Comments on “Yahoo! outsources! India's! giant! supercomputer!” • The Register

Comments on: Yahoo! outsources! India's! giant! supercomputer!

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Memory #

By Andy Barber Posted Monday 24th March 2008 19:38 GMT

When I was working as a telephone engineer back in 1982, I asked a customer what the whirring noise I could hear from their desk. The manager came in puffed out his chest & said "Oh, that the 10Mb Winchester Hard Disk." To which I said, "What on Earth do you need all that memory for?" I'd just bought a ZX81 with a 32kb ExpandeRam!

Complete BS #

By Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 24th March 2008 19:54 GMT

There is no way that thing would be able to run Crysis on medium mode. Does it even have DirectX 10 support?

Powerful #

By Sceptical Bastard Posted Monday 24th March 2008 21:12 GMT

Quote: "Hewlett-Packard-based cluster, sporting 14,400 processors, 28TB of memory, and 140TB of disk storage. EKA has a peak performance of 180 teraflops per second, has a sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops..."

Should just about be able to run Vista then. Can I buy one in PC World?

Fishy statistics #

By Brian Miller Posted Monday 24th March 2008 21:19 GMT

More like 3560 blades (maybe 1780) with 2Gb RAM per core and appx 100Gb disk per core. (I don't know if top500 counts processors as per-core, or per physical package)

Once its looked at that ways and you realize that its a pile of boxes, the oodles-of-RAM-and-disk is quite a bit less impressive.

"Oily Anus"? #

By bws Posted Monday 24th March 2008 21:20 GMT

You know, I've been looking for the proper term to sum up "marketing", thank you!

Mine is the rain suit with hat & NBC mask, my friends, from marketing all have jackets with an extra pocket for optional colostomy bags.

You made my day!

All that computing power... #

By Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 24th March 2008 22:55 GMT

and the answer is still:

101010

Isn't there such a small market for these cluster machines, and really when you start dealing with such astronomic numbers or iterations of computation how sure can you really be the answer is accurate.

'Computer says "no" '

Pile of blades? #

By Aitor Posted Monday 24th March 2008 23:05 GMT

Is it really a pile of blades? then it is a piece of s***, as HP blades share Ethernet fabric.. I would (and do) design these things as piles of Proliant doalprocessor servers.. and hey, you can put multiple multi-giga-ethernet adapters there!!

Sad days for supercomputing #

By Daniel B. Posted Tuesday 25th March 2008 18:39 GMT

Seymour Cray would be ashamed of current "supercomputers", if it turns out that the 4th most powerful supercomputer is just a bunch of el-cheapo x86 blade boxen.

It seems that the "1024 chicken" philosophy won after all, and we're now doomed to use mediocre hardware for all eternity!

Mine is the one with the liquid N2 cooling system ;)