Computing

SGI’s ‘Personal Supercomputer’ Handles 80 Cores, 1TB RAM

1:20AM September 23, 2009 | Adam Frucci

SGI’s Octane II is a “personal supercomputer”, which isn’t to say it’s designed for you to play video games and check your email on. It’s just a supercomputer that garage physicists might be able to save up for.

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance…

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalise on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

For about $US8000, it’s not cheap by normal computer standards, but by supercomputer standards it’s a bargain. [SGI via The Inquirer via Boing Boing]


Comments

  • matt

    September 23, 2009 at 9:29 AM

    cool. but for anything that can harness the power of gpgpu, a normal computer with a few top of the line gpus in it will kick the shit out of 80 cpu cores.

  • Douglas Orchard

    September 23, 2009 at 12:02 PM

    But can it play Crysis..?

    • Daniel

      September 23, 2009 at 10:50 PM

      Probably. It will treat crysis the same way current PC’s treat quake 1 hahaha.

    • Adam Roberts

      September 23, 2009 at 10:51 PM

      5 times over!

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