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University of Antwerp Makes 4k € Supercomputer with Four GeForce 9800 GX2 Cards

Mussels

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no the HT has absolutely nothing to do with it. they say in the article, and i quoted it earlier - the ONLY reason they went AMD, was because they couldnt find an Intel board with 4x PCI-E slots.
 
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Mussels said:
no the HT has absolutely nothing to do with it. they say in the article, and i quoted it earlier - the ONLY reason they went AMD, was because they couldnt find an Intel board with 4x PCI-E slots.
Click to expand...

Correct, the CPU and FSB/HT probably sits idle 99% of the time in this setup. They probably could have actually gotten away with using a single core processor with little to now loss in overall performance.
 
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Fastra, version two :D



Dual QC Xeon SBC / PCIe x16 backplane with enough slots for (8) 9800GX2's.
 
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emm skulltrail got 4 pci-e slots
 
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Morgoth said:
emm skulltrail got 4 pci-e slots
Click to expand...

But the last two are too close together to allow 4 9800GX2's to fit. MSI is the only company to make motherboards that have 4 PCI-E slots that all allow two slot cards. If they wanted an Intel solution the P6N Diamond would have worked for them, but it only has PCI-E x16 1.1 slots, not 2.0, but I don't think it would have affected performance.
 
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also probably cost alot more at the time.
 
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Morgoth said:
emm skulltrail got 4 pci-e slots
Click to expand...
Yaa..... but it uses FB-DIMM which is quite slow compared to DDR2 & DDR3........(Means it is bottleneck to bandwith)
 
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sumit_malwadkar said:
Yaa..... but it uses FB-DIMM which is quite slow compared to DDR2 & DDR3........(Means it is bottleneck to bandwith)
Click to expand...

FB-DIMMs aren't really the much slower and don't drastically affect performance and in this application it wouldn't affect performance at all as the system memory isn't used for the caculations.
 
Mussels

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newtekie1 said:
FB-DIMMs aren't really the much slower and don't drastically affect performance and in this application it wouldn't affect performance at all as the system memory isn't used for the caculations.
Click to expand...

it would drastically affect the price, however.

I am sure that memory and CPU power contributed something to this project, all we know is that the GPU's were the main power... we have no idea how important the ram performance truly is.
 
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