They aren't selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. Silicon Graphics International Corp. But that day probably isn't too far off, as the costs fall and they become easier to use.
Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The system can be expanded to an 80 core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. SGI said multiple configurations are available, which can include use of Nvidia graphics processing unit card as well as Intel's low powered Atom chip. An Octane III with a 10 dual socket, four cores, Xeon L5520 processors nodes, for 80 cores, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit Ethernet networking is priced at about $53,000. This new supercomputer's peak performance of about 726 floating point operations per second (FLOPS) won't put it on the Top 500 supercomputer list, but that's not the point of the machine, SGI says. SGI says that Atom chips are being used for application development and testing scale-out application code.
A key feature instead is the system's ease of use. Other major vendors already have products that fit into this category. Steve Conway, an analyst IDC, says the new SGI system joins a $2 billion worldwide market of HPC category of systems that cost less than $100,000. That market is expected to grow to $2.7 billion by 2013 or nearly 6% a year, which is a good rate of growth considering the server sales generally cratered this year, he said. Among them is Nvidia Corp., which last fall unveiled a desktop supercomputer, the Tesla Personal Supercomputer , that relies heavily on graphics processing unit cards. He said SGI has a good history of producing systems that work well out-of-the-box. This market is mostly "made up of people who typically don't have HPC experience, and so the transition to these systems has to be easy," said Conway.
But Conway questioned the personal supercomputer label on the system. It can come preconfigured with Windows Server or its HPC Server 2008 as well as Red Hat and Suse Linux servers, and includes a list of some 50 HPC compatible applications used in engineering, life sciences, oil and gas exploration and other uses. Although some users may run this system as truly their own personal HPC system, it supports workgroups as well. The customer installs the application. Rackable subsequently changed its name of the combined companies to Silicon Graphics International Corp. Silicon Graphics was an independent company until May of last year, when it was acquired for $42.5 million by Rackable Systems Inc.