfectly honest, since it is more of an add-on component. It cannot function without a host (http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_compatible_platforms.html). By itself, it is not capable of being a desktop device. Don't get me wrong, its very powerful.

Personally, I don't think HPC class hardware belongs at the desktop... If you run a business that truly has HPC needs, surely you have a rack in a datacenter, or at least a temperature and power controlled room... Trust me, NO facilities planner for a building floorplan prepares for HPC at the desk, and just due to the nature of HPC, if you stay current, you will likely overload it within a year or two.

Now this (http://us.fixstars.com/store/index.php?submit=software&submitimg[hardware][solutions]=1) is more like desktop supercomputing to me:

With a tesla, you have to buy that 9K xw9400 or equivalent host, so you are talking at minimum 20K to have a tesla system that could really start doing HPC. I'm more of a fan of the 1U rack tesla's for obvious reasons, like I stated above.

with a 32 node PS3 doing greater than 5 teraflops. Of course their markup is a bit much, but there are docs on the web on how to build this using open source software. You can get a PS3 at consumerdeopt.com for $349, but for the sake of example, lets say they are 500 a piece, and you build your own 32 node cluster of them for around 16K on the high side if you built it yourself. PS3's don't put off as much heat as standard HPC equipment, they don't draw as much power, and they are a self sufficient processing unit. You can put linux directly on a PS3. You don't HAVE to have a head node, or at least not one that is so expensive. Also, since linux will run natively on a PS3, they are MUCH easier and cheaper to code for.

you can install a dedicated graphics card in the new models, they can run a display and act as their own host.

[3rdalbum]

Folding@Home for Linux doesn't have support for GPU-based calculations. If you wanted to do some serious folding, you'd have to be running Windows :-(

If I had one of those computers, I'd play around with it for a while before realising that there's not really anything I can do with its extra capabilities. I'd send it to an ffmpeg developer so they have a reason to implement GPU-based video encoding! Then ask for it back so I can transcode all my DVDs in less than a day :-)

[nerd0795]

Play crysis 2, crysis, far-cry, unreal tournament 3, compile 3 5gb files, render a 4 hours full hi-def animation with blender, check my email, and listen to music all at the same time :)

[zmjjmz]

I would finally get gnome-terminal to work without lagging.

[handy]

How many PS3's in a cluster would it take for you to call it a supercomputer? :-)

8?

32?

[zmjjmz]

How many PS3's in a cluster would it take for you to call it a supercomputer? :-)

8?

32?

Well 4 in a cluster can render GTA5 at 2160p at 240fps.

[grazed]

How many PS3's in a cluster would it take for you to call it a supercomputer? :-)

8?

32?

8 was the number for the first ps3 supercomputer. a professor replaced his cluster with 8 ps3's. if you google it you can find a ton of stories on the guy.

there have been much larger clusters made with them since though...

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/08/8-11-07-warhawk-servers.jpg

http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/11/sony-erects-massive-ps3-server-cluster-for-warhawk-mayhem/

pretty crazy.

[grazed]

Well 4 in a cluster can render GTA5 at 2160p at 240fps.

a common misconception is that "supercomputers" or clusters can run games.

while technically you could run a game on the host computer, the fps, and rendering would soley run on the host leaving the rest of the cluster inactive. so it would as well as if you were using a single computer or ps3.

[Grant A.]

Do LFS within 5 minutes.

[handy]

8 was the number for the first ps3 supercomputer. a professor replaced his cluster with 8 ps3's. if you google it you can find a ton of stories on the guy.

there have been much larger clusters made with them since though...

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/08/8-11-07-warhawk-servers.jpg

http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/11/sony-erects-massive-ps3-server-cluster-for-warhawk-mayhem/

pretty crazy.

Yes, I recently read about him - Dr. Frank Mueller:

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

[SunnyRabbiera]

I plan on taking over the world with it, mwa hahahaha! :D

[toupeiro]

you can install a dedicated graphics card in the new models, they can run a display and act as their own host.

.. and run .. what OS? last I checked, a Linux kernel doesn't contain GPU instruction sets to interface with at the level required to host an Operating System.

[CrazyArcher]

A supercomputer would eat too much power - I won't be able to pay the bill! Besides, I won't have a use for it anyway. A quad-core server with a rack of storage boxes plugged into it would be enough.

[bobbocanfly]

I'd hack the Gibson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)).

[wrtpeeps]

Sell it. Make a fortune.

[amitabhishek]

I will wait till Japanese make an Aibo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO) out of Tesla.