/. US DOE gets a $24.5 Million Linux Supercomputer

[Tim Carlson]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Richard Walsh wrote:

> Stream numbers for this 1.5 GHz chip (estimated) would be around
> 250 MFLOPS for the triad. Using the triad as a baseline for performance
> for this and several others systems and relating it back to
> some estimated cost for several other systems (government purchase
> price only, no recurring costs) this is $70 per MFLOPS sustained
> for the Mckinley (again using triad) ... or more than the CRAY SV2
> ($65), EV6($55), EV7 ($50), Pentium 4 ($30).

I don't think you can calculate the cost at $70 without subtracting out a
few million dollars for various parts. Off the top of my head

1) 53 TB SAN
2) 1.8 TB RAM
3) Quadrics interconnect
4) 117TB local storage

The list just had a discussion about the cost of Quadrics. People were
guessing something like 3K per box?

I haven't seen the actual breakdown of costs, and I'm sure it is under
some NDA anyway.

Having said that, I don't work for the MSCF folks, and I don't want to
speak for them. :)

Tim Carlson
Voice: (509) 376 3423
Email: Tim.Carlson at pnl.gov
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