[Beowulf] SC13: the Limulus boxen appear ...

[Joe Landman]

[Disclosure:  we do have a business relationship with Basement 
Supercomputing. ]

I have to say, that one of the most popular aspects of the show for us, 
was the Limulus system that Doug Eadline had set up in our booth.  This 
is a terrific system.

I really like the concept of a personal supercomputer, one where, as 
Doug puts it, you own the reset switch.  We tried, and did not succeed, 
in building interest in "muscular desktops" with huge amounts of 
processors, IO, and graphics.  It cost way to much to build these.

Doug comes along and in very beowulf-ish fashion, says "hey, lets build 
a very low electrical power many core distributed system from lower cost 
parts".  It took a few years from project inception, but the concept is 
sound.  Far more sound than the "muscular desktop" strategy.

He ran hadoop on it, and was showing off running the overall system.  I 
think the configs for hadoop might be slightly different than whats on 
the product page: 
http://www.basement-supercomputing.com/index.php/products/hikashop-menu-for-products-listing 
, but its similar enough that you can get the concept.

I was simply blown away by this.  The response came anywhere from "thats 
exactly what we need" to "this is very cool" with everything in between. 
  They are awesome boxes, and it looks like it could fill a very nice 
niche for a number of folks.

If you've not checked out the Limulus project in the past 
(http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/ and twtr @LimulusProject) , 
definitely have a look at it.  Returning to our core value proposition, 
of power at lower cost, with creative designs, is deeply gratifying to 
me.  Have a gander at the benchmark page: 
http://limulus.basement-supercomputing.com/wiki/LimulusBenchmarks

It needs to be emphasized that this is not a toy system.  You can do 
real work on it, and its trivial to setup and get going.

Bravo to Doug!


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
twtr : @scalableinfo
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
cell : +1 734 612 4615