On Monday, Microsoft and supercomputer manufacturer Cray announced that they have teamed up to release the Cray CX1, the most affordable supercomputer that Cray has ever created. Prices start at $25,000 and range up to $60,000.The CX1 will run Microsoft HPC Server 2008 and is purpose built for offices, laboratories and other non-traditional HPC environments. The system incorporates up to 8 nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors, either dual or quad core, and delivers up to 64 gigabytes of memory per node. It also features up to 4 terabytes of internal storage. Cray says that it doesn't requires a dedicated computer room, special power or cooling requirements like typical supercomputers.
Scientists at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA plan to use a Cray CX1 with Microsoft HPC Server 2008 for mathematical modeling and visualization.
Over at the Windows Server division blog, Tina Couch explained that ordering a CX1 is "as easy as shopping on Amazon.com. Customers can go online, order the CX1 system using a configurator and pay with credit card. If that’s not making supercomputing mainstream, I don’t know what is."
We could not find the CX1 on Amazon, yet.
View: Cray Press Release | Microsoft HPC Server | Windows Server Weblog
It comes Vista Super-Ultra-Mega-Colossal Edition
Why sadly? Whats wrong with it?
Why sadly? Whats wrong with it?
Could of got similar performance from other systems for the same amount of money by our testing... but management always wants the newest "trend" they heard the word supercomputer and jumped all over it... while we had a 30 node linux cluster all running quad core Xeons we only spent $30k on and it works just as well as this will in our calculations... but hey what do I know... only an engineer... let the managment tell us how to do our jobs... *LOL* they give us the money we'll spend it on what ever they say......
You casted the bait, now give us the info!What I expected.
It would be nice to see a more detailed comparison (not just number of nodes, but cluster performance) and if the Linux cluster cost includes 3 year support (like Red Hat and others offer).
Either way, Linux and BSD have been doing clustering for a long time. Microsoft is the newcomer in this block, and (while they have a couple of supercomputers in the top 500) they have to prove themselves against platforms with a proven successful and powerful history.
Or security updates every first Tuesday of the month
Marketing ploy ? Cheeper clusters could probably preform better.
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