/. US DOE gets a $24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 09:37:07AM -0500, Richard Walsh wrote:

>  True, but the dual-floating point units in the core are not
>  likely to be added to ...

I don't think that's a good guess. Not only are conventional cpus
getting wider over time, but the whole point of EPIC and VLIW in
general is that they potentially go _really_ wide. And most scientific
codes can use lots of functional units.

>  When I saw the posting, I was surprise how few IA-64 processors 
>  (even with the extras) were to be had for ~$25,000,000. The Pentium
>  4 looks a better deal at this level of analysis.

PNL's codes require 64-bit addressing. I don't think anyone was
willing to bid AMD's Hammer, although it was a possibility.

The problem with pricing this bid are that it's all forward-priced. HP
is committing to delivering Madison processors when McKinley isn't
even formally released. That means risk, and that means you need to
subtract off $$ to cover that risk. That skews all of your analysis.

BTW, the interconnect is next generation Quadrics. I've never seen any
specs for it, nor pricing.

greg