They aren’t selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn’t too far off, as costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use.
Silicon Graphics International Corp. on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory.
An Octane III with a 10 dual socket, four cores, Xeon L5520 processors, for 80 cores, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit Ethernet networking is priced at about $53,000.
This new supercomputer’s peak performance of about 726 GFLOPS won’t put it on the Top500 supercomputer list, but that’s not the point of the machine, SGI says. Rather, a key feature is the system’s ease of use.
This market is mostly “made up of people who typically don’t have HPC experience, and so the transition to these systems has to be easy,” said Conway. He said SGI has a good history of producing systems that work well out of the box.
This embiggens me to take my dusty old SGI 320 Workstation out of the attic for old times’ sake!
