[Beowulf] dollars-per-teraflop : any lists like the Top500?

Rahul Nabar rpnabar at gmail.com
Tue Jun 29 22:30:12 PDT 2010


The Top500 list has many useful metrics but I didn't see any $$ based
metrics there. Are there any lists that document the $-per-teraflop
(apologies to international members!) of any of the systems in the
Supercomputer / Beowulf world? Googling "dollars per teraflop" didn't
give me anything useful.

I'm speculating, one reason could be that sites are loath to disclose
their exact $ purchase prices etc. But on the other hand for most of
the publicly owned  systems this should be accessible information
anyways. I was just thinking that this might be an interesting
parameter to track. I was also curious as to when systems become
larger is there an economy of scale in the Beowulf world? i.e. for
something like Jaguar or Kraken is the $/teraflop much lower than what
it is for my tiny 100-node system. Another question could be: Is it
cheaper to assemble 100 Teraflops of capacity in the US or WU or China
etc.

Of course, HPC is not really commoditized so a Teraflop based $ value
may not be strictly an apples-to-apples comparison but still.....

Just wondering what statistics are available out there......

-- 
Rahul



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