Need a supercomputer but can’t afford a Cray or time on IBM’s behemoth Blue/Gene? According to an article at New Scientist, you might have an option besides stringing together all of the neighborhood Dells. It seems a company in California is marketing a small supercomputer with a price tag of $100,000. Certainly not pocket change, but with a claimed peak power of 230 Gflops and about the size of a refrigerator, just slide the armoire out of the way. Sporting 96 1.2 GHz processors, this mini comes out at $435/Gflop (using simplistic math of course). Granted it wouldn’t make the last rung of the latest Top500 Supercomputer ladder and you wouldn’t use it to run a large, complex CFD simulation, but 230 Gflops is more than capable of crunching some solid numbers.

Such a machine could very well find its niche in smaller markets and bring computing power to those who need it but couldn’t really afford it. With IDC reporting that the high performance computing market grew roughly 23% from 2003 to 2004, which includes statistics of systems valued at less than $50K and more than $1M, the demand is clearly there.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.