[Beowulf] MS Cray

[John Hearns]

>
> You got me. I saw that when I continued reading the article *after* my
> post. I was hoping no one else read the article to the end.
>
> Noise-cancellation devices may help keep the noise down, but the air
> flow under or "behind" a desk is still a problem. Fans can only move air
> if there's a place for the air to come from, and a place for the air to go.
>

I do agree with you there.  Many times we've seen  personal supercomputers
touted, only for them to fade away. Fancy enclosure or no, you  have to
think twice about one of these under your desk. Networks are fast these
days.

I've also seen plenty of people who buy quite ordinary perforated steel
racks and are convinced a cluster will sit happily in a work area, or in a
room dedicated to the cluster plus graphics workstations (I can think of
examples from Streamline and from my company previous to that). Such users
tend to rapidly abandon that idea!

I once got an Intel twin motherboard system to take home, for evaluation and
power draw measurements for a contract at CERN. I live in a two bedroom
apartment in central London. I couldn't power this thing up for fear of the
neighbours being woken up, though I'm quite happy to share a machine room
with 200 of the things.

John Hearns
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