Eric Thibodeau wrote:
Joe Landman wrote:
Gus Correa wrote:
Otherwise, your "newbie scientist" can put his/her earbuds and pump
up the volume on his Ipod,
while he/she navigates through the Vista colorful 3D menus.
Owie .... I can just imagine the folks squawking about this at SC08
"Yes folks, you need a Cray supercomputer to make Vista run at
acceptable performance ..."
Maybe they have a "tune options for performance" option ;)
The machine seems to run w2k8. My own experience with w2k8 is that,
frankly, it doesn't suck. This is the first time I have seen a
windows release that I can say that about.
A few questions (not necessarily expecting a response):
POSIX?
VERBS?
Kernel latency and scheduler control?
Don't mistake me for a w2k8 apologist. I reamed them pretty hard on the
lack of a real posix infrastructure (they claim SUA, but frankly it
doesn't build most of what we throw at it, so it really is a non-starter
and not worth considering IMO). They need to pull Cygwin in close and
tight to get a good POSIX infrastructure. It is in their best
interests. Sadly, I suspect the ego driven nature of this will pretty
much prevent them from doing this. Can't touch the "toxic" OSS now, can
they ...
IB Verbs? Well through OFED, yes. Through the windows stack? Who
knows. We were playing with it on JackRabbit for a customer test/benchmark.
Kernel latency? Much better/more responsive than w2k3. Scheduler
control? Not sure how much you have. I don't like deep diving into
registries ... that is a pretty sure way to kill a windows machine.
These are the real barriers IMHO, without minimally supporting POSIX
(threads), there is very little incentive to use the machine for
development unless you're willing to accept the code will _only_ run on
your "desktop".
The low end economics probably won't work out for this machine though,
unless it is N times faster than some other agglomeration of
Intel-like products. Adding windows will add cost, not performance in
any noticeable way.
The question that Cray (and every other vendor building non-commodity
units) is how much better is this than a small cluster someone can
build/buy on their own? Better as in faster, able to leap more tall
buildings in a single bound, ... (Superman TV show reference for those
not in the know). And the hard part will be justifying the additional
cost. If the machine isn't 2x the performance, would it be able to
justify 2x the price? Since it appears to be a somewhat well branded
cluster, I am not sure that argument will be easy to make.
I just rebuilt a 32 core cluster for ~5k$ (CAD) (8*Q6600 1Gig RAM/node +
gige netwroking). Bang for the buck? I can't wait to see the CX1's
performance specs under _both_ windows and Linux.
The desktop CPUs/MBs will get you best bang per buck, as long as you
don't mind no ECC, and 8GB ram limits per node. For your applications,
this might be fine. For others, with large memory footprint and long
run times, I see people need/require ECC (as memory density increases,
ECC becomes important .... darned cosmic rays/natural decays/noisy power
supplies/...)
Eric
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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