IBM ASCI White

[Bill Rankin]

A couple questions, since I've lost the original reference.
This is kind of targeted at those in this group who have 
experience in large-system installations.


> > > The $/GFlop is pretty good too, $8.9K/Gflop.  Has anyone
> > > beat this?

Does the IBM "price" include
  - power supplys, backups, UPS?
  - cooling of any sort?
  - what level of personnel support is included
    in this contract?
  - what level of software support is offered?


> > Of course -- it's hard to build a cluster that costs that 
> > much for list price. The FSL system was cheaper than that.

Greg, to the extent you can tell us, what was included in the
FSL system?  Was it hardware only?  On-site support?

Just trying to get an apples/apples comparison here, while pointing
out that putting together a system of this size there is a lot more to the
total system cost than just how much a single node costs.


> I'd second this.  Whatever a "GFLOP" is in a cluster environment
> (apparently, by agreement, the simple aggregate sum of the single CPU
> GFLOPs, which didn't mean much in the first place;-).

Marketing drivel at it's finest.

-bill