Holy shit, this is amazing. Just like IBM invented/popularised personal computers (PCs) back in the 1980's (before that they took up the size of a room and cost millions), NVIDIA has just releasing a line of personal supercomputers. They cost under $10,000 (again, these used to be the size of a room and cost millions).
That's pretty amazing if you consider that not long ago, the average PC cost $5,000 (and we haven't even adjusted for inflation).
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/11/23/068234.shtml
I am so going to save up for one of these puppies.
Some brackground: supercomputers run on a parallel processing architecture. Instead of using one processor to compute one thing at a time, they use multiple processors (maybe 4, maybe 90) to do multiple things at once.
The 'dual core' concept in modern PCs is similar (but not the same).
Tesla PSCs (personal supercomputers) have 4 processors, each with 240 cores. They use a GPU (graphical processing unit) instead of a CPU (central processing unit), but that's another story.
Previously, people have created homemade supercomputers by hooking up multiple PS3s, whilst the ANU built a superfast Beowulf cluster by hooking up 90 computers each with 400 MHz processors - it cost just a few thousand dollars.
Telling you how fast this thing runs in hertz would be useless, because supercomputers tend to be measured in flops instead, and parallel architectures obviously compute in parallel rather than serial. Suffice to say, though, it would be significantly more than 10 GHz.
I'm having a nerdgasm.
That's pretty amazing if you consider that not long ago, the average PC cost $5,000 (and we haven't even adjusted for inflation).
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/11/23/068234.shtml
I am so going to save up for one of these puppies.
Some brackground: supercomputers run on a parallel processing architecture. Instead of using one processor to compute one thing at a time, they use multiple processors (maybe 4, maybe 90) to do multiple things at once.
The 'dual core' concept in modern PCs is similar (but not the same).
Tesla PSCs (personal supercomputers) have 4 processors, each with 240 cores. They use a GPU (graphical processing unit) instead of a CPU (central processing unit), but that's another story.
Previously, people have created homemade supercomputers by hooking up multiple PS3s, whilst the ANU built a superfast Beowulf cluster by hooking up 90 computers each with 400 MHz processors - it cost just a few thousand dollars.
Telling you how fast this thing runs in hertz would be useless, because supercomputers tend to be measured in flops instead, and parallel architectures obviously compute in parallel rather than serial. Suffice to say, though, it would be significantly more than 10 GHz.
I'm having a nerdgasm.
