[Beowulf] 96 Processors Under Your Desktop (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)

[Russell Nordquist]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 17:18, Jim Lux wrote:

> 
> More to the point, given the market that Orion is selling into (offices), 
> what's the power consumption and noise level of the quad opteron?  If Orion 
> has 96 processors and you use your 4 Opteron/12 Efficeon ratio, that's like 
> 32 opterons (i.e. 8 quads).  If opterons are 100W each, that's 3200W, which 
> is quite a bit more than the 1500-1800W the Orion box is shooting for.
> 

Good point, but this is based on a price ration. The ratio I am really
interested in is a performance ratio. so...
according to
http://www.sun.com/amd/39497A_HPC_WhitePaper_2xCli.pdf
a quad 1.8GHz opteron ran a 12Gflop linpack. 1.8 is a bit outdated. A
2.4GHz should get ~16 Gflop. Compare this to the advertised 18Gflop for
the Orion box and adjust for marketing and they are about the same. So
your point is even better and the Orion box wins on heat/noise. Now for
compilers...

On a side note, I have been waiting for something to happen on the low
power/more cpu for a while. It seems like there is a lot of room for
growth in that area. 

russell

> 
> 
> 
> James Lux, P.E.
> Spacecraft Telecommunications Section
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
> 4800 Oak Grove Drive
> Pasadena CA 91109
> tel: (818)354-2075
> fax: (818)393-6875