3 ms·
As a Hokie, this is good but SystemX was way more revolutionary. At the time, supercomputers weren't built on consumer hardware and the fact that it was in the
by yardie 15y ago
As a Hokie, this is good but SystemX was way more revolutionary. At the time, supercomputers weren't built on consumer hardware and the fact that it was in the top 5 (3?) with a bunch of G5s was like a shockwave. Basically, COTS supercomputers had finally arrived when SystemX came out.
- scott_s 15y agoAs another VT alum (two times over, and the second time being last year), I can tell you that what they're probably most interested in is the energy efficiency. Feng's group does research with both GPUs and power efficiency. Wu Feng and Kirk Cameron (also at VT) were the ones who started the Green500 list.
- yardie 15y agoI've noticed the last few years of supercomputer announcements has focused less on raw performance and more balanced performance/energy. Small world, I'm also a '03 alum. I was just going through my address book and a Scott S. was in the list with a 540 area code. We might have been in a study group at one point.
- patrickgzill 15y agoBeowulf cluster? ASCI RED (sort of)?
- yardie 15y agoASCI Red was a supercomputer built for Sandia by Intel so not exactly COTS. Beowulf was still in the experimental phase. Researchers were building 5-20 node clusters. IIRC, there weren't any Beowulf clusters you would consider supercomputer at that time. Keep in mind the fastest supercomputer at the time cost $400 million and this one cost just $5 million.
- wmf 15y agoToo bad System X was a publicity stunt that was never used for science AFAIK.
- scott_s 15y agoI heard of at least one engineering grad student who made heavy use of it to get work done. (Which is not a great counter-point, I know.)
- yardie 15y agoI left in 03 so AFAIK the researchers using SystemX were coming from ICAM and the Bioinformatics department. The professor I worked under (as a gopher) had a 4way G4 cluster doing protein synthesis. He was very excited to get processor time on this supercomputer. But whatever, some publicity stunt. They were stupid enough to waste money upgrading and expanding it because no one was using it.