So I was looking around the net the other day and I found out these people built a supercomputer for about 1300 bucks here is the link
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/09/03/1256-microwulf-supercomputer-smaller-than-bread-box-runs-at-2625-gigaflops/
I was thinking that you guys should build one and test it out and benchmark it. I wasnt sure what forum to put this in but this seemed like the correct place.
No disrespect intended but his name is Wendell
Exactly what purpose does the thing serve?
One single 780ti is 2.25 orders of magnitude faster than that cluster.
Briefly we did use all our machines for a distributed 3d renderfarm for TV shows. It was about 20 i7 920s plus one 8800gtx for each i7 total GFLOPS.
An 8800 GTX (which came out about a year before that article was written) was more than an order of magnitude faster than that computer... In fact that computer was only about as powerful as an overclocked Q6600 of the day, so I'm not really sure how it was determined to be a supercomputer. In stead of assembling a cluster of conventional cpu's I'd be more interested in combining multiple high end gpus. The trouble is finding/writing the software to utilize all the hardware.
here is an example of what I'm talking about.
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOpBlYx2H1o
Maybe you could put together something with 4 GTX Titan Z's
I haven't personally laid my hands on one of these http://www.netstor.com.tw/_03/03_02.php?MTEx but it used to be that cisco (they made some 1u compute servers (they were crap) that could use external pci express cases like that nestor box. IBM did the same, with their NUMA machines. I miss my old quad socket NUMA IBM with 32gb ram.
Something like that with a 6 or so titans with the Dell R270 as the host.. would rock. About 4 of those in a cluster would be an absurd number of teraflops.
26.25 gigaflops?
my 4770K does more than 4 times that, according to IntelBurnTest
my rig costed less than $1256 :3
the uni i attend has three supercomptuers. each one has like 96GB of RAM, dual Xeons, three nvidia teslas and one quadro. hooked up to 1600p panel. they are cuda monsters but are old by technology standards. we are up for grant renewal soon, but the professor in charge of that whole project is so engrossed in his AI/data mining research that he only plans to purchase hardware that will allow him to do more of it as opposed to anything useful for students.
I was actually talking about a faster one I knew the post was old on that page but I pointed out the 1300 bucks because they did it for cheap, I thought that now you could build a super computer for much cheaper and faster, kinda like when people build fast cars just to see how far you can go. I didn't realize you already have built one though.
I wouldn't mind a video on how to set up a renderfarm or a cluster. I've set up a few but its been a while.
As a second thought
With all the changes with cloud resource sharing, I'm kinda surprised we don't have a mainstream poor mans version for home use. Could be useful with all the tablets out there. Countless times I have sat on my couch wishing my surface could share resources with my workstation. I know there's screen sharing but sometimes I just want more
Hm I think the name "supercomputer" is somewhat misleading. Supercomputers are clearly powerful devices, but they are not like a bigger version of your desktop. You need to formulate a problem that is solvable in parallel and in best case scaleable.
There are thinks that cannot be faster, even if you have a supercomputer.
Windel = diaper in german.... I'm so sorry :(
There was nothing remarkable about that machine even when it was built. Cluster computing has been around forever, so it's hard to consider a 4 node cluster as a super computer. A super computer, to me, is massively parallel with hundreds, if not thousands of nodes. A quad cpu cluster is basically just a high end workstation imho. You're never going to match the computing capabilities of the fastest supercomputers like jaguar at ORNL on the cheap. The difference with cars and computers is that something like a mustang gt has ~75% of the power (if not more) of much more expensive super cars. The fastest supercomputers are several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest consumer hardware available.
yea, it only means that if you say it means that, so its only you that is insulting anyone, the fact that I misspelled his name is just that, a misspelled name, so maybe you are what you say, "sorry".
A true supercomputer isn't feasible for anyone outside of a government, university or large corporation. Just too expensive. So I assume you mean a Beowulf cluster (basically a network of computers made from commercially available components running in parallel). In which case, I vote for a Raspberry Piowulf:
Useless has hell unless you need to run some kind of simple parallel simulation or something, but still kind of awesome...
Wait.. is there are rack on top of the server dedicated for Hard Drives?
Yes, this isnt a Compute-Server... Looks like a HP Storage Server... Not made for number-crunching :)
