[Beowulf] Windows in top 10

Vincent Diepeveen diep at xs4all.nl
Thu Nov 20 23:56:59 PST 2008


hi, i'm using now 10 yuan = 1 euro, just for ease of calculation:

2 billion RMB = 2 billion yuah (assumption) = 200 million euro

200 mln / 1920 nodes =  104,166.666666667 euro a node

104k euro a node in short. That's soon 200k dollar.

It doesn't matter what gets delivered for that, if it has just 16 cores,
then it is a factor 5-10 too expensive.

Even if there is 4 expensive FPGA cards in each node or so,
that just doesn't matter.

Additional to that, 128 GB DDR2-800 ECC ram is real real cheap.
We all know this typical government problem of overpaying for hardware.

But it sure means there was enough budget for windows.

Vincent




On Nov 21, 2008, at 7:06 AM, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> A while back a customer of PathScale issued a press release about how
> they were running Windows on their supercomputer, with InfiniPath
> interconnect. We were kinda surprised, since we didn't have Windows
> drivers.
>
> So I was curious about the Dawning 5000A... the previous  
> supercomputers
> in this series ran Linux. But the top500 entry trumpets Windows.  
> Well...
>
> http://tyan.com/newsroom_pressroom_detail.aspx?id=1289
>
> This press release says it runs Linux and Windows. That's a bit more
> credible; I wonder if they actually had to buy the Windows software?
>
> -- greg
>
>
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