lemonadesodaNot exactly. The "old-style" were vector based architectures, like the Cray's of yesteryear. They didnt suffer from the von Neumann control bottleneck when scaling like modern clusters, esp. Beowulf that is now very common. However the Crays were ultra powerful at vector-scalable problems but easily outperformed by much cheaper scalar CPUs for more regular (and easier to program) computing tasks.

Pricing for COTS has just made Cluster supercomputing so cheap relative to SIMD and Vector that SIMD and Vector is essentially dead. However, if you have a SIMD or vector type problem and try to cluster it you hit von Neumann very fast where the marginal gain from an extra node has exponentially decreasing returns.

Anyone want to build their own supercomputer?

www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOWTO.html
www.beowulf.org/overview/index.html

Easy Rhinowhat i find humorous is that fact that we all still mention it's ability to play crysis even when its been almost a year since the game has been out!

Tripriftthe size of it is the thing that gets me thats like a return to the past with the first computers.

DarkMatterDecember + January + February + March + April + May + June = 7 months

It's more like half a year, but you are right about it being like the ultimate test for any hardware. What I find even more humorous is the fact that GT200 and R700 have been delayed by the same amount of time, since the second delay, the cards were first announced to launch more than one year back. I have said it before, but Crysis was developed with those cards in mind. It's the absence of them in the market what has carried over the game's "failure".

lemonadesoda

• Roadrunner, named after the New Mexico state bird, cost about $100 million
• Roadrunner is the world’s first hybrid supercomputer. In a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine® -- originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony Playstation 3® -- will work in conjunction with x86 processors from AMD®.
• Made from Commercial Parts. In total, Roadrunner connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips (on IBM Model LS21 blade servers) as well as 12,960 Cell engines (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers). The Roadrunner system has 80 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter® racks occupying 6,000 square feet. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet -- require 57 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. Companies that contributed components and technology include; Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox and Voltaire.
• Custom Configuration. Two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server are combined into a specialized “tri-blade” configuration for Roadrunner. The machine is composed of a total of 3,456 tri-blades built in IBM’s Rochester, Minn. plant. Standard processing (e.g., file system I/O) is handled by the Opteron processors. Mathematically and CPU-intensive elements are directed to the Cell processors. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 Gigaflops).
• Roadrunner operates on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.